Email verification not being sent

Bug reports
1

Hello,

I teach an "Intro to Comp Sci" course. I had about 75 students sign up for Snap! accounts over the last two days. I have a small handful of students who have not received an email to verify their Snap! account. I know of at least 3 students that have self-reported this to me, and there are likely a few more shy ones.

Information:
My students use an incognito window in Google Chrome to access the Snap! website
Students use their school Google account as their email.
We have checked all Spam and other folders for the email.

Additional information:
This happened last year, only to one or two of my 70 students.

My questions:

  1. Will their account actually expire? Or can they just keep using it without verifying their email?
  2. If it will expire, what should they do? Just create another account with the same email? Is that allowed? It would be a bummer to have them begin their first project, only to have their account disappear.

My next steps:

  1. Sit down with the student and search their Google email. I just recently had the problem of an email being searchable, and labeled as being in my inbox, but not actually showing up in my inbox.
  2. Verify (for the 2nd time) at the student didn't mistype their email address.
  3. Click on the option (I think there is one) to have Snap! send another verification email (this didn't solve the problem last year).
2

If they're using the account it won't be deleted. So far we haven't had the volume of account creation that we can't keep up with problems manually, although I may have a different story a month from now when the new school year has started everywhere.

You might check with your school IT wizard to ensure that snap.berkeley.edu and cloud.snap.berkeley.edu are whitelisted for incoming mail.

And yes, there's an option in the cloud menu while not logged in to ask for a resent validation email.

P.S. When we really get serious about validation, we might disable an un-validated account, but we certainly won't delete an account without a human being looking at it.

3

I’ll check our logs —- but are some emails getting through and not all? That’s a bit different than all emails being blocked. I would definitely still recommend checking in with your IT staff.

If students save a project then their accounts become verified and they don’t need to worry.

4

Awesome, thank you for the answers (no acc deletion, and add to whitelist).

My school IT guy added those two domains then asked:
"Do you know if there is a contact that I can get the mailing IP range from so I can add that?"

Cheers,
Brendan

P.S. I am reading the book "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution", and as my students are starting Snap! the book was talking about a young Brian Harvey.

5

Indeed. Hard to remember being that age -- which felt pretty grown up to me, at the time, years after my undergraduate days.

6

Right now we don’t have a specific IP range that sends emails but I will take a look and see what further details I can provide.

We are aware that locking that down will be helpful to schools but it costs a bit of extra money we cannot yet support.

7

So my student did get booted from his account.

His login: 100025161

When he tried to login he got a pop-up reading:
"Login Failed"
"Could not login: This user has not been validated within the first 3 days after its creation. Please use the cloud menu to ask for a new validation link."

... but we can't login, so we can't see the cloud menu ...

8

I'm sorry this happened; it's a big screwup and must be really painful for you and the student. We'll definitely fix it for next time.

Yes, you can; it's a different menu when not logged in, but it's the one you want, because that's where the resend-verify-link menu item is.