Automated Mail System Move

[bradl]

The transactional mail service that the forum uses to send mail (registration validation links, topic notifications, activity digests, personal messages and so on) is moving to a paid service. There is a similar alternative service that remains no-cost so I will be moving to that system sometime in the next few days (within a week for sure). 

You do not have to do anything regarding this change and the change should be be transparent to you. You should not even notice.

Then why am I mentioning this?  There are a couple of related things that may happen and that you may notice.

• I may put the forum offline for a half-hour or so while I set up the new mailer and test it. This is to reduce or prevent the chance that a  normal forum activity will take place — such as posting or registering — that would trigger an email which might be missed during the actual switchover.
• Because the forum outgoing emails will be handled by a different mail server than previously, your provider may block your incoming mail from the forum as unrecognized or spam. During the period after the switchover if you do not receive a notification that you expect or normally receive, please check your spam/junk folder and mark the forum mail as Not Spam (or whatever is appropriate for your mail reader) to "teach" your provider's filters that you want to receive forum email.  This is unlikely to be necessary, but possible.

I will post a follow-up after the switchover occurs to let you know it happened so you can check your spam folder if any mail goes missing.

Thank you for your patience and understanding. The goal is to make sure you have a fun and useful forum experience and that includes insuring you get your related notifications. The new provider is supposed to be an excellent one, so here's to a painless transition! 

[bradl]

The email handler has been moved. 

Test emails to myself were correctly processed and arrived in my inbox as expected. So far so good.

If you are expecting email from the site, such as a registration validation link, topic notification, or personal message and you do not receive it, check your spam or junk mail folder to see if your email provider is filtering it out. If so, virtually all email systems have means to "whitelist" or mark incoming email as being intentional.

I will also monitor the bounce and rejection logs for a few days to see if I spot any major problems with delivery.