Hi all,
Is it possible to get an e-mail when someone replies to your comment on iNaturalist? All the notifications seem to be enabled in my settings, however I never get any e-mails (not even to my spam folder) so it can take me days before I notice someone has replied to me. I’ve attached a screenshot of my notification settings and the e-mail address listed on my profile is correct, so I’m not sure what else to do to get the e-mails coming in.
It looks like you should be getting emails when someone comments on an observation you follow (you can’t “reply” to specific comments on iNat). Are you sure you are checking the right email?
Yes I get other e-mails from iNaturalist to that address, just not any of those ticked notifications. If I visit the web page and click on the notifications icon then I see all the new ones since my last visit showing as unread, but none of them ever come in as e-mails.
And none of those emails that you get have subjects like “[iNaturalist] New updates 2025-12-28”? Those emails are where I get my daily activity updates
Looking at our email logs, these daily update emails are being blocked by your email provider. We’re sending them, though. Weirdly, we’re not seeing a reason for the block/bounce, here’s what I see:
Unable to parse reason from bounce report
I think you’ll have to ask your email provider about this. The last email of ours that was blocked had the subject of “[iNaturalist Australia] New updates 2025-12-25” and came from do-not-reply-inaturalist@ala.org.au
Interesting, many thanks for looking into it. I run my own e-mail server so I am my own provider, but I’m not seeing any e-mails from iNaturalist in the folder messages go to when the server rejects them. I did actually get an e-mail on 2025-12-29 but that’s the only one I’ve gotten since 2025-10-12.
Looking in the logs for the 2025-12-25 e-mail you mention, I see an attempt to receive a message from iNaturalist which fails with the error “message has lines too long for transport”.
The SMTP standard in RFC 2822 section 2.1.1 says:
There are two limits that this standard places on the number of characters in a line. Each line of characters MUST be no more than 998 characters, and SHOULD be no more than 78 characters, excluding the CRLF.
The 998 character limit is due to limitations in many implementations which send, receive, or store Internet Message Format messages that simply cannot handle more than 998 characters on a line. Receiving implementations would do well to handle an arbitrarily large number of characters in a line for robustness sake. However, there are so many implementations which (in compliance with the transport requirements of [RFC2821]) do not accept messages containing more than 1000 character including the CR and LF per line, it is important for implementations not to create such messages.
It looks like the iNaturalist system is generating non-compliant e-mails, and this is why they are getting lost, as the receiving system cannot handle the long lines.
Is this something you can look at fixing? A number of e-mail systems drop messages with long lines as they are often used in attempts to compromise e-mail servers, so it’s probably a good idea to wrap the underlying e-mail text to 78 characters as the standard recommends, to avoid triggering these server-side protections.
