Is it just me or my setup, but is the Librem One email only working sporadically for anyone else? I use it for this forum, but I only get emails (messages, quotes, responses, etc) maybe 15-20% of the time.
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I haven’t had any trouble with it for quite a while.
It must be mocking me, because I got the email saying you responded.
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How do you actually know that?
It may depend on the forum settings that you have set. It may also depend in complicated ways on the behaviour of the forum software. (For example, I think I am right in saying that the Discourse forum software selectively sends emails depending on how recently you have logged in. That kind of complex behaviour, ostensibly “smart”, would make it difficult to detect any loss of email messages. You would be better off sending yourself periodic test messages from another mail service.)
It may be a setting somewhere, I’m not discounting that. I use a service that provides fake email addresses and then forwards the emails to that address to my real address I check it every so often, and the service registers that it receives emails that I don’t get in my librem one mailbox. It could be that service, certainly, but the odd email behavior I get from emails from this forum (in addition to other librem one complaints, email and not) led me to believe that perhaps it isn’t.
Yeah OK quite a few moving parts.
You would need to understand a bit more about the forwarding service. How it operates. Whether it provides any diagnostics for when forwarding fails. What it does when forwarding fails. How many sending servers there are and what their IP addresses are. etc.
Is this a paid-for service?
If it’s a free service, or otherwise, I can imagine that it could be abused and then maybe Purism ends up blocking email from that source as spam (either rejecting it outright or dropping the email). The service may even outsource the actual sending out of emails, which brings in additional problems.
Does the service provide a web interface so that you could inject new emails directly for sending to your real email address? (The point is that even if you want to keep your real email address secret, obviously you need to give the service your real email address, so there is no problem directly sending emails to your real email address if using an interface provided by the service - if such an interface exists.)
It’s paid. Only way I can think to inject an email (sorta) is send one to the fake address and see what it does.
But I did want to ask around before I blame purism. I haven’t heard much about librem one in some time, wasn’t sure if that was because it’s working as it should for everybody or isn’t working at all for anybody.
Before “blaming” anybody, you really need those diagnostics.
Forwarding mail is fraught.
Let’s say that the original sender is fubar@gmail.com and it’s sent to gavaudan@masking.com and masking.com is your forwarding service provider who should then forward the email to gavaudan@librem.one
The service provider has two options in forwarding.
- Preserve the original SMTP sender
- Replace the original SMTP sender
If it preserves the original sender then the email should be rejected by the recipient because it will fail the SPF test i.e. looks like a forgery i.e. looks like some random company called masking.com forging email to be from Google.
If it replaces the original SMTP sender, which it should do (e.g. changes it to bounce-randomhex@masking.com), then you won’t have a problem with the SPF test but if the email does actually bounce for some reason then the bounce won’t go back to the original sender (fubar@gmail.com), it will go back to masking.com and they will have to handle reversing the replacement of the original SMTP sender and forwarding the bounce message back - which may or may not happen correctly.
This problem could be even worse if the original sender and the receiver are actually the same company (as they are here i.e. both Purism) because there are additional avenues for detecting that something weird is going on.
So, again, you would be better off sending yourself periodic test messages from another mail service.
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Oh I never realized emails from here were coming from librem.one. It makes perfect sense now that you mention it, but I always figured it was some discourse email address or something.
I don’t have one to hand but I would think that notification emails would be coming from xyz@puri.sm - so same company but different domain - and could be same mail server or could be different mail server and, if so, may or may not be sharing data.
They do, but from what I can see in the email header (and I’m not great at reading email headers) it’s handled by mx.librem.one in the back end.
I agree that using the same email domain probably is being a little screwy. I do need to order some tracers, though, which uses my throwaway service to get the invoice so we’ll see how quickly that shows up or if it doesn’t.
There was a short period yesterday where I waited more than 5 minutes to get an email that I knew was sent. It was my bank’s 2FA by email. So I had to click the “send it another way” button and choose my phone.
FWIW yesterday I had a similar but opposite experience with my bank, sms did not work and I had to use email so that particular experience could just as easily be on the banking side.
Same issue here though typically on the L5 when mobile, WIFI connected, with workarounds:
- close geary and use usage app to kill process and delete cache / memory, restart geary app and sometimes it retrieves new emails using librem one service,
- otherwise restarting the phone and relaunching geary typically works and suddenly retrieves / sends all the emails.
Not sure if it is geary or the account implementation in PureOS itself, since typically email server operation is pretty robust and seems to work better when using Geary on my laptop (Ubuntu Linux without the Librem One Online Account setup).
I see my issue on android, K-9 Mail to be exact. It hadn’t occurred to me it’d be the client, though… lemme give that a shot.
I have occasionally had to close and pkill geary in order to get emails (that I know exist) to show up. NB: The server in my case is nothing to do with Purism. So I think there must just be a bug or two in geary.
Rebooting the Librem 5 of course has the same effect as killing geary.
My email finally showed up a half hour later. Too late for the 5 minute window.
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