Email Validation MAJOR PROBLEM

[Vinnie]

I just spent the last 8 hours troubleshooting why my SMTP server wasn't sending mails to over 1,500 of my users and now i have the answer.

Turns out that certain free e-mail services, for example chek.com, do NOT allow their receipients to receive emails that contain URLs!!!! This means the password and registration emails, not to mention any other email that vBulletin sends out, will not make it.

I hope I am hallucinating - has anyone else had this problem?

What's the work around?

1) Don't validate email

2) Screw users who try to use chek.com

I am leaning towards 2 but it is very unfriendly for users!!!

Help!

[Steve Machol]

Frankly I've never heard of such a thing! I've always disallowed registrations from yahoo and hotmail, but I've never heard of chek.com.

Very strange policy!

[cscharff]

lol

If they choose to use a mail service which is not RFC compliant... they pretty much deserve what they get. Add a note to the registration process that chek.com accounts will most likely fail because the mail system is run by brain damaged mutants and leave it at that.

[Vinnie]

Disagree

Its not funny.

Imagine billy bob user who doesn't know about RFC or HTML or any of that, who gets an ad for one of these free email and starts using it. He gives it to his family, friends, and business associates. He becomes known with that email address.

Then, he grabs BearShare, hits the Community button and decides to sign up for the forum.

He puts his email in, and waits for the registration instructions. And waits.

And waits, and waits.

7 days pays, no email. He tries to register again but it says the user name is already taken. So he registers with a different user name, but then it says the email already exists.

Finally he throws his hands up in desparation and becomes one of those people for whome computers are "too complicated".

This is not user friendly! This is a problem!

[Steve Machol]

I'm curious. Among those 1700+ users that aren't getting the email validation notices, how many are from the 'free email' services and which services are they?

The biggies - yahoo and hotmail do allow HTML and frankly I don't get many registrations from any of the others.

[tubedogg]

Not supporting HTML and bouncing messages with URLs (hyperlinked or not) in an email message are two entirely different things. If chek.com bounces emails with hyperlinks, they are seriously screwed up. If (as I suspect) they simply don't make them clickable, then that's another story.

[tubedogg]

Re: Disagree

Originally posted by Vinnie
Its not funny...

The tone of your message seems to indicate you think that it is a vBulletin problem...

[tubedogg]

Re: Email Validation MAJOR PROBLEM

Originally posted by Vinnie
I hope I am hallucinating - has anyone else had this problem?

You are hallucinating. I just signed up for a test account with lovemail.com (a site that uses chek.com for email services) and sent myself an email both from there and to there from my main account. Both contained URLs, including URLs with query strings, and both came through fine.

[Vinnie]

vBulletin

No its not a vBulletin problem.

However, there are several issues with vBulletin that make the situation a little worse, notably the lack of bulk user operations.

It would be extremely convenient to re-send all of the registrations to pending users but there is no way to do this.

I have sent several emails but gotten no responses - I need someone who is experienced with vBulletin to dedicate some hours (maybe 40 or so) into the extra programming that I need for my board. This could be invoiced as an independent contractor.

I would also like to get a support contract with someone who will integrate all of my customizations into new versions of vBulletin. They could use some patch type program to re-apply the deltas.

Ideally, some of the changes would make it into the distribution version of vBulletin (like bulk sending of registration emails).

Another feature I need is to do bulk pruning of users based on last login or status. If these features could make it into the shipping vBulletin admin cp that would be ideal. Free Peers, Inc. is more than willing to fund this development, and I think it would benefit everyone.