Ian Dunn 4:41 pm on August 20, 2016
Tags: email ( 27 ), logs ( 2 ), prio3 ( 78 ), wordcamp.org ( 30 )

Visibility into WordCamp.org mail failures

Right now I’m blind to any errors that occur with messages sent from the WordCamp.org web server. This week there was a Core bug that resulted in many (most?) messages being rejected by the receiving MTA, but I didn’t know for several days, until the reports started coming in from users and the CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. bug was discovered.

I think two things would help resolve this, but I’m open to whatever suggestions you have.

1) Set the Envelope-FROM to bounce@wordcamp.org instead of bounce@wordpress.org. I’ve already setup the address.
2) Grant read access to mail.* in the logs directory

Thanks!

#wordcamp.org #email #logs #prio3

Ian Dunn 6:40 pm on August 20, 2016

Another idea would be to setup Gmail’s Postmaster Tools.
Ian Dunn 7:48 pm on August 22, 2016

Or maybe it’d be better to just create a website@wordcamp.org SMTP account, and send everything through that. That’d probably be more reliable than sendmail, and bounces would automatically go to it.

Thoughts?
Barry 3:48 pm on October 2, 2016

@stankea – can you look at this one please?
stankea 12:04 pm on October 3, 2016

Hi @iandunn,

I would prefer the non-SMTP method in this case, as the SMTP server is shared with lots of users, and is more likely to get accidentally blocked.

Sounds good for me to use #1. This is done in code, so you can do the change when you are ready. Please send me a test email to aleksandr.stankevic@gmail.com so i can check if everything is properly being signed / checked.
As for #2 (access to logs)- you probably won’t look at the logs until you suspect that something is broken, and then you can pingPing The act of sending a very small amount of data to an end point. Ping is used in computer science to illicit a response from a target server to test it’s connection. Ping is also a term used by Slack users to @ someone or send them a direct message (DM). Users might say something along the lines of “Ping me when the meeting starts.” us directly.
Ian Dunn 12:25 am on October 6, 2016

Thanks @stankea, you should have a sample message now that was sent with bounce@wordcamp.org as the Sender.
- stankea 6:27 am on October 6, 2016
  
  Hi,
  
  It’s actually being sent out as:Return-Path: bounce@wp.com
  - Ian Dunn 5:29 pm on October 6, 2016
    
    Huh, it worked for me. I might have botched the test that I sent to you. I just sent another, which should work.
    - stankea 10:03 am on October 7, 2016
      
      Ok, looks good, although i want to add some more signing to the emails – i’ll do that a bit later, not marking this one as resolved yet.
      - Ian Dunn 2:16 pm on October 7, 2016
        
        Awesome, thank you 🙂
      - Corey McKrill 6:12 pm on October 3, 2017
        
        @stankea Following up on this. We’ve gotten 5 or 6 reports of users who do not receive the confirmation email when they are invited to join a WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. site. Could this be related?
stankea 8:55 am on October 13, 2017

@coreymckrill the emails are already signed, so it’s probably a different issue. If you could give me some example headers of emails which were sent to spam – i’ll look into it.
- Corey McKrill 9:27 pm on October 16, 2017
  
  @stankea Thanks. I do have a couple of headers I’ll send you via DM on WP SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/..