We sometimes get emails from people who say they’ve requested a password reset email be sent to them from this page (heads-up, you can’t load it if you’re logged in to iNat) but never receive an email. They’ll tell me which email address they’re entering, and I can confirm it’s linked to an actual account. When I look at our email service, I see that no email was ever generated, so either a) there’s a bug the code somewhere or b) people are entering the wrong thing, like their username, or making a mistake when writing their email address.
Anyway, it’s often hard to get feedback about this so I’m curious if anyone here has had a similar experience, as in you never received an email at all (it wasn’t diverted to your spam folder or anything). Thanks!
Not me, but I once saw similar behaviour on another site. People were using autocomplete to fill in the email field, but it was appending a space to the end of it. They couldn’t see it, obviously, but the site took that character as part of the address, and so couldn’t match it to the actual address and took it as an invalid email. Could it be the same thing?
Does the code reject their request if the email doesn’t appear in the database? Often when I request a password reset for other services, it will tell me immediately if I enter the wrong email.
After doing some tinkering I realized that I could submit anything, eg “tiwane” and I’d get the banner saying if that email address was in the database iNat would send you an email. So I suspect at least some people were submitting their username or actual name by accident and not knowing it. Now it won’t let you submit anything unless you enter something formatted as an email address, hopefully that will fix the issue.