E-Mail Confirmations

There are currently 8 unconfirmed accounts, including the original @IronEdithKidd

In several of these cases, the problem was that they never received their confirmation e-mail.

I’m using SparkPost for mail delivery. Is there anyone with experience in this area that could help troubleshoot this?

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No clue. But if it helps troubleshoot… first I tried my AOL address. The first one wound up caught in the Spam folder. The following attempts never showed up at all, even after marking the first as Not Spam. I made several attempts with my Gmail address. No emails showed up, not even in Spam. Then I remembered I have an email address at netzero.net. (I never use it.) The confirmation email showed up almost immediately. I don’t know enough about the protocols to say why that might be.

Does that help?

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I used Gmail and I got the confirmation pretty quickly but it ended up in my spam.

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15 Delayed. AOL is a non-trivial segment of it.

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just fyi–the confirmation email showed up at the inbox of my yahoo account within 5 minutes of signing up.

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I had some email confirmation issues with gmail, but it was purely a spam issue; I use several email addresses that all get forwarded to my main gmail account. When I signed up here, I used a different gmail address and that account did not forward the confirmation because it looked like spam. And because I don’t check that account manually (relying instead on forwarding) I didn’t see the confirmation in my spam folder either.

I’m not much of s techie, but I remember when I worked at a tech company we had a similar problem, and I seem to recall that there was some kind of process for getting “white-listed” that we had to go through. AOL has a white-list request form;

https://postmaster.aol.com/whitelist-request

Again, I’m not much of a techie so I apologize if my solution naive or obvious.

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This is also what happened to me. I had to separately log into my other email address to get the link out of that spam folder.

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Yep, the AOL error message return that’s shown in that screenshot matches up with that. AOL’s got some… interesting spam prevention quirks. That whitelist process ought to help on that front.

It doesn’t look like the sending IP is listed in any well-known blacklists, so IP reputation shouldn’t be an issue. @LockeCJ, are there any other specific services that seem to be an issue?

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That report is all of the delays. I think there was one rejection, but I don’t remember the specifics.

I guess a follow-up question would be whether anyone has successfully signed up using an AOL address.

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I’d be happy to take a look at any return codes if you need. It looks like the usual suspects (SPF config, blacklists, etc) are squared away, so anything fishy that’s happening is probably specific to the recipient service (like AOL’s strict rate limiting and Gmail’s tendency to throw mail from a new domain into the junk folder).

The earthlink return code that’s in that screenshot looks like it may be someone who typoed their email address based on Earthlink’s docs, but there could be some other reasons as well.

Oh, wow… I just discovered that my old AOL email address is still active. I haven’t used that in ages. I’ll set up a test and see what happens. :smiley: Have you filled out the request at the link @waetherman provided?

Update: Roughly an hour later, my AOL account hasn’t received the confirmation email.

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Well, it looks like the confirmation was just delivered to my AOL account roughly half an hour ago. So either something changed, or the rate limit expired, or something. :slight_smile:

It did land in the spam box, but that’s a bit less of an issue.

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Same here with the Yahoo account I used for sign-up. No issues.

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I just logged in with my Gmail account, didn’t have to get a confirmation email.

Any reason I shouldn’t have?

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My confirmation showed up in spam today. Partly that’s my fault - a typo in my email address (and my aging eyes can miss these errors now, <sigh>) - and partly it took a while once I corrected the error. Still, it did show up.

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So everyone signed up via gmail? There you have it, I used my usual hotmail crap-bin email, and that’s the one that never showed up. Anywhere. My even more useless gmail account was not too much of a problem. I have no idea what my password is, but I know the answers to the security questions. :upside_down_face:

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Thanks to @LockeCJ for making me whole again!

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Mine was swept into a corner by a long-forgotten Gmail filter. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
And thanks for having me, even though I kind of barged in. :slight_smile:

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Same here. I had never noticed or looked into that particular spam folder.

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After signing up I never received the initial email confirmation. But @LockeCJ presented me with a solution.

I went to this site and went to login. There I presented my email address again and pressed the “I forgot my password” link. Miraculously a password reset-email arrived, it was in with my junk email. Eh voila, I reset my password and here I am.

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This is different (since it’s related to gdocs authorizations), but an example that it’s difficult to say one way or the other as to whether it’s a good idea…

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