Members not getting notifications -more often lately?

I'm seemingly getting more than the usual cases of members not getting notifications, even from my moderators now. This is going on despite their having their notifications settings on to YES/email, and despite them having certain forum discussions and group discussions marked as "Following". I also have several 'greeters' who for example are set up and supposed to be getting emails when a new member joins, but are not.
No one is finding the notifications in their junk folders. Besides, my moderators at least should be well past the 'spam filter' phase when getting notices from my site.

This seems to be getting reported to me much more often now this week and last.
Is anyone else having a lot more instances lately of this?



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...just another satisfied Jamroom customer.
Migrated from Ning to Jamroom June 2015
updated by @strumelia: 09/02/15 06:24:42PM

You don't know a pattern that works to test for by any chance? Something that I could do to test out what could be wrong.

Locating what the actual issue is in cases like this is going to be the hardest thing to accomplish. Need to figure out a way to see it happen to understand why it happens.

Just a thought - You've not exceeded the 10,000 free monthly MailGun emails?


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Paul Asher - JR Developer and System Import Specialist

Paul- no, I upgraded my Mailgun account about 3 weeks ago already- should be unlimited and I pay for however many I generate now. I also have a very low bounce rate of less than 2%.
Here is a quick screenshot of since I went live on June 15th...


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...just another satisfied Jamroom customer.
Migrated from Ning to Jamroom June 2015
updated by @strumelia: 07/23/15 11:59:52AM

Michael, I realize this might prove difficult to find.
I am actually getting one or two more regular members per day now bringing it up..saying they've checked their notifications, 'followed' discussions, checked their spam folders...

Three of my moderators now (who know all this stuff about spam filters and following etc) are experiencing this off and on at this point. They told me it sometimes helps to 'unfollow, then re-follow' again a particualr discussion...that gets the notifications working again, but only temporarily they said. Then they have to do it again a few days later. I've told members to do all the usual things, plus clear their browser cahce, log in and out, etc etc.
Here's a quote from another fairly web-savvy regular member yesterday:

"Hey...I'm having the same issue as Chuck. I had no problems when the site first went live but shortly thereafter I stopped receiving notifications. Of course I checked the settings at my end and all appear to be in order. Checked my email spam folder but it was empty. I've added contact.fotmd@gmail.com to my contact list and will send you a message. BTW, I'm impressed as all get out that you know how to do all of the techie stuff!"

(apparently she thinks I a computer wiz...lol if she only knew!)

Anyway, with three of my moderators now experiencing this too (they were not a month ago), this is becoming a growing problem now. Once member said they were getting notifications many hours, sometimes a day later...but most complaints have to do with getting almost no notifications at all. I cannot figure it out.
Here's the thing- Mailgun seems to be successfully delivering the ones it gets in its queue, but the implication here seems to be that there my be a whole lot more that Mailgun is not receiving triggers for to begin with...?


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...just another satisfied Jamroom customer.
Migrated from Ning to Jamroom June 2015

That 'unfollow, then re-follow' again provides a starting point. Thanks. I can investigate from there, see if anything jumps out.

thanks Michael- this is becoming a real problem, and people's settings seem to be correct. Three of my moderators are reporting it amongst them to me along with active various members. They say they are not finding any emails in their spam folders. My mods said the 'unfollow/follow' trick seemed to work pretty well for at first but is not 'sticking' long at all now.

According to Mailgun, my system successfully sent out 12,000 emails during the first two weeks of June when i went live. Then for the whole 3 weeks of July so far- only 10,500.
(I sent out site invites once during each of those periods)
Something not right with that, since members are becoming more active, sending more PMs, posting more now...should be substantially higher for the second 3 week period. Errors are about 1.5% according to Mailgun.



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...just another satisfied Jamroom customer.
Migrated from Ning to Jamroom June 2015
updated by @strumelia: 07/25/15 05:22:57AM

You need to check your Mailgun logs and look for reasons why they are not being delivered - every email sent is logged.


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Brian Johnson
Founder and Lead Developer - Jamroom
https://www.jamroom.net

Brian I have been looking intensely through the Mailgun logs- and it seems to me very very few not being delivered successfully. A few seem to be marked for 'trying again later', and I assume that then works later. Could be I don't know what to specifically look for. Look at the bounce and 'failure' rates in my screenshots for example.

I do know that right before i went live last month i ran Kickbox on all 5000 member emailaddresses...and got only a 2% failure rate or so...after which i deleted half of those particular members....bringing it to about 1.5%, which was just fine.



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...just another satisfied Jamroom customer.
Migrated from Ning to Jamroom June 2015
updated by @strumelia: 07/25/15 10:28:56AM

It sounds like things are working correctly then - as long as you're not seeing a bunch of errors in your Mailgun log, you should be good.


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Brian Johnson
Founder and Lead Developer - Jamroom
https://www.jamroom.net

Unfortunately, I'm not good though. Members' settings seem fine, but more and more are complaining about not getting notifications...and many of them 'used to' get the notifications fine at first...see above: "Here's the thing- Mailgun seems to be successfully delivering just about all the ones it gets in its queue, but the implication here 'seems' to be that there my be a whole lot more that Mailgun is not receiving triggers for to begin with..."
Sounds from his ablove comment that like Michael is investigating, maybe?


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...just another satisfied Jamroom customer.
Migrated from Ning to Jamroom June 2015

I've just checked the local mail.log on your server and it is all "green" - everything being sent from your server is being received correctly by Mailgun. Have you confirmed your user's notification options? Have you tried sending them a test email from the ACP -> Communications -> Email Support -> Test Email tool?


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Brian Johnson
Founder and Lead Developer - Jamroom
https://www.jamroom.net

Brian, yes I've checked all the settings of the members having this issue.
The 'majority' of the notification emails are going out fine to members, but seems to be certain people having trouble now that didn't have trouble when I first went live.
however....

I just thought of something to ask you-

When i went live on June 15th, I was working with Paul of course and we sent some test invites out just to a certain quota as a test before sending them out to all 4800 members. (later we returned the volunteer test members to the regular member quota and deleted that tester quota)
Anyway, when we were doing all this, we had some sort of little glitch and Paul had me de-activate my jrMailGun (MailGun SMTP) Module, saying I didn't need it since my mailgun stuff was all set up and working when I test an email address.
Is this ok, to leave that MailGun SMTP module not activated? I have no clue, but thought I'd ask you just in case.

Also, my maximum send rate per minute was still set at 5 per minute from when I sent out several thousand Mailgun invites...I just changed it to 25 per minute- is that a good or bad idea? (I will always set it back to 5 per min temporarily if I mail anything out to all members at once, like a newsletter or invite.)

I just now sent out two test emails to two diff email addresses of mine, and also sent on to 3 members who are having the difficulty. I got my two right away, but I'll have to wait to hear back from them.

Meanwhile...Here is a screenshot of my current EmailSupport JR module config settings now- does it look right to you? Thank you for helping...



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...just another satisfied Jamroom customer.
Migrated from Ning to Jamroom June 2015
updated by @strumelia: 07/25/15 04:04:21PM

1) You do not need the Mailgun module - Mailgun is "built in" at the server level on our hosting

2) I would remove the throttling limit - you do not need to set that

3) You need to set your "from email address" to an email address from your DOMAIN - i.e. "support@fotmd.com". You do not want to use a gmail address as your from address if you want to maximize deliverability:

https://www.jamroom.net/the-jamroom-network/documentation/jamroom-hosting/2654/creating-email-aliases

Let me know if that helps.


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Brian Johnson
Founder and Lead Developer - Jamroom
https://www.jamroom.net

OK I will dig into this tomorrow after a good night's sleep...thank you!


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...just another satisfied Jamroom customer.
Migrated from Ning to Jamroom June 2015