Off topic: Email notifications

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matthewj
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Off topic: Email notifications

Unread post by matthewj »

Sorry, I can't post this in the forum discussion forum since it is read only. I'm getting topic announcements to a badly formed email address, which is messing up filtering and others are complaining about getting this "junk". The To: field is "Undisclosed-recipients:;@mydomain.com" which would be much better if it could use my real address, or "helpandmanual@mydomain" or something.

Is there anything that can be done about this?

Matthew
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Tim Green
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Unread post by Tim Green »

Matthew,

This must (I hope) be a temporary glitch or something that has happened to the mail after it got sent. The phpBB forum software always fills the To: field with the real address of the recipient, it doesn't use BCC or any other mechanism. I've also checked your profile settings and they seem to be OK as well, provided that your email address is correct, which I suppose it must be if you are getting the notifications at all.

I've activated notification on this topic for myself and I'll have a look at what I get when you reply. :?
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Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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Tim Green
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Unread post by Tim Green »

Matthew,

By the way, thanks for pointing out the issue with the "Forum Issues" section. That was a leftover from the installation of the portal page. I set it to read only because I wanted to use it for announcements, which meant that all posts would also be included in the Announcements section on the portal page. But of course that makes it rather impractical for discussions and postings on issues that users are having with the forum...

I've now changed this. This section is now just called "Forum Issues" and is open to all registered users. Announcements will generally only be made in the Announcements forum -- we really don't have enough to justify more than one section. Forum Issues is no longer included in the announcements section on the portal page. :)
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Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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matthewj
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Unread post by matthewj »

Here's my response to get you a notification then. I've looked at the full headers, and it is definitely wrong. No other email is "transformed", so I don't think it is our mail system (I know it very well!).

Matthew
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Martin Wynne
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Unread post by Martin Wynne »

Tim Green wrote:The phpBB forum software always fills the To: field with the real address of the recipient
Hi Tim,

Not for me it doesn't. All my "topic reply notifications" have always been sent to
"undisclosed-recipients". Here's a typical chunk of header:

Code: Select all

Date: 15 Sep 2005 06:56:24 +0200
To: Undisclosed-recipients: ;
Subject: Topic Reply Notification - Shortcut to insert Internet link
Reply-to: webmaster[at]it-authoring.com
From: webmaster[at]it-authoring.com
Message-ID: <cf0dab591950827ce2d94b9342ac26f2@helpman.it-authoring.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
Content-transfer-encoding: 8bit
Date: Thu, 15 Sep 2005 06:56:24 +0200
X-Priority: 3
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
X-Mailer: PHP
X-MimeOLE: Produced By phpBB2
(I obscured your email address for this post)

It hasn't caused me any problems, so I assumed it was intended.

Martin.
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Tim Green
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Unread post by Tim Green »

Matthew,

You're right, it seems that this was quietly changed in a recent update. :evil: phpBB now hides email messages and uses BCC. I'm looking into a fix with the phpBB programmers, not quite sure how long it will take, bear with me...
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Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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Unread post by Tim Green »

Matthew,

I've now tried the first fix listed at phpBB support, which is a very minor change. It seems that some email filters will allow "Undisclosed-recipient:;" but not "Undisclosed-recipients:;", so I've changed it to the former. Apparently putting nothing at all in the To: field causes other problems, so I'm not going to do that right away.

If we're lucky this may work for you, if not I may have to investigate further... :?
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Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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matthewj
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Unread post by matthewj »

I'm not sure what the fix is that you've applied, but I want my normal (registered) email address used. I'm not sure why it helps anybody to have "Undisclosed-recipient" as the destination address since it is only ever addressed to me surely? Or are the notifications always sent to everyone as a single email BCC'd? If the PHPBB generates an email for each individual, then this change gains nothing. If it generates a single email and sends it to all watchers, then err, it needs to be changed :wink: .

Matthew
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Tim Green
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Unread post by Tim Green »

Matthew,
matthewj wrote:I'm not sure what the fix is that you've applied, but I want my normal (registered) email address used.
As far as I can see this is not possible. I've just been doing a lot of searching on the phpBB forum and it seems to be an issue on which the programmers are extremely stubborn, probably for some complex security-related reason. This method has been in place much longer than I thought, since around 2.0.5 (we are now at 2.0.17) and all requests for a changeon the forum have been ignored. There haven't been very many requests, however -- as far as I can see only a very few servers are this picky about it.

I'm going to keep looking but I can't promise very much at the moment, I'm afraid. :roll:
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Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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matthewj
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Unread post by matthewj »

The simple solution is for me to turn off notifications, which is a pity, but I'll have to do it. I'm probably unusual in that our mail all goes into a central system that everyone in this small company sees, and it is filtered to mailboxes as suits. Thus all sales emails are visible to all, making for a better response. Development stuff normally goes to a development folder, sorted by the destination email I'm using here. I guess a lot of people use personal mailboxes and so this isn't seen. I can't see any good technical reason, but there you go. At least I know it can't be changed.

Matthew (I'm turning off notifications now, so will check this sometime.)
matthewj
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Unread post by matthewj »

Actually, having just written that, and while turning off the default, I wondered why I can't just filter on the sender. So I have!

I still think it is a phpBB deficiency though. :(

Matthew
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Unread post by Tim Green »

Matthew,

As I say, I'm going to keep looking -- I find it pretty silly myself. One alternative to keep up to date with forum traffic is to use the RSS feed in the forum header if you have an RSS aggregator program or a browser like Opera or Firefox that supports RSS.
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Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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Unread post by Tim Green »

Matthew,

Try giving it one more try with notification on and no filtering. I've now made a change that does not change what is put in the headers but it does change how the mails are sent. Up until now I was using the default board mail setting, which sent the mails with an internal routine. Now I've set it to use my own SMTP server. This will still paste "undisclosed-recipients" in the To: field but that should now be irrelevant because:
The header is still built with "to: undisclosed-recipients", but the SMTP server is handed valid RCPT-TO exchanges for each user. Remember... what's in the header does not matter for SMTP exchanges. It can be completely absent when using SMTP.
(Quote from the phpBB forum.) So theoretically, your server should now allow the notifications to come through without complaining about them. Theoretically, of course... :?
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Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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esfabian
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Alternate services for Forum

Unread post by esfabian »

JP Software (whose help files I work on using H&M) uses a program called Lyris, hosted on a commercial server (email.sparklist.com) for its unmoderated support forum. Lyris allows web-based browsing, receiving all posts as email, or receiving/posting as an ordinary newsgroup (but posting requires username and password). It has a few problems, not all mail/news clients handle threads correctly, but Mozilla Thunderbird and Outlook Express do. If a post does not include a timestamp, it may be timestamped as "Unix 0", i.e., 1970-01-01 00:00::UTC, which causes problems when news are sorted by "sent" timestamp. Lyris has another minor problem, it has a single message number for all groups on the server. This often results in an "unread" count in the hundreds, but downloading all unread messages resets it quickly to the correct count.

The newsgroup master can delete messages.

I personally like a newsgroup much more than a forum. You can read all posts quickly, responding is easier, you can have your personal copy to browse offline if desired.

I tries the RSS feed on Mozilla/Thudnerbird, but all I could get was the headers, I still had to come back to the forum website to read each article. Very tedious.
Steve Fábián
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Unread post by Tim Green »

Steve,
I tries the RSS feed on Mozilla/Thudnerbird, but all I could get was the headers, I still had to come back to the forum website to read each article. Very tedious.
Then there's something wrong with the way M/T is set up or handling the feed. It's a fully-validated RSS 2.0 feed and it includes the entire text of all the postings. I recommend Feed Demon from Bradbury Software, the same people who produce TopStyle: http://www.bradsoft.com/
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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