Digest emails not getting sent

<baris>

All the digest code is here https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB/blob/master/src/user/digest.js, can put a few console.logs to see whats going on.

Dave Jensen

Is there a way to manually kick it off?

PitaJ

There probably should be a way, as this seems to be a common problem.

Dave Jensen

Also, I noticed when chatting with one of my moderators that he was posting chats in the "future." E.g., for a little bit the time estimate would say, "a few moments from now."

Is that because his clock was ahead, my clock is behind, or, more importantly, it's a problem on the server?
And to bring it back, does that affect the cron and digest emails getting sent?

PitaJ

Yeah it sounds like either your clock or the server's clock is unsynchronized.

Edit: such an issue could affect it, but only if it's a big difference

Dave Jensen

The other possibility that I eliminated was running NodeBB with forever vs. the nodebb command.

Dave Jensen

@baris I put in some winston.info messages and nothing is getting set to the logs. I guess I'll try console.log next.

<baris>

If nothing is being printed in log/output.log then maybe the cronjob isn't running at all. Did you put one at the top of User.digest.execute ? You can also modify the interval of the cronjob so you don't have to wait all day. That code is here.

Dave Jensen

@baris Yup, that's the first spot I put a winston log message.

Where do console.log messages end up? Also the logs?

<baris>

Yes if you are starting nodebb with ./nodebb start everything should go in logs/output.log if you are starting with ./nodebb dev you should see them in terminal.

If it's not printing it the next step would be to check if jobs are started at all, put a log here to see if it's printed.

Dave Jensen

@baris When should that get printed?

~~If on startup, it didn't happen.~~

Okay, it printed out in the logs. (I need to make more gregarious debug messages so I see them).

Dave Jensen

Probably irrelevant ... I explored the code that sets 'runJobs' ... I'm not running as a cluster. Here's my config.json

 {
     "url": "https://www.axisandallies.org/forums",
     "secret": "redacted",
     "database": "mongo",
     "port": "80",
     "trust_proxy": true,
     "mongo": {
         "host": "redacted.ip.address.here",
         "port": "27017",
         "username": "nodebb",
         "password": "redacted",
         "database": "nodebb"
     }
 }

<baris>

@djensen47 said in Digest emails not getting sent:

Okay, it printed out in the logs.

So jobs are getting started then but never triggering, try a log here https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB/blob/master/src/user/jobs.js#L44. If you get it cron is definitely setup.

If they are not run maybe has some time setup issue.

Dave Jensen

For some reason, the digest was sent today. All I've done since last time was upgrade to 1.11.0.

Dave Jensen

Actually, only a few went out and they went out at the wrong time. I have it set for 17:00 and they were sent at 9:00.

JJSagan

Hi @djensen47
I had a similar issue, and found out it was related to email throttling.
The mail server rejected most of the digests, as they came in too fast.
If this is your issue, there is a solution, but it needs to be integrated into the main code.
Follow my comments here:
https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB/issues/6911

Good luck!
JJ.

Dave Jensen

I ran into a similar issue this weekend when the digest tried to run.

The issue that I have is that SparkPost automatically adds emails to a restricted list when they bounce or get reported. When NodeBB attempts to send a message to one of these email addresses, an error is thrown and at some point the whole process stops sending. In addition to throttling, it would be nice to ignore the email failures like this and continue.

Dave Jensen

@baris If I change the cron job to run the weekly on a different day (today) and it's been less than a week since the last attempt (Sunday), will the people who were already sent a weekly digest (on Sunday) be sent another weekly digest? I don't want to spam those first 1000 people.

<baris>

They would get it again I believe.

Dave Jensen

Darn, that makes debugging difficult. I guess I'll file a bug with the errors that stopped the digest send.