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I just noticed that I haven't been receiving any tag subscription/filter email — since September 4, 2018!

I've checked my tag subscriptions and they each say:

Email Updates
Subscribe to receive emails of new questions in this filter. You can receive emails every 15 minutes, every 3 hours, or daily.
Emailing every day to
[email protected]
edit unsubscribe

My one filter subscription says the above plus "Confirmation email sent. Please confirm your subscription.", but asking it to resend does not generate any email. (I don't know if that filter ever worked.)

  • I've checked my spam and mail filters — nothing there of note.
  • I am receiving newsletters and inbox notifications successfully.
  • I've seen previous mentions of the subscription system being broken but not more recently than July 2018.

Update: I still have not received any tag subscription email, despite the April 11 fix. I received a subscription confirmation email after requesting one, but no actual subscriptions.

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27
  • 1
    Oh, good point -- mine's gone missing too. And here I thought people just didn't have new questions on some of those tags! Should have noticed the absence of [featured] here on meta, though.
    – Monica Cellio
    Mar 7, 2019 at 2:50
  • 1
    @MonicaCellio It's rather a classic “noticing when something doesn't happen” problem, isn't it.
    – Kevin Reid
    Mar 7, 2019 at 2:54
  • Is this working again? It looks like some of the queueing problems have been fixed and all of your confirmed subscriptions have a LastEmailDate of Mar 26 or later. stackexchange.com/filters/1759/twisted should have arrived recently.
    – Brian Nickel
    Apr 8, 2019 at 19:21
  • "Resend" also appears to be working for me.
    – Brian Nickel
    Apr 8, 2019 at 19:22
  • @BrianNickel I just checked and my mailbox still contains no recent subscription messages. Found and clicked a “resend” link and there's no immediate email either.
    – Kevin Reid
    Apr 8, 2019 at 19:36
  • :( I'm still looking for an issue on our end but haven't been able to reproduce the issue. Could it be ending up in spam?
    – Brian Nickel
    Apr 8, 2019 at 20:12
  • @BrianNickel I check my spam filter regularly (and right this second, too). And note that newsletter email works fine.
    – Kevin Reid
    Apr 8, 2019 at 20:14
  • @MonicaCellio Are you also still having this issue? I'm going to have SRE check some logs so it would be helpful to have a accounts to look at.
    – Brian Nickel
    Apr 8, 2019 at 22:48
  • @BrianNickel yes, still no notifications. Here on MSE I tried unsubscribing and resubscribing to "featured", thinking that might kick something loose, and that's when I realized we can't subscribe any more, only mark tags as favorites. So I have a mix of old-style subscriptions and new-style favorites, all marked to send me email, and I haven't gotten tag email in months. Nothing in spam and all the Stack domains are whitelisted (se.con, so.com, and so.email -- any others?)
    – Monica Cellio
    Apr 8, 2019 at 23:04
  • Thanks! I'll hand that info off. (I am sorry you can't subscribe on-site anymore, Teams-style tag notifications were supposed to be a follow-on project.)
    – Brian Nickel
    Apr 8, 2019 at 23:11
  • @BrianNickel correction -- I just found a lone message from April 2 in the spamtrap (missed whitelisting one address). I feel like I should have had more.
    – Monica Cellio
    Apr 8, 2019 at 23:11
  • @BrianNickel that lone message (for technical-writing on Writing.SE, Apr 2) seems to be an outlier. For example, this featured question asked yesterday didn't generate any email, and I'd be astonished if none of my several subscribed tags have had new questions in the last week. In fact, "favorite tags" on my network profile shows a subscription and many new questions. Other email from stackoverflow.email (like newsletters) comes through fine.
    – Monica Cellio
    Apr 10, 2019 at 14:54
  • @MonicaCellio Based on the application's audit logs, it is seeing the new questions and thinks it's sending you emails. I had to hand it off to another team to check the SMTP email server logs to see if it's dropping the emails or getting errors pushing to you. The funny thing is I am getting the emails, on my personal account even, so the end-to-end system is working some of the time. We'll have to see what they say.
    – Brian Nickel
    Apr 10, 2019 at 16:40
  • Thanks @BrianNickel. Is there a better way to track my support issue than comments on this post? I have all three domains whitelisted at both pobox (forwarder) and gmail (where the email actually lands), and I'm not sure what else to do on my end. AFAIK I hadn't changed anything around the time the messages stopped coming (but, of course, users always say that).
    – Monica Cellio
    Apr 10, 2019 at 16:49
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    @MonicaCellio You've done plenty. I've included this question in my ticket and I can loop back with you if we need to do testing or anything.
    – Brian Nickel
    Apr 10, 2019 at 16:51

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
7

This is fixed.

This was one of the few remaining instances where we send emails via an internal SMTP server. At some point we switched to using an @stackoverflow.email address but we weren't signing the outgoing emails with the DKIM key we use for other emails. This caused other email systems view tag subscriptions as untrustworthy and drop them.

We're now sending these emails to our normal email delivery service and they're getting signed correctly.

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8
  • Wow, so it was getting dropped even before it got to my whitelist, apparently? Yikes, I didn't know that could happen. Now I have to find out how to turn it off.
    – Monica Cellio
    Apr 11, 2019 at 17:42
  • Thanks for the fix and the details!
    – Kevin Reid
    Apr 11, 2019 at 17:43
  • @MonicaCellio I don't know all the details, but you probably don't want to turn it off. DKIM is a way for senders to vouch for the authenticity of an email, reducing the risk of fraud. (Anyone can technically send an email from any address so some automated filtering is warranted. In fact, I used to spoof email addresses all the time using AltaVista's flexible "from" editor.)
    – Brian Nickel
    Apr 11, 2019 at 17:50
  • @BrianNickel true, I don't want to turn it off, but for things that seem to be from addresses I've whitelisted, I'd rather it not be silent either. Oh well. (And yes, I figured out how to spoof email not long after getting access to email, so I realize the dangers. :-) )
    – Monica Cellio
    Apr 11, 2019 at 18:02
  • 1
    I'm having the same problem trying to subscribe to my Favorite Tags (stackexchange.com/filters/103309/favorite-tags) I'm getting no confirmation email at all.
    – Oscar Cunningham
    Sep 26, 2019 at 17:22
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    This isn't fixed. I'm having the same problem in October 2019.
    – DanielSank
    Oct 31, 2019 at 1:05
  • Same issue for me. I wonder if it doesnt work for filter tags. Please can someone guide on any way to subscribe to a single tag? Because "subscribe" option is not there for a single tag. So then what's the bypass solution as of now? :-(
    – mkRuby009
    Nov 18, 2019 at 6:05
  • Not fixed. I have the same problem now, in Nov 2019. Why to allow specifying separate email for subscriptions if we have account email which can be served for everything?
    – Suncatcher
    Nov 29, 2019 at 20:32

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