Not getting email notifications

[Rick314]

I am subscribed to a recent thread I started, but received no email notification when it got responses. The email address in my profile is correct and used daily. My Email Notification is "Instant Email Notification". Is there something more I need to do to receive notification emails?

[EdS2]

Checking my emails, it looks like it's 4 years since I got a notification about a thread.

But only a few weeks since I got a notification about a private message arriving.

So I think perhaps notifications for threads have been disabled for some reason.

[Rick314]

I did receive an immediate email notification for your reply EdS2, after not receiving several I should have and posting the problem yesterday. Something has changed. If a forum moderator changed/fixed something related please provide an update here.

[Dave Hicks]

About a month ago, I removed a bunch of individual thread and forum subscriptions from some dormant accounts – that was because those accounts used email addresses that no longer existed and I occasionally get tired of all the email bounce messages from thread and forum subscriptions. (The subscriptions I removed were from accounts with last active times of years ago, and they were bouncing anyways so this shouldn’t have had any effect except to remove those bounce messages, which it did.)

So, subscription emails were going out a month ago, and I don’t have an explanation for someone not seeing any in 4 years.

No forum settings have been changed in the last month. People appear to be registering at around the usual rate (which requires an email.)

I do know that at various times some email systems have disposed of emails that looked “automated”, but I haven’t heard any recent complaints.

[EdS2]

Ah, right, it does sound like it might be a deliverability problem, which is common enough. The big email providers are particularly eager to filter - gmail, yahoo, microsoft - in my case I'm a gmail user, so that fits the facts.

But also, it looks like I changed my user options so I no longer subscribe by default - and it looks like I did that 4 years ago. So, no mystery in my case.

Personally I visit pretty much every day so it's no hardship.

(Three aspects of the outgoing emails might be noteworthy: lack of a list-unsubscribe header, message not signed with DKIM, no DMARC record. But it's a judgement call, and something of an arms race, of the mail sender versus the mail providers. Might or might not be worth the effort.)