Lemmy Support @lemmy.ml jax @lemmy.cloudhub.social 1 yr. ago

Accounts blackholed when instance email is not working

When the following is true:

User attempts to create an account
Instance has "require registration application" enabled
Instance's email is not working/unavailable

the application seems to get lost, the user never receives an email (even after email functionality is restored), nor can that email/username be used going forward to re-submit the account creation request.

Additionally, since the user never verifies their email, the instance admin never gets a registration application.

It's not currently an issue for me, however, would it be possible to delete these ghost users? If you lookup the profile/username in the database, you can view it via the web UI, but the only options appear to be either blocking the user or banning them. It might be good to be able to completely delete the accounts, no?

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8 comments

I caught this in testing as well today.

That said i removed my test accounts in SQL directly

DELETE FROM local_user WHERE person_id='someusernumer'

Where someusernumber is their actual ID.

Used this thread as a resource:https://normalcity.life/post/13018
- Awesome, that’s super helpful, thank you!
  
  I guess I’ll also look into an SMTP relay. That could be useful I guess.
  
  In my tshooting today, i dont think it will help. I think the error is hitting in the lemmy app container, and not getting passed to my postfix relay. So even if i say...setup postfix as a dedicated relay (which I have done plenty of), not sure it would help.
  
  I put more here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ansible/issues/105
  
  I was actually testing email, when I stumbled on this. When i tried another account with the same address I got an error that the address already exists. Prompting me to go cleanup my DB and use something else to test email realy (forgotten passwords in my case).
  
  It's because the postfix docker container is not connected to a docker network that has access to the "lemmy" or "lemmy-ui" container, it's being connected to the "default" docker network. I submitted a pull request for it here that should fix it.
  
  To make it work in the meantime:
  
  cd into the Lemmy install directory and run docker compose down
  
  Edit docker-compose.yml in the same directory, and in the postfix section, put this just below the postfix: line:
  
  networks: - lemmyinternal - lemmyexternalproxy
  
  Run docker compose up -d
  
  The indentation of that code is very important. Your postfix section should look like this when it's done:
  
  That should connect the "postfix" container in to a docker network that can communicate with the "lemmy" and "lemmy" UI containers. There's another bug in the default config that doesn't assign a hostname to all the containers, but it doesn't always manifest all the time. You can fix that by making sure each service has a hostname assigned to it, like hostname: lemmy, hostname: lemmy-ui, hostname: postfix etc in the respective service's section of the service: section of the docker compose file.
  
  I get an error that the network ‘lemmyinternal’ doesn’t exist when making this change in docker-compose.yml - anything I’m missing?
  
  Make sure the networks section at the top of your docker compose file looks like this:
  
  Thanks! Somehow missed that in the original post - that worked but I am now seeing “email_not_sent” when trying to test forgot password, how can I get to the postfix log to see what the issue is?
  
  Make sure the postfix container is connected to the lemmyexternalproxy network.

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