Post Notification EMails are Blank

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MaFt

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Post notification emails from this forum arrive blank. The subject is there but the content is missing. When I view the original source of the email in Thunderbird it seems to have the correct code for both plain text and the html version.

The only thing that seems different to normal is that emails are sent in US-ASCII. Is this an option that can be changed per user?
 

beardie

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Thank you for the detail about the issue. To make sure I am understanding correctly... in Thunderbird, the email body shows as blank. However, when you view source, you see that there is content there. Is that correct?

I'll have to test more with Thunderbird. These used to work. I'm very unclear when/why it doesn't display for some people. It would be really sad if I had to switch it all back to pure text. The HTML is simple and easier for most people to understand what to do; simple buttons as opposed to displayed URL links.

Unfortunately, I do not have a means to have select users assigned HTML vs. text. I had someone else recently ask this, and I need to see if perhaps there is a plugin that could be used. I generally try to minimize the amount of plugins used, as they make upgrading the forum software much more difficult (plugins for phpbb are actually code modifications, as opposed to true "plugins").

When you say that what's "different" is that they are sent in US-ASCII, what do you normally see for that?

I'm not sure where that is being set, but it may be something I could address. I'm just confused as to why it's so inconsistent. In theory, the text version of the email is supposed to be what gets displayed if the email program doesn't want to show the HTML. My guess is that they are trying to display the HTML, but failing to do so as intended.

Thanks,
-Alex
 

MaFt

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It looks to be an issue with Thunderbird as my phone and Gmail display it correctly. I'll raise it in their support forums.

US-ASCII is the character encoding (I.e. what letters, numbers, punctuation, accents etc are available to be used). Other common ones are UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1 (I'm a web-developer by trade and have to deal with stuff like this every so often). However, Thunderbird SHOULD be able to handle it. The emails the site sends are valid.

Apologies for posting this before I'd actually looked into this fully!! If I find a fix for Thunderbird then I'll post it here as it may help others in the future.

MaFt
 

beardie

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I agree. Thunderbird should be able to handle it. Hotmail's webmail UI also seems to behave this way. I suspect it has to do with how they re-parse html and CSS for display within their web client.

I hear about it enough that I suspect there are some things I am doing that simply isn't common enough for use in email, that it's failing. Just odd that the effect is usually a blank email.

Thanks again for the detail. I'll have to look into why it isn't using utf-8 or ISO. My guess is I'm using some default in my templates. Or possibly a default by phpbb (although most of their defaults are UK, so not likely them). It may also be the tool I used to convert web pages into email format.
 

beardie

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Oh. Also, which OS are you running thunderbird on? I want to see if I can reproduce the issue when I get a chance.
 

MaFt

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beardie":yoqxlklm said:
Oh. Also, which OS are you running thunderbird on? I want to see if I can reproduce the issue when I get a chance.

Interesting that Hotmail does the same. Yes, webmail ones often mess about trying to sanitize and/or style formatted emails... Fun!!

I'm running Thunderbird 38 on both Windows 10 and OSX El Capitan.

In bugzilla an American user has reported that the email opens fine for him, so I'm wondering if it's something to do with my non-US localised version of Thunderbird. If you're interested (or REALLY bored) take a look at the thread here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1264477
 

asleeis

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test... I changed the template to use utf-8. Posting with my test user to get the reply notification on my main account. I forget if email templates are cached anywhere, so hopefully this test will load the changes on the one template.
 

beardie

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Okay. The last reply notification specified utf-8. Granted, I did nothing to the actual character encoding, but I don't think that should be an issue for basic characters which are what I use.

Unfortunately, it doesn't send it multiple times, so MaFt, when you view the topic again, let me know, and I'll reply with something so you get the fresh reply notification.

I'd be amazed if something so simple fixes this issue, but it would be awesome if that's all it was.

Cheers,
-Alex
 

MaFt

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If you take a look at the bugzilla link I posted earlier, someone has found the problem. In the source code of the email is: start="<body@here>";

If this is removed from the email source then Thunderbird displays it correctly. Yes, TB should be able to parse it and show it like other email clients do but at the same time start="<body@here>"; isn't valid email code.

I wonder if that's part of a template file that you use?

Feel free to email me directly if you want to chat about this (see my profile for email address) rather than doing it in the forum :D

MaFt
 

MaFt

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Looking into it, it's actually valid code for emails but Thunderbird doesn't handle it well. I'd suggest leaving your system as it is :D
 

beardie

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Okay. So, I've changed the <html@here> reference. Although, that SHOULDN'T be interpreted as part of an HTML tag, given how and where it is used, but I could see a reader confusing that. It was an arbitrary tag name really, just saying where to "start" the next encoded message body.

Oh! I just saw a comment you made that isn't entirely accurate. The email template is not "standard". It's generated by an online tool I found that converts an HTML page into an email format (pulls in CSS, and other MIME stuff). I then place the template that that produces into the phpBB stuff. The default phpBB stuff is completely plain text (ugly and unintuitive). However, I didn't modify it from the tool I used. The site I used for this, which provides an API interface and I use for the newsletters (which I send out maybe a few times at a year at most), is http://premailer.dialect.ca . I probably converted these into the templates used about a year or two ago.

What I have done was to change the start tag to not resemble an HTML body tag. I put it back to us-ascii. And I cleared out cache. So, the next one you get should be with the template slightly modified for that <html@here> tag.
 

beardie

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Let me know if the reply notification worked for you. If so, I'll change that tag reference in the templates for all emails (not just the topic reply notification).

Thank you for your help with this. Having someone who's both able and willing to dig into debugging a problem is a great help (as have a handful of others with issues over time). I'm sure you know that when someone can't reproduce a problem themselves, it's a challenge to solve the problem.

Also, I do like to keep these kind of topics here on the forums rather than in email. There are a number of geeks here who like seeing these sort of discussions as they relate to the site. And the Website Comments forum is the right spot for them. :)
 

CooperDragon

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beardie":2ssopv61 said:
Also, I do like to keep these kind of topics here on the forums rather than in email. There are a number of geeks here who like seeing these sort of discussions as they relate to the site. And the Website Comments forum is the right spot for them. :)

We aren't geeks... :evil:
It's good to be able to follow these issues and jump in with assistance when able =)
 

beardie

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Okay... I've updated all email templates to use "bodystarthere" as the marking tag, rather than "<body@here>". Hopefully this will take care of most people's issues.

I had one person say that the "Activate" button in the activation email wasn't working. So, I may have to look at including the full link in the email to ensure people can get around that issue. But I suspect they'd have problems with any emails with the HTML "buttons".

At least, I think this issue is now resolved!

@MaFt: Thank you so much for helping debug this problem. Very much appreciated. Obviously, Thunderbird still needs to fix their issue, but until they do, our emails will work either way.

Thanks,
-Alex
 
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