ODK Central web user account invite not received

1. What is the problem? Be very detailed.
Some folks whom I wish to invite to be Project Managers on ODK Central aren't receiving the invitation to become web users.

2. What app or server are you using and on what device and operating system? Include version numbers.
I have a ODK Central server I have installed on Digital Ocean. I began with v 0.7 and maybe a month ago I upgraded to 0.8. I have only noticed this problem since the last couple of days

3. What you have you tried to fix the problem?
I tried sending the invitation to alternate email addresses and two of them received it , no problem.
I also tried asking the invitees who did not receive the mail to check spam, or use the search term: "in:spam from:no-reply@mydomain.in" , that didn't help either.
Lastly asked them to search using a laptop instead of gmail on android, since sometimes the phone app takes time to sync, no luck there either.

4. What steps can we take to reproduce the problem?
you can share one of your email addresses and I could try sending more invites.. but would that help?

5. Anything else we should know or have? If you have a test form or screenshots or logs, attach below.
let me know if I should screenshot anything inparticular

Thanks for doing some good troubleshooting already. Are all of the email recipients on the same e-mail provider (e.g. Gmail, your company, etc)? It could be that the people not receiving your emails have a stricter e-mail provider which is filtering out messages from your Central install before they reach your inbox.

In particular, some e-mail providers require Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) to ensure that messages are sent by the domain they say they are. If you haven't already, please try following the documentation about configuring DKIM. Alternately, you may want to use a custom mail server.

If you need to set up these users immediately and you're not sure about these email configuration options, you could use the command line script to give them a password using the user-set-password command while we try to figure out what has happened and the best way forward.

Hey,
thanks for that quick reply!
I went with the temp fix for now, setting up the users via the command line
I will go ahead and read up on the DKIM documentation and report back here soon.

The issue isn't specific to one e-mail provider, I've noticed it with gmail and alternate providers too.

Best
Craig

1 Like

hey @LN
apologies for revisiting this after so long...
going for a permanent solution, I eventually went ahead with the instructions shown here for configuring DKIM.

I simply completed step 1

Ensure that your server's name in DigitalOcean matches your full domain name, and that the hostname does as well. If you had to make changes for this step, restart the server to ensure they take effect.

after this my original problem was resolved, new users get e-mail invites (tested with gmail users only so far). Do I still need to go ahead with steps 2,3,4 in configuring DKIM? What's the purpose of these?

If you're only working with known individuals (e.g. your colleagues) and can easily follow up with them to make sure that they've received messages as expected, you likely don't need to take any further action.

Configuring DKIM means your messages are cryptographically signed and guaranteed to come from your domain. In Gmail, click on the little down arrow below a message sender's name and you'll see more details about the message. If you see signed-by:, that shows the domain from the DKIM configuration. More email clients will trust mail that is signed. It also means that users could verify that they're not falling victim to a fishing attack (though I'm not sure many people do this).

Thanks @LN , sounds like the safer option to go ahead with the remaining steps, so I did.
I have encountered the same error mentioned here Configuring DKIM , seems like a recent one. I'll take my problem over there for now.