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Ever since launching the new site we have had some email issues. We setup a gmail account and use it to send messages from the forum. Turns out that gmail limits the number of emails you can send per day. This is not unique to gmail. All free email services do this. Gmail happens to have a high limit which should be enough for our site. The problem is that many of the emails the forum sends ends up going to addresses that are no longer valid, thus they bounce back. This causes gmail to freak out thinking that we are spammers. As a result it shuts down our account for 24 hours. Again, this response is not unique to gmail. Most providers do something like this.
To address this issue, any time an email bounces I am now adding that user to a new user group, registered users with bad emails. That user will no longer receive birthday or new post emails. If you find yourself in that group, your account is still active and you can still login. You could even re-enable emails on your profile page, but you better update your email address at the same time otherwise I will just end up disabling your email notifications again.
So far I applied this change to 80 users. Hopefully this leads to increased reliability of forum emails. We are also investigating paid email services which have much higher send limits, but no matter what we need to keep a clean user list with minimal bounced messages so that we don't get blacklisted. To that end, I have also removed a bunch of users that created an account, never logged in, and never posted a message.
To address this issue, any time an email bounces I am now adding that user to a new user group, registered users with bad emails. That user will no longer receive birthday or new post emails. If you find yourself in that group, your account is still active and you can still login. You could even re-enable emails on your profile page, but you better update your email address at the same time otherwise I will just end up disabling your email notifications again.
So far I applied this change to 80 users. Hopefully this leads to increased reliability of forum emails. We are also investigating paid email services which have much higher send limits, but no matter what we need to keep a clean user list with minimal bounced messages so that we don't get blacklisted. To that end, I have also removed a bunch of users that created an account, never logged in, and never posted a message.