XF 2.1 How do a determine when and why Xenforo 2.1 sent a notification email to a user?

[iaresee]

I have a user who is constantly complaining that email notifications for things they subscribe to are delayed. Sometimes by hours. Sometimes by days.

It's a low volume forum. I know we're not overloading outbound email capabilities for the server we're running on.

Looking the headers in his email I can see a receive timestamp on his end that is ~1 second after the send timestamp on the server end. So I'm fairly confidant the problem does not lie between sending and receiving email.

Received: from forumx.fractalaudio.com (forumx.fractalaudio.com [72.52.184.152])
by mta20.mtka.securence.com (Securence v1163) with ESMTP id 1565065041083-020-00276237;
Mon, 05 Aug 2019 23:17:21 -0500 (CDT)
Received: from xenforo by forumx.fractalaudio.com with local (Exim 4.92)
(envelope-from <webmaster@fractalaudio.com>)
id 1huquW-0000pW-T1
for redacted@redacted.com; Tue, 06 Aug 2019 00:17:20 -0400
Message-ID: <d6f37c0f2414ff9b7ca7ccb680a5c836@forum.fractalaudio.com>
Date: Tue, 06 Aug 2019 04:17:20 +0000
Subject: FC-6 Tuner bug - New thread in watched forum
From: Fractal Audio Systems Forum <webmaster@fractalaudio.com>
To: Rex <redacted@redacted.com>

The trouble here is that the thread in question was created on July 28, 2019.

The user has confirmed they are watching the forum and the settings they are using are as follows:




The forum thread in question is here: https://forum.fractalaudio.com/threads/fc-6-tuner-bug.152655/

So I'm trying to figure out how Xenforo determines it should send an email and when it makes that determination. This one user, in particular, seems overly sensitive to email-based notifications and their drift from when events occur that should trigger notifications.

Is there a callback that fires on new thread creation to check if anyone is watching the forum and to process alerts and emails? Or is there a cron job? I have no server error logs surfaced in the admin view -- are there other on-disk log files I can be searching to see what's going on here?

Thanks!

- Ian

 

[Abraham54]

It may have nothing to do with your server but probably everything with a full mailbox of the user.
I have a member who regularly complaints about not receiving e-mail notifications.

And every time his e-mail inbox is full.

 

[iaresee]

It may have nothing to do with your server but probably everything with a full mailbox of the user.
I have a member who regularly complaints about not receiving e-mail notifications.

And every time his e-mail inbox is full.

I'm certain they're not out of space on the email account but this has me wondering if the ISP-based email they use from usinternet.com is possibly to blame here in other ways. I'm going to have him create a secondary account with a Gmail email address, subscribe to the same forum and test out delivery.

I'll also check my exim logs for retries -- I had neglected to do that, thinking the problem was perhaps in Xenforo, so this is a great line to chase down. I'm wondering if there's something DKIM or SPF related here that's causing delays in accepting email at his ISP from my forum server (which is not setup for SPF or DKIM or DMARC...I should do that). Thanks for the thoughts here!

 

[iaresee]

Unfortunately the exim logs only show one attempt to send an email to this user and it's on the day and at the time that he got the message. I have logs that cover back to before the thread was posted:

[root@forumx /tmp/exim]# ll
total 151672
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root      140 Aug  6 23:10 ./
drwxrwxrwt 23 root root      640 Aug  6 23:10 ../
-rw-r-----  1 root root 13596168 Aug  6 23:10 exim_mainlog
-rw-r-----  1 root root 34241805 Aug  6 23:10 exim_mainlog-20190714
-rw-r-----  1 root root 34882051 Aug  6 23:10 exim_mainlog-20190721
-rw-r-----  1 root root 37729915 Aug  6 23:10 exim_mainlog-20190728
-rw-r-----  1 root root 34849993 Aug  6 23:10 exim_mainlog-20190804
[root@forumx /tmp/exim]# grep "FC-6 Tuner bug" exim_mainlog*  | grep redacted\@redacted.com
exim_mainlog:2019-08-06 00:17:20.932 [3194] 1huquW-0000pW-T1 <= webmaster@fractalaudio.com U=xenforo P=local S=8163 M8S=0 RT=0.007s id=d6f37c0f2414ff9b7ca7ccb680a5c836@forum.fractalaudio.com T="FC-6 Tuner bug - New thread in watched forum" from <webmaster@fractalaudio.com> for redacted@redacted.com

That means the problem is likely on the Xenforo side and I'm back to wondering what causes the mail hook to be triggered? Is it on thread creation? On a cron?