bugs

The error message below appeared when trying to register an email to a bot. It also appeared when trying to reset a bot:

"There was an error sending the email."

Thanks for the report, I confirm I'm seeing the issue too.

I got it when trying "view all bots associated with email", so I assume it's a systemwide issue with sending email.

The last successful email I see sent by the game was last night (about 12 hours ago), so whatever is happening is likely pretty new.

There's nothing obvious in the logs so I don't have any guesses about the cause right now. I'll try to find time to look more closely tonight after work.

Spent some time looking at this tonight. I have a better understanding of the problem now and a suspicion of what could have caused this to suddenly break. I made a change to the game's DNS settings that may fix this, but it can take up to (I believe) 24 hours for the change to propagate, so we won't know for a bit if it worked. Stay tuned...

It's working fine for me atm

Confirmed on my end is well - this appears to be fixed.

Details: The game uses Google / legacy G Suite for sending emails. Apparently they've stepped up their anti-spam efforts lately and have become a lot more strict about domain/DNS requirements for sending email. Apparently something got ramped up very recently that pushed the game's domain into untrusted territory, so it got blocked from sending email. I fixed this by adding some additional DNS settings to basically convince Google that the game is a reputable sender.

Same issue appears to be playing up again :/

Seeing the same as well. The game had sent 50ish emails since the fix, but last successful email sent was Nov 7 now.

I suspect the problem is the same "trust" issue as before. I made another tweak to the DNS settings to see if that helps. Like before, it will take some time for the change to propagate (anywhere from a few minutes to 24 hours), so I'll check in again tomorrow to see how things are looking.

If that doesn't work, I'm unfortunately probably out of options for continuing to use Google for sending emails and will need to migrate to a dedicated email provider (e.g. SendGrid), which will take a bit more time.

Seems to be working now - fingers crossed that it stays that way.

I also added some additional logging for email sending so I'll have better visibility into problems in the future.

There was an error sending the email.

Looks like it’s broken again

The bug that keeps on giving!

Short version: I tweaked some more stuff again. Like before, it'll take time to propagate, but after some time it should hopefully get fixed again.

Long version: Part of what I did before resulted in me getting daily aggregate reports from email providers (Gmail, Mail.ru, etc.) about how the bots4.net domain is being used to send email. Turns out because of some lax domain settings, there is some spam going out from the domain. I made yet further changes to the game's DNS settings, as well as some of the game's Google / legacy G Suite settings, to try to stop this. That should in theory increase the domain's reputation score as a sender, which should in theory coax Google to stop blocking the game's emails.

It's working again now.

There was an error sending the email.

Dang, lost my energy and can’t reset yet Sadge

Ugh, sorry for the continued problems with this. I won't be able to look into this further for a couple days (hosting for the weekend), but this will also be an opportunity to see whether it's an intermittent problem that keeps fixing itself independently of my supposed fixes. Stay tuned.

Didn’t work over the weekend but worked today

To close this out, things have been stable for over a week now, so I'm declaring this incident officially resolved.

I think the period from Nov 14-17 where emails were still failing is a result of the game's domain's and/or IP's trust score taking some time to fully recover. Based on not having problems since then, I'm concluding that the reputation has since stabilized.

For posterity, here's the log of email attempts since my last set of changes around end of day on Nov 12:

✅ Nov 13: 18 success
❌ Nov 14: 11 success, 7 fail
❌ Nov 15: 13 fail
❌ Nov 16: 9 fail
❌ Nov 17: 1 fail, 6 success
✅ Nov 18: 6 success
✅ Nov 19: 20 success
✅ Nov 20: (none attempted)
✅ Nov 21: 19 success
✅ Nov 22: 11 success
✅ Nov 23: 63 success
✅ Nov 24: (none attempted)
✅ Nov 25: 5 success
✅ Nov 26: 1 success