It seems sendgrid is having issues with guaranteeing the delivery of our emails. As a consequence this is impacting the delivery of notifications from Discuss.
As this is not just an issue we face as Flarum, I will share my thoughts with you.
Sending email is a complicated process. You might have noticed it from some of ourSupport requests here as well. Aside from using
- the right credentials,
- sending address, and
- DNS records have to be set up correctly with
And, even with that in place, there's no guarantee your IP is clean and not marked as spam.
Using a new IP to send email will mean you will have to gradually build trust with receiving servers. This actually only applies to IP addresses that have never seen any email sending activity; it's more than likely that your IP address for a new server on Digital Ocean (or elsewhere) has been used in the past and has gained some form of reputation. The bigger the hosting provider, the more likely that reputation isn't amazing, or downright detrimental.
For this reason, it's usually easier to rely on a sending service like MailGun, Sendgrid, and others. But unless you have paid plan and/or dedicated sending IP address, the risk of being blocked is still high with other accounts sending email and causing a massive impact on shared reputation.
Anyone can mark received email as spam, the more this happens the lower your sending reputation becomes. Once you hit a certain threshold email servers will simply block you. This usually happens in a cascading manner; for instance a notorious (and widespread adopted) mail server authority is Spamhaus. Spamhaus is usually quick to mark any IP as spam; especially when sending using a shared IP address this is to be expected. Others blatantly adopt the blocklists provided by Spamhaus to protect their own email users.
A few days ago Spamhaus marked the IP address we use on our sendgrid account as spam, and although Sendgrid suggests they take action as soon as possible, the suspension is still in effect.
The following actions will be taken by the Flarum team to enable sending again:
- report the blockage to sendgrid, although they explicitly tell in their docs this is unnecessary
- move away from a shared sending IP address as soon as possible, this might also mean moving away from Sendgrid
