I just recently registered for this forum, but was unable to successfully activate my account because I never received the activation email.

I emailed Mike Chin about the problem and after working together for several days we gave up and he was nice enough to manually activate my account.

However, we would both like to know the ultimate cause of the problem. So he asked me to add this post and ask if any other forum members had similar problems or have any ideas what might be wrong.

Here's the scenario:

- I completed the registration page and got the message that an activation email had been sent
- My ISP is Comcast
- To eliminate my computer/Outlook as the source of the problem, I only used Comcast's webmail interface to check for the activation email
- I disabled all server-side SPAM filtering in the Comcast mailbox preferences
- And still the activation email was never delivered to my mailbox

I should also add that I've registered with many phpBB forums in the past that use the exact same procedure and have never had a problem. Also, I was able to receive email from Mike without any problem. Mike's email and the activation email both come from this domain. Not sure if they both use the same SMTP server, though.

So we don't know if the problem is with phpBB, some SMTP server down the line, or with Comcast.

Anyone else have similar problems or have any ideas?

This seems to happen periodically. Not regularly but often enough that I wonder what's the real culprit or whether it is a convergence of bad factors -- the perfect storm type of thing...

Over the years I've been contacted by at least a dozen people that have had this same sort of issue, but in all but one or two of the cases, it was due to bouncing emails. All were were successfully resolved, except for a few that I was never able to get in contact with (due to their bouncing emails).

Hmmm... I have notification enabled, but I'm still not getting any emails.

The email address in my profile is definitely correct and I'm able to get email from Mike no problem. What the heck is going on?

I've temporarily enabled "Always show my e-mail address" if someone would like to shoot me a test email.

Mike - do you have access to the SMTP logs? Or is there some other way to track down what's happening?

Greetings & welcome to SPCR,

My ISP, Verizon, used to bounce/block all emails from automated systems -- I used to have to have a Yahoo account to get registered/activated, and then change the email after it got started...