Apparently my account was somehow set not to recieve emails. Support were ableto fix that.
So, now I was able to log in and start the process again. Unfortunately that sent me into a loop. When you click on the link in the confirmation email it just took me to a page to resend another confirmation email and so on… However, at least I could log in now so I decided to change my password instead. Had to do this do using the ‘forgot password’ link. Anyhow, changing the password seems to have cleared things up. Hope this help someone else.
Platform: Website Browser: Chrome Screenshots of what you are seeing (see attached) Description of problem
Step 1: Saw the email address iNat had was incorrect, so before I hit “send confirmation” I input my correct address. But as soon as I do that, the incorrect email address shows up again in the little input box.
Step 2: Hit “send confirmation” and received it in my correct address. Followed the steps in the email to “confirm your email address”.
Step 3: New tab opens, but the page never loads. Other pages load fine, and my internet connection is fine. Now I’m locked out of iNat and can’t get back in.
Step 4: create a new email address using the incorrect address iNat had. Inbox empty, and I’m still locked out, so I can’t resend the confirmation anyway.
In the UK, one user i know of, followed the procedure for confirmation of his email address BUT never received the email from iNaturalist with the confirmation link. Consequently, he is now locked out of iNaturalist and cannot try again. He is currently very disillusioned with iNat because of this and may influence other UK users if he cannot get back in to either iNat or the Forum.
Please, is there any way this can be resolved quickly to enable locked out users to get back into their accounts so the email confirmation procedure can be tried again ???
Thanks for the information. Does the colored banner below your email address flicker between red and yellow after you send the confirmation email from the pop-up? Some users have been reporting that.
EDIT: @zygy I suspect you were hitting an API v2 bug - are you testing API v2? If so, that should be fixed now. I’d be interested to know if you can send a confirmation email now without opting out of API v2 testing.
Nope, the password change did not work, still in the email loop, but I changed it from the profile page, where it says change password not the forgot password.
Dogged determination and just trying the same thing over and over again - as insane as that sounds - it finally worked. Problem seems to have been solved.
Our employer has a very trigger-happy spam filtering system that decided iNaturalist was not acceptable email, so the server was bouncing iNat email.
I resolved it by changing my email address to my personal one.
Two things occur to me:
iNaturalist’s main mail server may be misconfigured. Might want to check that SPF, DKIM & DMARC are all set up correctly as these are the most common reasons for a server bounce (as opposed to the message going to the junk folder).
This was a predictable situation. Was there a security issue so important that users needed to re-authenticate, and risk creating a mass lockout? If so, it hasn’t been disclosed.
As far as we can tell these records are set up correctly. If you can identify a problem, please let us know
There was no specific security issue, but not confirming email addresses makes it easier for spammers to sign up, and makes it impossible for us to contact everyone with an account when we need to, e.g. when new privacy laws require us to get yet another consent (specifically, in our case, the EU GDPR data transfer consent requirement). For the last, we can and do and will make these requests in the software for authenticated users, but there are situations where we need to contact you even if you don’t use your account, like complying with privacy laws, and email is the only way we have to do that.
It was a predictable situation, but we failed to predict it, so that’s on us, specifically on me. I’m sorry you and so many people have had trouble confirming email addresses. I didn’t realize how bad deliverability would be. We’ve made a number of changes since releasing this to address these issues, and we’re going to continue working on it.
I try logging in and get a message to check my email but no email arrives. It looks like this problem got fixed for some people, but I had a hard time initially creating my account and again when I next logged in.
