How to force all Discourse notifications via e-mail?

Okay, those were very valuable pointers. Especially the link in the error message. I submitted a request to remove the IP from that blocking list now. Hope it will get acted upon soon.

Note: kasserver.com is the domain and e-mail service provider I use for my domain to which the Github e-mail address belongs. That’s the same one I use here on discourse.

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In the meantime mail was blocked again due to bounces, so yell when it might be fixed and I’ll reset.

I received a confirmation from the provider that the IP has been unblocked. Please retry @calmh.

I reset your bounce score.

Great, thanks. This exact message did get notified by e-mail. So glad we could work out the root cause, now let’s hope it stays that way for some time.

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@calmh it happened again a few days ago. Not receiving any e-mails from the forum. Can you please check the logs again what IP it’s barking at this time (if different)?

It’s the same IP, I don’t think it changes unless something major gets rebuilt mailgun-side.

Hello Mr Colomb,

our spam protection system detected a lot of spam mails originating from this ip address. Thats the reason why it was blocked again.

We can´t whitelist a ip which permanently sends spam.

The administrator of this ip has to secure the system. Then we won´t block it again.

with best regards
Daniel Lehmann
Supportteam

Neue Medien Münnich
- Inhaber René Münnich -
Hauptstraße 68, D-02742 Friedersdorf
Ust-ID: DE212657916

Tel: +49 35872 353-10
Fax: +49 35872 353-30

E-Mail: info@all-inkl.com
Web: www.all-inkl.com

What to do now? :man_shrugging:

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I’d set up a relay mail account.

OT: who the hell blocks mailgun? IMHO you’re dodging a bullet by moving to Hetzner/Strato in the long run. I would avoid those smaller german providers but YMMV.

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Well I’m not precisely shocked if there is spam coming through mailgun. But from my point of view it is what it is. Not my circus, not my monkeys, we need to send email somehow.

Maybe mailgun has some degrees of freedom to route traffic from this site through a different IP? In case they operate several servers…

There is something like that if you’re on an expensive premium plan, which we’re unfortunately not.

After a few weeks without e-mail notifications, I tried again to contact my mail / hosting provider. Their official stance is that in order to unblock the IP address permanently, Mailgun would need to reach out to them and clarify the situation. I tried to explain who the stakeholders are here and that I pay them to make e-mail work, which they broke.

Now you @calmh probably are paying Mailgun for the service, so I guess if you contacted them, it would possibly lead to some activity to get the IP unblocked. Can you ask them please? Best pointer would be the URL in the bounce messages probably, and in addition the abuse@all-inkl.com contact address.

Sorry for the trouble, though I feel quite innocent and didn’t expect that the two of us as paying customers would need to suffer from two companies’ blocking policy wars.

@acolomb Has anything changed regarding the spam block or are you still unable to receive notifications?

This may or may not be useful to you, but I’ve recently found out that you can use RSS to subscribe to Discourse forums. I think it can at least serve as a substitute for e-mail notifications. It works by adding .rss to the URL, e.g. https://forum.syncthing.net/latest.rss or https://forum.syncthing.net/posts.rss. If you use an email client like Thunderbird, as I do, you can keep both emails and feeds in one place.

RSS can also be faster (if you set a short refresh interval), because Discourse email notifications seem to always come delayed by 10 minutes :wink:.

As a late reply to the above, I don’t think we have the kind of plan that comes with anything resembling human support, no. But if you want to give it a try, send them a mail. Our account is identified by the sending domain, mg.syncthing.org.

Well, for now it just started to work again a few days ago. Dunno if you had to unblock it in Discourse again, or if the ban there somehow expires. At least the IP blocking seems loosened for the moment. Will try to reach out to mailgun when it happens again. Thanks for the pointer.

That’s actually an interesting idea to use the RSS feed. I usually read those on mobile using Feedly as an aggregator and Palabre as the reader app. That setup doesn’t give me push notifications (which is perfect for my feeds usage pattern). But at this on the PC / laptop where Thunderbird is usually running anyway, it could be a solution. Of course anything that syncs read status among devices is best, which Discourse itself already does but cannot mark the mails or feed entries of course. So right now, I’m trying to get used to a pull model using mostly just the web interface.

Some may considered this a “hack” :crazy_face:, but if you use IMAP in Thunderbird for your email, you can set up a filter that automatically moves all new RSS feeds to your email account inbox. There, you can mark them as read as you wish. This works, because Thunderbird uses the same file format for emails and feeds.

Obviously, this method won’t work with local POP3 accounts and you’ll also need to keep Thunderbird open and running 24/7 to have everything always synchronised, but I think it could be a useful alternative nevertheless :slightly_smiling_face:.