Why do I get always two "Topic Reply Notification"

jonib · Post by **jonib** » Thu Feb 09, 2006 6:04 pm

I always get two "Topic Reply Notification" emails for every reply I get.

Is this suppose to happen?

alex · Post by **alex** » Thu Feb 09, 2006 6:10 pm

did you get four notifications? because there were 2 replies.

jonib · Post by **jonib** » Thu Feb 09, 2006 7:03 pm

Well I just got two "Topic Reply Notification"s for your reply to this thread

Sample headers from the first:

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Received: from netwu.com (scratchy.tera-byte.com [216.194.64.213])
        by spf6-2s.us4.outblaze.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 525081AC5F3
        for <...>; Thu,  9 Feb 2006 18:10:56 +0000 (GMT)

Sample headers from the second:

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Received: from netwu.com (scratchy.tera-byte.com [216.194.64.213])
        by spf6-3.us4.outblaze.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id E3CCD10D973
        for <...>; Thu,  9 Feb 2006 18:36:45 +0000 (GMT)

The subject,time and msgid is same.

I tryid to put in more headers but it did not work I can email if you want?

alex · Post by **alex** » Fri Feb 10, 2006 2:30 am

i don't know really, it is forum software, i don't email anything

i think you can disable notifications in your forum account settings somewhere.

jonib · Post by **jonib** » Fri Feb 10, 2006 9:18 am

It wont kill me

to get two notifications I just think it is weird.

jonib · Post by **jonib** » Fri Feb 10, 2006 9:27 am

Only problem is they get sent at diffrent times I think I got another reply when it was the same reply

Josef K · Post by **Josef K** » Tue Jan 08, 2008 11:05 am

I hate dragging up ancient threads but...

Any advance on this? Eleven months on and I'm still receiving two notifications. No other phpBB forums I'm subscribed to does this. Like the previous poster, I get notification of a reply to a thread I've participated in, respond to it and then receive another notification. This leads me twice to visit thinking something is new. Or, at least, it did. Now I know better but I still come and look most times 'just in case'.

jonib · Post by **jonib** » Tue Jan 08, 2008 4:08 pm

YES i'm not the only one.

So I'm not going crazy and I just got two notifications to this topic

Josef K · Post by **Josef K** » Tue Jan 08, 2008 4:48 pm

I wonder if anyone else does as well. I saw this thread at the time and just thought I'd have to live with it but no-one else chimed in, either.

Maybe we're bugged.

PCPete · Post by **PCPete** » Mon Feb 25, 2008 1:39 am

You're not alone. I get two emails too.

I see this on a lot of phpbb forums where I've logged in and modified my account details (avatar, sig, etc) before posting the first time.

A long time ago, I had the same problem with a phpbb board I was hosting, and when I upgraded, apparently one of the user reply tables got all its email recipient records duplicated in another table if the user had subscribed to more than one topic in the same forum. I haven't used phpbb in a couple of years now, but that's one of the problems I've seen.

Sometimes it's a language thing too - if you sign up for non-standard (non-US English) languages, OR if you enter a different timezone to the default, that can trigger the same behaviour. I know that because I did the same thing.

There are any number of other forums that have the same problem, at least with me. So when I join, I make sure I post (if they have a sandbox or a newbie-say-hi thread) first, and only then I update my details. Sometimes it works, but sometimes not. The older the forum (or the less-up-to-date it is) the more likely it is to start getting duplicates.

Dunno if this helps. But yeah, it's really annoying, and actually, it's not that hard to fix. But if the forum admin doesn't have the time to dive into phpbb guts, it will not go away, even with the new updates.

[EDIT] Oops, posted twice due to a phpbb server error. Seems to be OK now. Hmmm. Wonder if it's related?
[/EDIT]

jonib · Post by **jonib** » Mon Feb 25, 2008 2:42 am

Interesting PCPete, hope it helps to fix it.

I was not going to reply but had to when I got the second notification

PCPete · Post by **PCPete** » Mon Feb 25, 2008 4:18 am

Hmmm. I just noticed that one reply goes directly to me, and another via an undisclosed recipients list. Sounds like the phpbb mailer code is adding each watched topic email to a general distro for that topic.
I do hope this helps the UE guru team to figure out the problem...
Don't worry, I won't keep replying, not even to 2+ topics..

[EDIT]
Damn, I got the bloody Apache server error AGAIN. It's:

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Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@netwu.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

Apache/1.3.27 Server at www.netwu.com Port 80

[/EDIT]

jonib · Post by **jonib** » Mon Apr 28, 2008 10:25 pm

I still get two mail notices for replies, so I looked for differences between them and noticed that the second one has a "To: Undisclosed-recipients:;" header while the first one has a blank "To:" header, so I figured I would just delete any mail From: support@usenetopia.com containing "To: Undisclosed-recipients:;".

And it seems to work, in case anybody else is bothered by double mails.

jonib

PCPete · Post by **PCPete** » Tue Apr 29, 2008 1:53 am

jonib, that's a good idea, I never even thought of that... That also works with a number of other forums as well (Adobe forums in particular).

The only catch, is that some forums ONLY post out to undisclosed recipients - in which case, it's possible that the filter will kill them too.

It IS interesting to see how clumsy most (all!) mail tools are when handling duplicate messages - there's no way to define a rule that says "If the body is the same, and the sender is the same, but the to: is different, delete the one with the to: being equal to undisclosed-recipients:;"... at least, none that I've found in Outlook or Thunderbird...

But good thinking 99! Now the BBS admin doesn't have to edit their mailout files...

jonib · Post by **jonib** » Tue Apr 29, 2008 2:09 am

PCPete wrote:jonib, that's a good idea, I never even thought of that... That also works with a number of other forums as well (Adobe forums in particular).

Thanks, Yea I'm kinda kicking myself for not thinking about it before too, As I knew there was a difference with the mails and was easy to filter.

The only catch, is that some forums ONLY post out to undisclosed recipients - in which case, it's possible that the filter will kill them too.

Thats why I am using both the From and To headers to filter.

Code: Select all

"From:" containing "support@usenetopia.com"
"To:" containing "Undisclosed-recipients:;"

jonib