Grand Opening

 Andrew Boon

 Hello, My name is John Curtis. I have a website called Cyclemadness.net and have been a registered user of your software since 2014. 

 Over a year ago I talked to someone there about getting my Dolphin site along with the new UNA software as a sub dir on your server so I could work on it  and one day make UNA the main site.

  I started out with your cloud plan for $100 a month but being a free site I could not afford that price so I asked about the Pro Plan for $50 a month. At that time I THOUGHT" my sites were transferred to the pro plan correctly and paid my server bill every month on time. 

  After over a year of working on my UNA site and talking to members and others, everyone was very excited about this so called "GRAD OPENING". 

 About a week ago we opened up the new site, 25 or 30 people joined and present members were all very excited to see the new site. Well, come to find out something wasn't set up correctly on the server and the second I opened the new site for some  reason (at no fault of my own) my license was said to be "EXPIRED"!!! That should not have happend! Of coarse with an expired license none of the new joins could  verify thier accounts, post or do anything else on the site. They tell other people that are already members and everyone is so pissed off no one is in the site now. It's a ghost site. with no one in there. 

  Here it is almost a week after our  so called "GRAND OPENING" was a total disaster and we are still not getting notifications, You know how important notifications are to a social networking site. Plus I can't download power apps ect ect… Also as far as I know no one is working on tiring to correct this. 

 After spending a boat load of money and over a year of my time and others I have a dead site. I can't help feeling like no one really cares but myself. It's to bad that paying customers are treated like this. My question is to you is what can you do to make this right? 

John Curtis 

CycleMadness.net

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Replies (31)
    • Chris,

      I joined your site. I did not receive a email confirmation. I checked my junk mail and it was not there either. I resent the email confirmation and this is the message I received. See screenshot.

      • Yes Tim Burleigh. I tested the join prosess before opening the site and it was working fine. May I ask when you tried joining?

        • Within the past few hours. 

          • it's a shame. I am very sorry for your lost

            • An expired Pro license should not effect notifications, only updates. It might be your subscription to whatever service you are using for notifications. Leonid S can you please take a look? 

              • Did the Pro Plan include server fees? I was under the impression it only included Power Apps.

                • Hello John Curtis !

                  Did you find something new about your SMTP provider as we agreed? Or maybe reach the new one?

                  • Just as Mark notes - Pro plan expiry Is not disruptive. We know that all sorts of things can happen with billing and licensing, so we made sure to setup the system where if your Pro license is not active nothing changes on your site. The only thing that’ll happen is that our server won’t authorise download of paid apps updates via Studio. We have no control or access to clients SMTP settings or any other settings apart from updates authorisation that happens on our end via key/secret authentication based on oAuth.

                    Emails are sent by SMTP server - you can use included SMTP mailer app and send from the same server that your site is hosted on (UNA Cloud it your own) but this is generally going to send them all to spam folders, unless you diligently track all reports and communicate with spam tracker servers. Most active sites in the world, UNAbased or other types, use 3rd party mail sending services like Mandrill, AWS SNS, etc. They have special high-reputation servers that guarabtee 99% delivery and emails rarely route to spam. They charge for this service, because maintaining them is resource-intensive. Every time some Joe and Jill report your email as spam, spam trackers get alerted and handler of mail server has to handle the report or get banned. 

                    If your emails are not going through at all - spam folder or not, it means that either your own SMTP ain server is not configured properly or the 3rd party Smtp is not setup correctly.

                    Note, that even on UNA you only get a server and the site installation. We are not a mail-sending service and can’t guarantee delivery. Such service is typically charged for by volume, depends on nature of your emails, needs constant oversight and requires you to maintain integrity of your email opt-in settings. 

                    • Apart from that, the team is looking forward to helping you find what may be the problem. Leonid is handling this via support tickets. 

                      • I use gmails service and yes I checked it more than once. I also setup a new one to see if that helped but it didn't.

                        • There seems to be a couple of issues here and I think some have gotten confused.  On the Pro Plan one does their own hosting.  However, if John was paying the bill each month for the plan then he should not have seen expired license.  So Boonex needs to address that part of the issue.

                          • "Note, that even on UNA you only get a server and the site installation. We are not a mail-sending service"

                            What does this mean?  I would assume at the prices I am seeing for Boonex hosting it will come with PostFix and Dovecot installed.  Does UNA not send out emails in batches like Dolphin did?

                            • But Postfix needs to relay mails to a smtp service specialized in this task with a good reputation, with tracking options etc ... It means they do not do that.

                              • There seems to be a couple of issues here and I think some have gotten confused.  On the Pro Plan one does their own hosting.  However, if John was paying the bill each month for the plan then he should not have seen expired license.  So Boonex needs to address that part of the issue.

                                Definitely. We are looking into the license issue. I just wanted to point out that license is not connected to with SMTP/mailing issues at all. 

                                • "Note, that even on UNA you only get a server and the site installation. We are not a mail-sending service"

                                  What does this mean?  I would assume at the prices I am seeing for Boonex hosting it will come with PostFix and Dovecot installed.  Does UNA not send out emails in batches like Dolphin did?

                                  UNA does send out emails same as Dolphin. As Baloo correctly noted - apart from sending emails you need a service that maintains high deliverability. It’s a pricey service to provision and it always depends on volume. For example Mandrill will charge $20 for 25,000 emails block. Amazon is cheaper, etc. 

                                  I believe it would be the same for dedicated servers that you provide? If someone gets a $100 server from you and starts sending tens of thousands of emails expecting them all go into main inboxes, then youd have to send them to Mandrill/Sendgid/Amazon, right?

                                  • I understand the smtp issues are my problem. But... Just now I was testing the smtp mailer on the site. I sent a test mail in my smtp test mailer and as I expected it failed. I turned off the smtp, saved and went back and sent a test mail and it was successful.  I went back to the smtp settings and turned it back on sent another test mail and that was successful. Now that my inbox was flooded it seems to be working again

                                    . I have been using the very same email server for over a year with zero problems till a very short time ago. That's why I'm saying that I don't think it's a problem with my smtp server. Plus it stopped working just when the new site was changed over to the main site.

                                    • I have gone through this process three times and am still able to confirm my email address on your site. I am getting emails now. They’re going to my junk mail. But I am getting the error message whenever I click the link to confirm email. See screenshots.

                                      • Thank you Tim Burleigh You said...

                                        "I have gone through this process three times and am still able to confirm my email address on your site"

                                        Are you saying that you COULD confirm your email address?

                                          I just got the mailer working but what does your reply mean? Would this be a problem with the smtp server or something in the site? If I get a sudden flood of email from the site, Doesn't that mean that the messages were never sent? They seemed to be waiting on the site waiting to be sent.

                                        • I tried to confirm my email address but as soon as I click the link to confirm I get a message on your website that there is an error. The email address is never confirmed. I just thought you might want to be aware of this because others may be having the same problem. At this point I can’t access anything on your site. That’s OK with me but it will be a problem if others are having the same issue.

                                          • Sorry, I just noticed it I should’ve said I am unable to confirm my email address.

                                            • Thank you very much Tim Burleigh  for looking into this. It's a big help tiring to run down the problem.

                                              • Let me know if you want me to try again later. When you’re ready I will do it.

                                                • Thanks again. I will take you up on that.

                                                  • Hi John - I've just joined your site and confirmed my email address with no issue, so can we conclude that with the SMTP mail service now functioning correctly that this issues is resolved?

                                                    • Mark Purser - I joined and received/confirmed my email as well without issue now too. Just a FYI

                                                      • Yes I now have MailJet

                                                        • Me too! Works great 

                                                          • yes it does. and so far NOTHING has gone into spam. It's great.

                                                            • Yes, same here.

                                                              • I just stumbled across this post because I was getting errors using the SMTP server.  When I blanked out the entire "settings" page of SMTP Mailer, saved, and then tested, I received the test email like John Curtis.  I am waiting to see if I get any email notifications since I have all of those enabled.

                                                                • Hello mrochek . If you continue to have proplems with you SMTP Mailer you might look into MailJet. It works much better that the default mailer.

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