It has been reported occasionally that a deleted user is still receiving e-mail notification from a Discus board. Although the board administrator has searched through User Manager, the recipient still claims to be receiving the messages. Although there is no one solution to this problem, the following document contains tips to help identify which user is receiving the e-mail notification, so the messages can be stopped.

• Manual examination of user database. It is possible that a user account exists that does not show up in User Manager. Typically such an account would exist because the board administrator deleted a group that contained users. As noted in the administration instructions for Group Manager, deleting a group does not automatically delete any users that were in the group. To determine if this may be the case:

  • Discus Professional 4.x: Go to Backup Manager - Export and click the "Export User Database" button. The comma separated value (CSV) result should be saved to disk and then opened in a spreadsheet such as Excel. The third column contains e-mail addresses - look through the user list (perhaps with the spreadsheet's "Find" feature) for the e-mail address in question. When you find the address, identify the username (first column) and group(s) to which the user belongs (10th column). If at least one of the groups still exists, go into User Manager, edit that group, find the username, and delete the account. If none of the listed groups exists, go to Group Manager, create one of the groups, and then follow the instructions in the previous sentence.

  • Freeware Discus 4.x: Download the users.txt file by FTP to your computer. Open it in a spreadsheet and parse the file as a delimited file. The delimiter is a colon (:). Follow the instructions from above regarding examining this file within a spreadsheet.

  • Discus 3.10 and below: Download the users.txt file by FTP to your computer. Open it in a spreadsheet and parse the file as a delimited file. The delimiter is a colon (:). There is one line created per user per group. To completely remove a user account, the user must be deleted from all groups to which that user belongs. (Note: version 3.10 users are encouraged to upgrade; version 3.10 is no longer supported.)

• Look at moderator lists. Is the person receiving the e-mail notifications a moderator? Moderator accounts are listed in Moderator Manager; no actions in User Manager will in any way create or remove moderator accounts. If the person is a moderator, delete their account in Moderator Manager.

• Examine the message. If you have either the "reply by e-mail" or "Add a link to edit profile within message" features turned on, examining the message itself will reveal the recipient's username on the board. (Note: the "Add a link to edit profile within message" can be turned on under Options Manager - E-mail in version 4.x Professional; this option is not available in older versions or the freeware version.) When the username has been identified, you will be able to locate the account more easily. Or, the person could click the link to edit their profile and then click the button to delete their account, if this options is enabled on your board.

• Examine the header. Be sure that the person reporting the problem is giving you the same e-mail address to which the board is sending messages. For example, if someone contacts you from their "work" address complaining about unwanted messages, but they registered their "home" address, then you need to know what the "home" address is in order to find the account. If they forward a message to you, including full headers, you should be able to identify the address to which the message is sent.

• Watch out for mail forwarders. Similar to "Examine the header" from above, someone may have one e-mail address set up that automatically forwards the e-mail messages to another address. In most case, a forwarded messages with full headers will identify the address to which the message is actually being sent. Note that a user might have set up a forwarder a long time ago, but now they forgot that they did...

• Beware of mail delays. If you're using the cron-based sending method, there may be messages that were queued before the account was deleted that actually got sent out afterwards. And, it's also possible that a delivery of mail failed because the recipient's e-mail server was down or mailbox was full, and the delivery was retried (this can happen 5 days or more after the original message was sent). If you look at the timestamp of the message within the e-mail notification, you will be able to determine quickly if the message being delivered was one from before the account was removed.

• If you've searched high and low and can't find it, then you need to convince yourself that the board is in fact NOT sending out e-mail messages to the recipient in question. Add the line debug_email_notification=1 to your version 4.0 or higher discus.conf file. Then look in the debug-email-notification.out file under the "data" folder of your administration directory. That records every e-mail notification being sent out, including the recipient's e-mail address, username, and whether or not the e-mail was HTML formatted.