Discus and Discus Professional have several e-mail sending features whereby the Discus program will initiate an e-mail message to a registered user of the system. This document is intended to help you diagnose reports from your users who indicate that they are not receiving these messages. Although there is no catch-all explanation, the following are the most commonly observed problems.

Have you configured Discus to send e-mail messages?

Before you can expect anyone to receive an e-mail message from your board, you must have configured Discus to use a command line mailer or SMTP server. This is accomplished through the E-mail tab of the Options Manager. To be sure that you have things correctly set up you should:

1. Log into your board's administration program as the board administrator (typically "admin"), go to Options Manager, and click the E-mail tab.

2. Click the "Configure E-mail Notification" button near the bottom of the page. This should both refresh the Options Manager page and pop open a new window. If the new window does not pop open, read the red paragraphs noted as "Important" in the administration instructions: Administration Instructions

3. After you have confirmed your settings, enter your own e-mail address in the test box and click the button to send the e-mail. If you receive the message, save your settings. If you do not, you can read through our tutorials within the Administration Instructions.

Do you have the Options Manager options checked to enable e-mail sending?

You must have checked the following options under the E-mail tab of the Options Manager if you want your board to send out e-mail notification messages:

[x] Server is capable of sending e-mail messages
[x] E-mail notification enabled

If you haven't checked those options, check those options now and then save your settings.

Do you have the right e-mail notification settings in your profile?

Before you can expect to receive e-mail notification of posts from your board, you must have configured your user or moderator profile to receive e-mail messages. This includes at minimum entering an e-mail address and checking appropriate settings in the "E-mail Notification" section of your profile. You can access your own profile by logging into the administration program and clicking Profile Manager. You can edit profiles of registered users by logging into administration, going to User Manager, and clicking the edit icon next to the profile you wish to edit.

• In the first section of the e-mail notification setup, you must check the box for those topics for which you wish to receive all new posts (except posts made by you). Generally you will want one or more of these topics checked. In Discus Pro you can also select by first-level subtopic if that option is enabled.

• In the second section of the e-mail notification setup, there is a box labeled "My own posts" which must be checked if you wish to receive a copy of your own posts, regardless of what topics or other options you may have selected. You will not receive an e-mail copy of your own post if this box is not checked.

The most common "problem" is that someone has not checked the "My own posts" box, and then does not receive e-mail notification of their own posts. The second most common problem is that there are no boxes at all checked in the e-mail notification setup. Both of these explain a "problem" of not receiving e-mail notifications of messages posted to the board.

Problems in sending and receiving e-mail notification messages and other e-mail correspondence from the board can sometimes be due to mail server problems. For this discussion, we will note the difference between your web host's mail server, which is the sendmail program or SMTP server that you've configured in your Options Manager, and the recipient's mail server, which is whatever mail server is ultimately presenting the message to the recipient. In actuality there may be other mail servers between these two, but it is unlikely that intermediate mail servers are causing problems.

Debugging outgoing e-mail messages

If you wish, you can configure your Discus board to generate a log of all outgoing e-mail notification messages. By examining this list, you can see whether Discus is attempting to generate an e-mail message to the recipient.

1. Using Appearance Manager - Editor (or in some other way with which you are more comfortable), edit your board's discus.conf file to add the following line:

   debug_email_notification=1

2. Post a message, or wait for a message to be posted, that you would expect to generate an e-mail notification message.

3. Open your FTP program and look for the file named debug-email-notification.out within the "data" directory of your board. This directory is found under your administration directory, typically named something like discus_admin_1234567890. Using your FTP program, download this to your computer and open the file in a text editor, such as notepad.

4. Examine the file to see if the desired recipient's e-mail address is listed. If Discus is not generating an e-mail message to the recipient you should check the profile settings. If Discus is generating an e-mail message to the recipient, the problem is either with your web host's mail server or the recipient's mail server (but it is occurring upstream of Discus).

5. When you are finished debugging, remove the debug_email_notification=1 line from your discus.conf file, and delete the debug-email-notification.out file.

Outgoing spam filters or sending limits

Some web hosts, in an effort to reduce "spam" messages sent by their customers, have implemented a limit on the number of outgoing mail messages that can be sent through their mail server. For example, your web host may limit the number of messages going through the server to 100 per hour. If you exceed this limit, additional e-mail messages may be delayed or discarded. Check with your web host to see if such a limit is in place.

Incorrect mail server setup

Some web host mail servers are configured to correctly deliver mail messages to "local" addresses, but do not deliver correctly to others.

Suppose you had your domain hosted by a web host called sample-webhost.com and you also got your e-mail via the address joe@sample-webhost.com. Although you get your e-mail notifications and your test message, none of your users ever get their e-mail messages. This would be an example of the mail server for sample-webhost.com delivering correctly to their own mail server, but not to the rest of the internet.

One quick way to find out if this is what's going on is to try a different e-mail address at a different domain. For example, you might sign up for a free e-mail address at Yahoo or Hotmail and try sending the test e-mail message there. If you never receive it, you have confirmed what's going on, and you will need to ask your web host to fix it.

In some cases, the exact inverse of this situation will happen - everyone outside your domain gets their mail fine, but you do not receive mail at your account on the same web host.

Spam filter at recipient end

Perhaps your recipient has a spam filter installed on their account that is identifying the messages sent from your discussion board as spam, and is therefore not showing them. Since messages sent through web-based applications are often spam, many spam filters are looking for patterns that will match those of messages being sent from Discus. (Unfortunately, Discus can do nothing about this - think about it: if an application could, the spammers would already be doing it!)

There are various tips you can give a user who is not receiving the e-mail messages from your board:

• If their "suspected spam" is still viewable, have them check there to see if the message is in that folder. For example, Yahoo accounts deliver suspected spam to a folder called "Bulk" but do not delete the spam automatically.

• If the problem is that e-mail notifications do not come through, and the user is using the HTML formatted mail option, have them try without that option (configured through their user profile). Many spam filters are more likely to identify HTML-formatted mail than plain text mail as spam.

• You could also try sending a test e-mail message (through Options Manager - E-mail) directly to the recipient who's not receiving your message. If this gets through but other messages do not, it's a nearly certain indication that the problem is a spam filter.

• Ultimately it is the responsibility of the end-user to receive their mail if it has been properly sent. One technique is to "whitelist" the sender (so mail claiming to be from your discussion board is never treated as spam). Your end-user should consult with the operator of their mail server to come up with an appropriate solution.

Domain blacklisted

Some internet service providers will "blacklist" an entire domain, or range of IP addresses. For example, during a brief time in February of 2004, AOL blacklisted all mail sent from the range of IP addresses owned by DiscusWare's internet service provider. Thus, all e-mail messages originating from any address owned by our ISP and destinated for any AOL address were bounced back, which included those e-mail notification messages sent through our Support Forum. Your web host should know if this is the problem.

Other resources

The best resource to see where the problem lies is to have your web host check their mail log to see if the message is being delivered to the end-user's mail server. If the log reports that the message was delivered, then the problem is definitely with the end-user's mail server. If the message was not delivered, then the problem is with either the end-user's mail server or your web host's mail server.

DiscusWare will assist you with any problems with the Discus software itself. Before contacting DiscusWare for support with any e-mail related issue, please do the following:

1. Configure e-mail notification and send yourself a test message. If you cannot send yourself a test message, then you do not have your configuration settings correct. Consult the e-mail sending section of the Administration Instructions to get this working.

2. Verify that your options under Options Manager - E-mail are set up correctly. Specifically you must check the boxes for "Server is capable of sending e-mail messages" and "E-mail notification enabled" in order to have your board send mail.

3. Verify that the profile of the user wishing to receive e-mail messages has been set up correctly. This includes supplying a valid e-mail address and checking boxes for those topics for which the user wishes to receive a copy of all posts. It may also include checking the "My own posts" box (for copies of the user's own posts) and in Discus Pro the "Replies to my posts" box (to send a copy of any message made in a thread to which that user has previously posted).

4. Follow the procedure above to debug e-mail notification, and examine the output of the debug-email-notification.out file.

   • If the recipient address appears in the debug-email-notification.out file, the problem you are experiencing is NOT a problem with Discus. If e-mail notification is working OK for most all of your users, then it's probably a spam filter at the recipient's mail server. (This would be especially likely if everyone reporting problems all had an e-mail address at the same domain.) If many people with many different domains are reporting problems, you should ask your web host to check their mail log. Please do NOT contact DiscusWare support, as we will not be able to help.

   • If the recipient address does NOT appear in the debug-email-notification.out file and you're sure that you have double-checked the profile settings and your Options Manager settings, DiscusWare support may be able to help.