[TMDH]

I subscribe to several threads from this forum via email. For some reason, it is no longer working properly. I wasn't receiving them for several weeks. I checked my settings in customize, and now I am receiving emails, but they appear quite odd. They do not have FROM data and the subject is a long series of numbers and characters beginning with "FTCID". Can someone point me in the right direction to correct this? Thanks.

[bnystrom]

This might be something we have to look into. Probably nothing on your end.

[TMDH]

Hmmm..Did you change something? Now I seem to be receiving an email from every posting, including those I'm not subscribed to. However, now they all say they are from NataraForums. I was out of the office today only to return and have 27 emails from the forum.

[devilspgd]

There is a FROM field now... Many mail servers will flat out refuse to deliver messages not in RFC822/2822 format, which among other things requires a FROM field.

[TMDH]

Bryan,
I'm still receiving an email copy of every post to this forum; all topics. Any advice on how this can be fixed? Do I need to delete my username or profile and start over? I'd sure like to stop receiving the emails that I did not subscribe to. Let me know when you get a moment. Thanks and happy thanksgiving to you folks at Natara.

[bnystrom]

That is strange. I am subscribed to many but not getting any.

For you though, what I might have to do is remove all of your subscriptions for the time being (maybe after I reassign your email address to me so that I can take a look at the emails). There hasn't really been anything changed in the forum software for quite some time, so it is most likely some changes on the server end (which we don't have control over...the forums are on a hosted site). It might require a reboot of the server, but that's sometimes like pulling teeth to get them to do for us since we share the server with others.

[TMDH]

Bryan,
2 other strange things possibly related to this. 2-3 weeks ago, when I replied to a post, I'd get a Microsoft Office install prompt asking me to insert the necessary disk to install some missing components? I don't know why MS Office would be related to this forum. After several similar occurances, I inserted the CD, but the prompted installation failed. It hasn't done it since.
The other change in behavior is now when I reply to a post, I get a prompt that requests I hit spacebar or enter to activate this control. I have to do one or the other to successfully reply.
FYI, we have a new IT guy here and some of my notebook settings may have been modified recently. Disregard & delete this post if it's unrelated.

[bnystrom]

Those items wouldn't be related to the sending of forum email in any way. At the moment, I am redirecting your forum emails to an account of mine and I am seeing emails being sent to you (but not me again for some reason). I am going to log in as you and see what settings you have set..something I unfortunately can not see via the admin section of the forums.

(IOW: You shouldn't be getting any forum email at the moment)

[bnystrom]

OK, I took a look at your profile. You had "Receive Messages by e-mail:" set to Yes. What that does is makes all posts to the forum be sent via email so that you can also reply via email. That's something we enabled while trying to determine the "no email being sent for subscriptions" problem. You may have noticed the strange subject title in each email. That allows the forum to determine where to post your replies. I've set that setting back to "No" for you, and you shouldn't get emails for each post. Unfortunately, I don't know or think that there is a "filter" for getting emails. It appears to be an all or nothing for that feature, so I may disable it again in the near future unless I get enough people say they like having all forum posts sent to them via email.

That of course doesn't solve the no emails at all problem....

[TMDH]

FYI, I haven't been receiving any emails from the forum, and that's much better than receiving all of them. I must have turned on the email switch while I was troubleshooting this problem. For the time being, I'll just check in occasionally to the forum to see what's new. Hopefully, the "subscribe to thread" function will be repaired soon as it was really handy. Thanks for your efforts and I understand you have larger issues to resolve.

[bnystrom]

I hope so also. It's not something we changed in the setup of the forum, so I can only imagine that it has to do with some setting on either the SMTP server or the server that the forum is hosted on (neither of which is under our direct control)

[devilspgd]

Would it be possible to reenable the option to email everything, at least until/unless the subscription thing can be fixed?

Either that, or hack in RSS feeds or NNTP support (*ducks*) or something -- Some way to know about new posts without having to look at each and every thread of interest?

[devilspgd]

Thanks!

[jdmarch]

I'm adding my vote to request that the subscribe function be fixed. I subscribed to 8 threads, never received any notifications. Checked in yesterday and found that there were indeed some replies. So I turned on the "send email" function and now I'm getting everything. Found this thread and understand the problem. Not sure which option is worse, but neither is satisfactory. With so many companies running forums, this is the first that I've seen which is so broken. Doesn't make Natara look very professional. Thanks!

[jdmarch]

It is disappointing that this forum does not give users the ability to subscribe to specific threads. I don't know of any other support forum which is so poorly implemented. Why not just jump ship to use some forum software which actually works?

[TMDH]

jdmarch,
You can subscribe to individual threads. I was the originator of this thread (and a subcriber), and I received an email that you had responded.
In the upper right corner of each Thread Entry, there are four icons. Try the one on the left that looks like a page with a red arrow. When you hover your mouse over it, it says "Subscribe to this thread".

[jdmarch]

Dave,

The problem is that I receive notification of all messages posted on this forum, whether I'm subscribed to the thread or not. Since this is big info overload (as you yourself pointed out in your message of 11/20/2006), I don't read any of them (they are now autofiled to a folder which I seldom read), so have no practical way of knowing when a message comes for a thread to which I am subscribed. This has been happening for me at least since July, and is still happening as of today.

I feel strange describing this to you since you yourself described the problem a year ago. I presume that this no longer happens to you, but neither you nor anyone from Natara has reported back to this thread that the problem has been solved for you (yes?), and/or how it was solved.

Thanks.

[bnystrom]

We've done nothing to fix this since it seems to be an issue w the way the server that this is setup on is configured (it changed). The server is on our ISPs site. Although I still agree it is something we would either like to get working, or change to a different forum, that doesn't really have high priority for us at the moment. I know that the global sending of email (for every message) does work, and I also seem to periodically get notifications of when someone posts to a thread that I am subscribed to.. but I think that is still just periodic. We have duplicate forums setup on our internal system here at natara... with the same db and settings, and it works just fine. We really are not prepared to move ISPs at the moment, but we are also working towards that. When we do, it will most likely not be on a "ColdFusion" system like we are on now. And ColdFusion seems to have gone much the same way as Palm since it was "Traded" several times an now owned by Adobe. There doesn't seem to be much interest in outside ISPs running it, and currently we are grandfathered in with the system we have (so if we "make waves" with our ISP, our costs are likely to go up...).

I'll look into this again in the next couple of weeks to see if there is anything I can find. But as I mentioned, it's not high priority... and the forum isn't something we wrote. Sorry for the inconvenience.

[bnystrom]

OK, heres the deal:

In order for you get to subscription notifications to individual threads or upon creation of new threads in topics, you MUST have "Allow Private Messages" set to "On" in your profile. If it is turned off, you will not get subscription notifications, but you can still get the global (all) messages sent via email. If you are currently NOT getting notification of threads you are subscribed to, the please check your profile (button in the upper right part of the screen) to make sure "Allow Private Messages" is enabled. Doesn't necessarily make sense (well, it kind of does on my end) but that's the way it is.

(Subscription notification are plain emails that show up with just the topic of the tread and a ":subscription update" tagged on to the suject line of the email....they should come from "NataraForums" user.)

[jdmarch]

Many thanks, Bryan.

So "Allow Private Messages" means "receive email notification of new messages in subscribed threads."
And "Receive Messages by e-mail" means "receive email notification of new messages in all threads."

Good to know.

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Edit: Sure enough, this is working. Wonderful!