Email Issues

[JG]

It has been brought to my attention that registrants are not receiving the registration validation email. Further testing has concluded that private messages are also not being sent.

I don't really know what the problem is. The emails are just sitting there without moving forward. I've rebooted the server and I've tested sending emails directly from the Outlook account and don't yet know what the problem is, as there's no record in the log of SMTP failures - they just aren't getting sent or moving out of queue. This may take a while to figure out the root cause and fix.

In the meantime, if you have recently registered and did not get your validation email, please send an email to sognadigitalmuseum@gmail.com from the email account you are trying to register and your registration will be completed manually. Apologies for the disruption of service and extra manual step.

[JG]

Some progress:
I've tracked this down to a recent TLS change implemented by Microsoft, which allows the forum to login to the email server but not do anything else on it (such as send messages). Backtracking how to fix this, it seems I'm still running a ten-year old version of PHP (5.3.28) that only supports TLS 1.0, and not TLS 1.2 as now required by Office 365 interfaces. So I must update to PHP 5.6.40 (latest 5.x branch available.) This should not break anything but I'll be crossing fingers on that.

[JG]

PHP 5.6.40 has now been installed and it has resolved the TLS 1.2 requirement for email exchange. I have confirmed private messages can now be sent which means the registration emails should now be able to go through as well. If anyone notices odd behavior from this new version (inability to do something we used to be able to do - like say, post images) please let me know.

If you registered in last month or so and still did not get the validation email, let me know by sending a manual email to sognadigitalmuseum@gmail.com and I can manually activate the account.

[JG]

More email changes have been applied today, using a radically different method.

Microsoft decided to follow Google into requiring OAuth2 authentication for all email interaction, which is very problematic as PHP does not natively support this technology and can only make it work with a lot of additional work, and Simple Machines Forum doesn't support it without its own load of extra work and new code. Micronsoft's deadline for this is coming up Saturday and I've been scrambling to find how I can keep the forum running with email support. Fortunately, I discovered an OAuth2 proxy that can run as a service on my server and translate on-the-fly any basic authentication emails generated by the forum into OAuth2 secured emails.

This is working in my tests, and also has allowed me to switch the forum email system back to sognadigitalmuseum@gmail.com, from outlook.com. However, its new and may present problems.

If you notice any emails not being received, let me know.