CUNY Academic Commons

Hi Boone --

The error message does already include that info -- please look again at 2093 to see the error message the user received.

Oh, right. I guess I'll leave this ticket open to see if Ray has any feedback on making the IMAP +hash user-specific, so that we can sniff those things out. I know we discussed it before, but I forgot what was concluded.

I don't have access to #2093. What does that discuss?

I'm just looking at how I have the RBE code structured and I do rely on the email address being correct before I parse the querystring.

There's one way I could workaround this and that is to add the user_nicename (or user ID) as a querystring parameter and move the querystring check above the email address check.

Note: If I add this fix, RBE would break for people who reply to older RBE emails.

I don't have access to #2093. What does that discuss?

Sorry about that, Ray. The issue is private so that we could copy and paste user correspondence, including email addresses. I've messed with the permissions levels, so you may now be able to access it. (I don't understand Redmine very well.) Anyway, the issue is that the user is signed up with a cuny.edu address, but she receives all her email at a Gmail account, probably because it's either forwarded by the cuny account, or because she uses Gmail POP3. When she hit reply, it came from the Gmail account, which of course bounced.

There's one way I could workaround this and that is to add the user_nicename as a querystring parameter and move the querystring check above the email address check.

Yeah, this is along the lines of what I was thinking. If it's going to break old RBE messages, though, I am tempted to say that we shouldn't fix this, as I think it's an edge case that applies mainly to people who have their email clients set up in a weird way. I'll leave the decision up to Matt I guess.

I still don't have access to issue #2093, but thanks for summarizing the problem, Boone.

It would be nice to fix this, especially for CUNY's use-case as a CUNY email address must be used during the registration process and some of these people might do something similar like forward their CUNY mail to another email address, etc.

I'm not sure if this works or not for CAC, but after a user registers with a CUNY email address, is it possible for that user to change their email address to something else after they are verified? I know this is considered a workaround.

Maybe a clearer failure message back to sender would help as well.

If we see more errors similar to this in the RBE debug log in the weeks to come, then we'll definitely have to address it.

I'm not sure if this works or not for CAC, but after a user registers with a CUNY email address, is it possible for that user to change their email address to something else after they are verified? I know this is considered a workaround.

We already do this, and I think a lot of people take advantage of it. In this case, the user probably never bothered to do so, because her cuny.edu email was already being forwarded to Gmail, by a more general rule.

Maybe a clearer failure message back to sender would help as well.

Yeah, this would be my preference as a starting point, because it's so much easier. It currently says:

This usually happens when you have configured your email client to reply with a custom "From:" email address.
In the future, please make sure to reply using the same email address at which you received the original notification.

Maybe change it to something like:

This can happen in a couple of different ways:
  - You have configured your email client to reply with a custom "From:" email address.
  - You read email addressed to more than one account inside of a single Inbox.

Make sure that, when replying by email, your "From:" email address is the same as the address you've registered at $sitename.

What do you think?

Hi Boone,

In 1.4.x-branch, I've changed the failure message for the 'no user ID could be found' error to use what you've written:
https://github.com/castiron/cac/commit/d4ee44a812324e1f2e297b60d3712645061a7921

I just checked the RBE logs on production and so far, eight people have experienced this issue. Of those eight, three of these people experienced this multiple times.

So it may be an important issue to address even though it will break older RBE emails?

Ray, are we still tracking failed messages? Would you mind having a peek to see if we've still got lots of failed attempts along the lines described above?

Hi Boone,

Sorry for the late reply.

From September 20 until today, we've had 12 people encounter the "no user ID could be found" error in RBE.
Of those 12, we've only had one person encounter this multiple times (3x to be exact).

Let me know what you think.

Thanks, Ray!