Introduce macro or auto-response for non-receipt of security emails (Gmail)

Request for comments

Need

There appears to be an increased number of users seemingly not receiving or unable to locate certain security emails from GitLab, e.g. account confirmation and verification emails. This appears to mostly affect GMail/Google Workspaces email accounts.

Whilst unsubstantiated it seems Google may have tightened filtering rules leading to emails from GitLab not being completely delivered despite seeing a successful delivery (250) in Mailgun logs.

This is ultimately leading to an increased number of tickets, mostly free users.

Approach

As this is a common and increasing issue I propose either:

  • A macro to send a standard response with advice for Google email e.g.

Hi,

Thank you for contacting GitLab support in connection with the non-delivery of account verification emails from GitLab.

As you are using Google Workspaces/Gmail as your email provider we would recommend you add GitLab's email domain and delivery provider's IP addresses to Google's allowlist, see Allowlists, denylists and approved senders. You can find details of our domain and IP addresses here: https://docs.gitlab.com/user/gitlab_com/#email

In the meantime, should you wish to troubleshoot the issue further with Google, please find below details of the last successful delivery to them for the verification email:

Salient sections of Mailgun log here

As there is no action that can be taken from our side we'll go ahead and mark this ticket as solved. We hope that you are able to address your email issues with Google soon. If the issue persists then do let us know by way of reply and we can check further.

Regards,

  • An auto-response with closure and similar text, the user can reply if the problem persists. Perhaps an auto-responder can check the delivery status also to avoid the need to check in Mailgun manually?

Benefit

  • Shorter ticket handling time being able to use the macro
  • If using auto-response then less clutter in the queue and user obtains the likely solution quicker

Competition / Alternatives

Do nothing. We will continue to craft our own responses to users as and when we get to the tickets and take longer to provide a response for what appears to be a common solution.

Also for consideration, is this limited to Gmail? While it appears to be the most common we have seen similar with Proton Mail, so should we make the response more generic?

Edited by Chris Stone