Difficult forum onboarding with iCloud Hide My Email, Cloudflare, and custom domains

meta
1

FYI: The onboarding for this forum was inordinately difficult and took about 45 minutes.

It seems there's something about the confirmation email configuration that is incompatible with the iCloud+ Hide My Email feature. Emails come through apparently without any sender email address, causing them to encounter an error in Cloudflare.

This affects both the Discourse and Zulip confirmation emails.

As a separate bug, trying to switch to a different email address during the confirmation process after the first one failed also didn't work: it produced an error saying "An error occurred: You are not permitted to view the requested resource."

I ended up with two separate accounts as a result, one of them not properly activated.

Even after making my account, I still can't change my email because it still requires a non-receivable confirmation email.

Moreover, this struggle was completely unnecessary, as I have zero need for receiving email notifications from this forum anyway!

Please make the email field optional.

Thanks.

1744×1452 206 KB

2

Where is the "bug"?
Helps to keep spammers out.

Suggest abandon the user name (which you did), and try again without the "hiding" stuff.

Admin: please keep the email mandatory.

3 Likes
3

I doubt that blocking iCloud HideMyEmail would have a significant effect on spammers. If you can acquire a relay address, it means you already have a "real" icloud email, too.

I've opened a thread on Discourse Meta to ask for help with deliverability.

4 Likes
4

No.

He was not getting verify emails due to iCloud.

Spammers would/may not use a real email address, and so are blocked from getting site access.

Another forum I frequent has no verification during sign-up. At least twice a month (some times week), new members with one advertising post must disabled and the post deleted. A lot of extra admin work.

Cheers,

1 Like
5

Is Dir1 the user with issues or dummy account or?

I saw Michael's post at Meta and thought I would try to help. I signed up with a gmail address. The Confirmation email arrived in my inbox within a few moments, clicked the link, and was posting this within a minute or two.

Try not using the email hiding stuff with a test account and different email address. Once you see this is not a forum issue the admin could change your addy on the original account, if you ask them nicely. :slight_smile:

From where I site there is no bug if you used the same iCloud+ Hide My Email feature.

No forum admin worth there salt would try to do a forum without email or some ability to verify users.

If you are convinced this forum has a bug try signing up at https://meta.discourse.org/ and see how it works there.

Best of luck.

6

I created this account using a Hide My Email address, and it works fine.

Can you describe the rest of your setup? Are you using a custom domain name? How is Cloudflare involved?

2 Likes
7

Hi, thanks all for replies.

For anyone who's not familiar with Hide My Email, it's an email alias service if you have a paid Apple iCloud+ account, where you get a separate email for each site you sign up for and if one gets hacked, you can delete the compromised email.

I have webmail account that all my email forwards to.

My Apple ID is an email address at my domain name, which is registered through Cloudflare.

So, the Hide My Email address forwards to my Apple ID address, which is at my domain name. Cloudflare then re-forwards the mail to my Apple ID address to my webmail.

Usually it works fine, but something here made the emails show up blank (with no sender or other metadata) in Cloudflare's email panel, and I couldn't see the email content - just that it tried to process them and the "Error" note in the screenshot.

So there's something going on with how the confirmation emails are interacting with iCloud that prevents them being properly delivered.

No forum admin worth there salt would try to do a forum without email or some ability to verify users.

IDK, I'm not a forum admin. I'm just used to tech projects having a prominent IRC where you can just hop on a web chat link and you're talking, no fuss or email registration needed. And I mean legit projects - Debian, Gentoo, etc.

Having to sign up for a forum, have my (paid, Apple-owned, common!) anti-email-spam tool not work, and then have the registration form completely error out and lose my progress when I tried to switch to a different email address felt really high-friction by comparison, so I thought I should report the issues I ran into.

I hope these details are helpful, thanks again for the replies.

3 Likes
8

I see in that thread they have identified the email delivery as an iCloud problem. Appreciate the investigation!

Addendum: A little more detail on the "You are not permitted to view the requested resource." JS popup: it was a JS modal popup with a blue button that showed up when trying to change away from the Hide My Email address that had failed to confirm; it needed a page refresh to continue. The same interaction flow did succeed on a second attempt.

9

For anyone wondering about this: do not use Hide My Email with a custom domain name.

  • If you use it with a normal @icloud.com address, Discourse works. I tried it. This flow is obviously better-tested than the custom domain flow.

  • Whatever bug kicked in here, it not only broke delivery, it also leaked the underlying email address :person_facepalming:

7 Likes