CUNY Academic Commons

Hi Boone,

Thanks for this info. The faculty member who never received the registration confirmation email was Allan Leibman (aleibman@bmcc.cuny.edu). This occurred around 1pm last Thursday 6/28. Just so I can inform faculty-- is there a particualr reason the commons emails are getting stopped by the BMCC Servers? Is there anything we can do to push the Commons emails through the BMCC servers?

Thanks,
Laurie

Thanks, Laurie.

The system shows that the registration took place at 18:51:24 UTC (2:51pm EDT). I'm unsure why this doesn't match the 1pm timeframe that you've cited. In any case, the mail log then shows that an email was sent to that address at the exact same time - 18:51:24 - which is, presumably, the activation email. The account was then activated at 19:08:34 (about 17 minutes later), and a second email was sent at this time, which is likely our standard "you have activated your account" email.

So, there's no indication that anything went wrong on the Commons end. The right emails appear to have been sent at the right times.

is there a particualr reason the commons emails are getting stopped by the BMCC Servers? Is there anything we can do to push the Commons emails through the BMCC servers?

To be clear, it doesn't seem as if they're being blocked altogether, just delayed. As above, my guess is that something in the content of the email triggered BMCC's security scanning service to flag the email, at which point it needed to process the email and deem it safe before delivering it to the user. I'm surprised that this would take 15+ minutes, but it's possible that there's a lag due to the complexity of the scan, or how busy the email server is, or something like that. The fact that our emails are subject to scanning is not in itself a problem, and is in any case something we'd be unlikely to change. If the delay turns out to recur for many different users, and turns out to be a source of annoyance or other problems, then we could probably contact BMCC IT to investigate. But that's likely to be a complex and difficult conversation (BMCC itself is likely just a client of a third-party vendor, and I'm guessing the vendor doesn't give out details on their scanning algorithms), so I'd suggest we don't undertake it unless the problem becomes widespread.

Thanks, Boone. Laurie, can you please pass this info on to Gina and Jean? It seems like something they should be aware of.

Everyone -

This sounded familiar so I looked at Zendesk. He wrote to me there at 2:08 pm which seems to be before the time "system shows that the registration took place at 18:51:24 UTC (2:51pm EDT)."

It's a moot issue with this particular guy, but it seems to point to something odd with how registration times are recorded.

I have two more reports of slow to confirm registrations from BMCC. Screenshot attached showing that all the unconfirmed on the first page are BMCC (or that road to nowhere login.cuny.edu email.)

Hi Boone -- My understanding is that the login.cuny.edu addresses are NOT linked to actual inboxes. I believe that they were created to make a single sign-on option for various central IT services such as CUNYFirst and Blackboard.

Thanks, Matt. I've opened #10230 to track the login.cuny.edu issue, which I'm pretty sure is separate from this one.

Boone, sorry I didn't see this before. The BMCC emails seem to be slow to arrive. Will report with more info when I have it.

The registered times I see on the unconfirmed screen are incorrect. Attached is a screenshot showing that people have registered this evening, and it's currently only 3:42.

I wouldn't mention it but it makes it impossible for me if someone just registered 5 minutes ago (in which case I'd advise that they give the emails a chance to work through the spam filters.

Hi Marilyn - I don't see a screenshot, but I'm looking at the Unconfirmed page now. It appears that the times there are in UTC. NYC is currently UTC-4, which means that, eg, 2018-08-29 20:18:53 UTC is 2018-08-29 16:18:53 EDT, or 4:18pm. I don't see a reason to change this behavior as long as the team (mainly you, since you're the one looking at it!) understand that you need to make the UTC conversion.

This does help me to understand the delay, though, so thanks for that. If you can provide more information on the length of the delay in as many cases as you reasonably can, we may have enough information to submit to the powers-that-be at BMCC. And if they can't help us, we may be forced to add some disclaimers to our own registration process to the effect that some campuses may impose several hours' delay on activation emails.

Luke, Tom, Laurie -- please take a look at this ticket. I just looked through the Unconfirmed listings on the Admin backend, and there are a lot of BMCC addresses there. Tom and Laurie, we might want to touch base with BMCC faculty from our summer group to check in.

Separately, please see this ticket, as well: https://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/issues/10230 . Though that issue won't happen for new registrations, there are a number of login.cuny.edu addresses in the Unconfirmed list, and we should let faculty know that if students entered the login.cuny.edu address at login, they won't get a confirmation message and we will have to activate/change email manually (or ask them to re-register with the correct address)