[Fixed] No longer receiving daily email with due reminders (reminders email)

[stocky2605 386]

Hi all, I‘m used to see an email every morning in my inbox showing me notes (reminders) due today.

Unfortunately no longer. I‘ve switched that setting on my Mac on / off /on - doesn‘t fix, I did it also using a web browser, didn‘t fix. Of course, I checked my Spam.

No reminders email anymore.

Any hint?

[stocky2605 386]

Ticket# 3183700

 

[DTLow 5,698]

17 hours ago, stocky2605 said:

No reminders email anymore.

I tested overnight and received my reminder email

[Scott T. 656]

@stocky2605 Did you get your reminder email today? We made a change last night that might have fixed it, so wanted to check if your issue was related or not.

[stocky2605 386]

On 10/21/2020 at 5:46 PM, Scott T. said:

@stocky2605 Did you get your reminder email today? We made a change last night that might have fixed it, so wanted to check if your issue was related or not.

@Scott T.sorry for being late - I come back to you tomorrow, there are three reminders waiting for me then 🙂

Update: Feedback from Support team:

The product team will assess the issue and work on prioritizing this in a future release, but I do not currently have an estimated time on when it will be addressed.

Issue depends to a certain release?? Sounds a bit strange to me.

Update 2: another Feedback from Support team (thanks for quick response!)

You're right. The issue is not isolated to a specific app version, but rather an issue with the current version of our backend code that handles reminder email deliveries.

[stocky2605 386]

On 10/21/2020 at 5:46 PM, Scott T. said:

@stocky2605 Did you get your reminder email today? We made a change last night that might have fixed it, so wanted to check if your issue was related or not.

@Scott T.Hi, unfortunately no, I still do not receive any reminder email. I also created new reminders - existing ones, new ones, nothing happens to receiving those reminder emails.

[Scott T. 656]

@stocky2605Thanks for confirming. I'm sorry the change we made didn't help. I was hopeful, though not too certain given my understanding of what we fixed. We have people investigating the issue, but I don't believe we have clear indications of what the problem is. If you can provide any information that might be helpful, that would be appreciated. Details like: Did you make any changes to your account recently? What version(s) (and what OS) of the client do you use to set/update your reminders?

Thanks. We've been trying to address this issue for some time, but the reports we get are very infrequent, so we haven't had enough info to go on.

[PSO 1]

I stopped receiving reminder emails some time ago, but only noticed it recently.  For example, I have 7 reminders that were set for today but received no email notifications.  Using MAC 10.15.7, iPhone and iPad.

 

[stocky2605 386]

@Scott T.Hi, after one week of testing still no reminder email for me.

• I've created reminders on all my platforms (iOS, MacOS) using different versions of Evernote.app (Mac: 10.2.4, 10.1.7, 7.14 iOS: 8.24.6, 10.0.7, 10.1)
• I've changed my email adress
• I've changed the time zone

incl. changing back to previous email adress and time zone and re-creating new notes with new reminders one or two days in the future.

Nothing happened. This premium feature is gone for me.

[CalS 5,042]

8 hours ago, stocky2605 said:

after one week of testing still no reminder email for me.

I'm still getting the reminder emails.  Haven't done anything in particular. Win 6.25.

[Scott T. 656]

As @CalSshows, it's not an issue that impacts everybody. @stocky2605, I'll pass on this thread to the main ticket tracking the issue. We'll see if we can pull something from our backend to help narrow down what is going on. The more people who report the issue here, the easier it will be to find commonality. We definitely want to fix the problem for all of you.

[stocky2605 386]

On 11/3/2020 at 12:02 AM, Scott T. said:

As @CalSshows, it's not an issue that impacts everybody. @stocky2605, I'll pass on this thread to the main ticket tracking the issue. We'll see if we can pull something from our backend to help narrow down what is going on. The more people who report the issue here, the easier it will be to find commonality. We definitely want to fix the problem for all of you.

@Scott T.Hi, just a short reminder I'm still not getting any due reminder emails. Is there anything I can do from my side to restart that feature? (I already changed my email adress back and forth without any effect)

[CalS 5,042]

8 hours ago, stocky2605 said:

@Scott T.Hi, just a short reminder I'm still not getting any due reminder emails. Is there anything I can do from my side to restart that feature? (I already changed my email adress back and forth without any effect)

Mine have stopped as well since my post above.  

[clepatb 0]

I just reported this very issue to tech support Ticket# 3270430. I rely on this feature for paying bills and I've missed a couple recently because of no reminder. I heavily depend on this feature. I have made no changes except for updating Evernote. I am currently on v 10.8.5 for windows but I believe the problem started before this particular update. There have been several updates recently. I'm going to open a new thread with this information, too.

[Wolfgang.DE 1]

just found the support and discussion forum - did try to contact support on other ways with no success 😞

 

Regards this issue I can tell the same - no email reminders anymore since in meantime a long time.
And nothing configurable on note or in main configuration does help to fix. Where have this important feature gone?

@Scott T. just for your notice - found your staff comment from Nov. 3rd 2020.

I've posted this issue here four month ago:

and still have no feedback there.

[PinkElephant 5,582]

As a Basic user you are not eligible for technical support. This is one of the limitations of the free plan (real people cost real money …). It is the forum, or you can upgrade to Premium for a month if you urgently need support access.

No idea about the e-mail for reminders - maybe search the forum. I remember there have been threads about it.

[Scott T. 656]

@Wolfgang.DE Thanks for the ping on this. It's not in my area, but I decided to take a deep dive into the issue. I believe I've identified the problem. Without getting into too much details, the process that sends out reminder emails for users is encountering invalid reminder data for a note and is aborting processing to avoid impacting the service. Our system is built such that users are grouped across many servers. Each server runs one of these processes. So when the email sending process aborts, it will not send any further emails for the group of users on the specific server. This will continue until that invalid reminder data is cleaned up. I'm assuming this is coming from a client that has a bug around this, but we'll have to investigate that further. It could just as easily be coming from a 3rd party client vs. our own clients.

In the meantime, I'm assigning our ticket for this over to a team to implement a fix on the server to clean up the data when it encounters it such that we can continue to send out the reminder emails. As noted, since we split users across many hundreds of servers, this will only impact the subset of users who are on a server that also has an invalid note on it. Furthermore, those notes may get cleaned up automatically by an update from another client, so there's also variability there.

I can't promise a specific release date for this, but know that I'm making sure we get somebody to work on this now that we know what is going on. 

[Wolfgang.DE 1]

On 4/29/2021 at 8:25 PM, Scott T. said:

@Wolfgang.DE Thanks for the ping on this. It's not in my area, but I decided to take a deep dive into the issue. I believe I've identified the problem. Without getting into too much details, the process that sends out reminder emails for users is encountering invalid reminder data for a note and is aborting processing to avoid impacting the service. Our system is built such that users are grouped across many servers. Each server runs one of these processes. So when the email sending process aborts, it will not send any further emails for the group of users on the specific server. This will continue until that invalid reminder data is cleaned up. I'm assuming this is coming from a client that has a bug around this, but we'll have to investigate that further. It could just as easily be coming from a 3rd party client vs. our own clients.

In the meantime, I'm assigning our ticket for this over to a team to implement a fix on the server to clean up the data when it encounters it such that we can continue to send out the reminder emails. As noted, since we split users across many hundreds of servers, this will only impact the subset of users who are on a server that also has an invalid note on it. Furthermore, those notes may get cleaned up automatically by an update from another client, so there's also variability there.

I can't promise a specific release date for this, but know that I'm making sure we get somebody to work on this now that we know what is going on. 

Thanks for your valueable feedback and deep dive efforts. As I understand from former comments in junction to your analysis, it's a problem which does not rely on the account status - that means also paying users are affected, if these users are in the same group as the user with the corrupted note. I'm right?

Does "reminder data" relate to content or is this special meta data for organizing the reminders?
Is it possible for a user to reset that invalid data in any way, e.g. by deleting the note reminder?
Did you with your deep dive identify that note (and maybe the account), that you can inform him to do so?

It's in the meantime more than five month, the reminding feature is not working any more.

In the longer term I think "invalid reminder data" should at a maxixum influence the user account, who has this corrupted data inside and not a bigger subgroup of users. Just my opinion.

Thanks at all for your analysis.

Regards
Wolfgang

 

 

[Wolfgang.DE 1]

On 4/29/2021 at 12:55 PM, PinkElephant said:

As a Basic user you are not eligible for technical support. This is one of the limitations of the free plan (real people cost real money …). It is the forum, or you can upgrade to Premium for a month if you urgently need support access.

No idea about the e-mail for reminders - maybe search the forum. I remember there have been threads about it.

Knowing that I'm basic member I can accept to have no direct technical support. Being aware I used the forum (see

) but also without any reactions there. Round about one week ago - still having this issue - I by accident found this elder thread than mine - from paying members - also with a long silence.
In the meantime Scott T. generously took over (again)....hopefully my last ping will no flow into a solution, soon.

Regards
Wolfgang

[Scott T. 656]

On 5/2/2021 at 8:14 AM, Wolfgang.DE said:

that means also paying users are affected, if these users are in the same group as the user with the corrupted note. I'm right?

Yes, it will impact any account that lives on the same server as the problem note.

On 5/2/2021 at 8:14 AM, Wolfgang.DE said:

Does "reminder data" relate to content or is this special meta data for organizing the reminders?

The reminder metadata lives with the note, but when a reminder is set, we separately create an entry in a database that the asynchronous process reads and sends emails from. The processing of that data goes back and reads the metadata of the note itself. That's the data that is "invalid", causing the process to halt.

On 5/2/2021 at 8:14 AM, Wolfgang.DE said:

Is it possible for a user to reset that invalid data in any way, e.g. by deleting the note reminder?
Did you with your deep dive identify that note (and maybe the account), that you can inform him to do so?

Nothing here that is user actionable. We can temporarily fix the data by altering the note metadata from our side. But the right fix would be adding code that auto-corrects the invalid data when it encounters it.

As I noted, it's possible this is coming from a 3rd party client too, and not necessarily one of our own clients. So the right fix is "self-healing" on the server, though we'd still like to add logging to track down where the invalid data is coming from. 

I made sure to hand off the ticket to another developer (in the group where the fix should lie) and they will be working on it very soon. I'll keep an eye on it so it doesn't sit for another 6-12 months :-O. 

[Owala 1]

During the last couple of days I have also recognised something was wrong that I was missing my morning reminder emails for quite some time. 

Following the threads about the subject it would maybe a good idea to slow down on the constant updates but getting old problems fixed first and give us the email reminders back. 

[Antiquarian 0]

I've recently been impacted by the failure of email reminders and, looking at this thread, I have no confidence in an early solution (it has clearly been going on for nearly a year, but in an arbitrary fashion, affecting only part of the user base at a time). It is now 4 months since the Evernote staff guy seems to have identified the cause of the problem, and allocated someone to fix it, yet it is still happening. Very poor service (I'm a paying customer but received only sympathetic noises from Evernote support: "it's a known issue, with no estimate of a fix" - I'm sure that kind of 'support' is thoroughly worth my subscription🙄). As someone else has said, let's forget about constant updates and get the old useful stuff working, shall we?

[PinkElephant 5,582]

What do you expect from a support clerk who has nothing than "we are working on it" from the devs ?

Making comforting noises while confirming that it is still not fixed. Maybe it is back in a few days, try again.

Can't do it myself, my reminders are working. Yes, I know this is purely accidental, because if it happens to one server, it pulls down all users hosted on this machine.

[stocky2605 386]

Ha, today I received an email with reminders due today - after one year the feature seems to be back, finally - my first thought was „uups, whats wrong here?“ 🙂

 

[Owala 1]

Same here but closer to the time. Meeting was yesterday, email came a day late. But something seems to happen. 

Maybe I can save on todoist, which I used to replace missing evernote reminders. 

[PinkElephant 5,582]

If you read through the thread, you get an understanding of what may be at work. Probably they are monitoring the mail servers better now, shortening the lag if one is taken down.

You could ask support to take a look.

[CalS 5,042]

3 hours ago, stocky2605 said:

Ha, today I received an email with reminders due today - after one year the feature seems to be back, finally - my first thought was „uups, whats wrong here?“ 🙂

 

Ditto.  Surprised me as well. 

[Wolfgang.DE 1]

Since round about one month I'm again getting notifications - which helps. Hopefully this will not go down again.

 

But what's not working with these current notifications - the links to the message (https://www.evernote.com/redirect?_h=<destination address>) can not be resolved anymore. Browser finally says "Page not found" - is this known by Evernote Customer Support Team?

[stocky2605 386]

1 hour ago, Wolfgang.DE said:

But what's not working with these current notifications - the links to the message (https://www.evernote.com/redirect?_h=<destination address>) can not be resolved anymore. Browser finally says "Page not found" - is this known by Evernote Customer Support Team?

clicking on the link is working here - even on iOS, I was just re-directed to the Evernote.app and it showed the correct note.

[CalS 5,042]

4 hours ago, stocky2605 said:

clicking on the link is working here - even on iOS, I was just re-directed to the Evernote.app and it showed the correct note.

Sad news here, on my iPhone clicking the link in the mail sent me to a browser to sign into EN.  Signed in and from that point on each time I click a link I have to press the allow to open in EN button from the browser.  Pretty much useless as it is a PITA.  🤷‍♂️   Sigh.

[Scott T. 656]

Came here to ask everybody to check if they were getting the emails now. Glad to hear people are.

We finally pushed out a fix yesterday. I'm sorry it took longer than expected. 

@CalS I will ask about the link. It sounds like the association of the Evernote links to the app is not sticking. I assume you are on the latest iOS version?

[CalS 5,042]

3 minutes ago, Scott T. said:

Came here to ask everybody to check if they were getting the emails now. Glad to hear people are.

We finally pushed out a fix yesterday. I'm sorry it took longer than expected. 

@CalS I will ask about the link. It sounds like the association of the Evernote links to the app is not sticking. I assume you are on the latest iOS version?

14.8.  Haven't updated to 15 as yet.

[PinkElephant 5,582]

Probably anybody who knows how major updates are pushed out nowadays usually waits for the X.1 release.

Greetings from another 14.8er 😉

[Scott T. 656]

@CalS Are you able to send me a sample link from your reminders email? I want to validate if it is of the format 

evernote://

or

en://

Or perhaps it is getting wrapped by our email sending engine (links.comms.evernote.com). If that's the case, please see if you can click through and get the URL it redirects to after being processed by the link wrapping endpoint.

Also, are you on the latest Evernote app version? I believe it should be 10.18.x

So are you saying that you get prompted by iOS to always open links in the Evernote app, but that isn't persisting? If that's the case, are you opening those links from within a specific mail app, such as the GMail app? If you are and it's opening a web page within that app, you might try launching that app into Safari first and then telling it to always open. I saw a case (albeit in Android) where it didn't persist when I said to always open from within the GMail app, but worked when I forced the URL to open in the base Chrome app and selected always open.

I'll see if I can reproduce this locally or otherwise get a member of the team that worked on the fix to take a look. 

[CalS 5,042]

33 minutes ago, Scott T. said:

@CalS Are you able to send me a sample link from your reminders email? I want to validate if it is of the format 

evernote://

or

en://

Or perhaps it is getting wrapped by our email sending engine (links.comms.evernote.com). If that's the case, please see if you can click through and get the URL it redirects to after being processed by the link wrapping endpoint.

Also, are you on the latest Evernote app version? I believe it should be 10.18.x

So are you saying that you get prompted by iOS to always open links in the Evernote app, but that isn't persisting? If that's the case, are you opening those links from within a specific mail app, such as the GMail app? If you are and it's opening a web page within that app, you might try launching that app into Safari first and then telling it to always open. I saw a case (albeit in Android) where it didn't persist when I said to always open from within the GMail app, but worked when I forced the URL to open in the base Chrome app and selected always open.

I'll see if I can reproduce this locally or otherwise get a member of the team that worked on the fix to take a look. 

I am still on legacy which may be the issue I suppose.  Link starts out https://links.notifications.evernote.com/u/click?_t=84b and a bunch more, probably 6 or 7 times as many characters in four wrapped lines. 

Yes on IOS whenever I press the link in the email I am prompted to open in the app.  On Windows I am presented with Continue with desktop app but nothing happens when clicking on that option.

Understand no support if this is a legacy thing.  Fortunately for me this is not that important.  I have an email reminder via FollowUpThen and a saved search for Today which accomplishes the same thing.  Weird though that a link works in new but not old.  Thanks.

[Scott T. 656]

1 hour ago, CalS said:

Weird though that a link works in new but not old.  Thanks.

So we explicitly changed from evernote:// links to en:// because legacy registered the former URL prefix. In order to make sure links opened in newer clients, we had them (10.x) register to use en://. So links in emails should all now use the en:// URL format causing them to be opened in 10.X and not legacy.

This may be the cause of the behavior you are seeing. Though I haven't explicitly checked the reminder emails code to confirm.

[Wolfgang.DE 1]

On 10/8/2021 at 8:24 PM, CalS said:

I am still on legacy which may be the issue I suppose.  Link starts out https://links.notifications.evernote.com/u/click?_t=84b and a bunch more, probably 6 or 7 times as many characters in four wrapped lines. 

Yes on IOS whenever I press the link in the email I am prompted to open in the app.  On Windows I am presented with Continue with desktop app but nothing happens when clicking on that option.

Understand no support if this is a legacy thing.  Fortunately for me this is not that important.  I have an email reminder via FollowUpThen and a saved search for Today which accomplishes the same thing.  Weird though that a link works in new but not old.  Thanks.

I'm on Windows - the Evernote App (for Windows) is installed and I guess uptodate, but not running. The browser (Firefox) is uptodate.
Wenn clicking the above mentioned link (same format, but I guess/hoep different content, i.e. pointing to a note of mine), its from browser side changed to "https://www.evernote.com/redirect?_h=https://www.evernote.com/shard/<more data containing also forward slashed>" and no request to open the installed windows app. Reloading the pages gives then a different behaviour - showing the "continue with" Screen. The first option (i.e switching to the App) does not react, but the second option (i.e. continuing in the web browser) then works.

In past times that worked all very well and I do not see, why this is a legacy problem not under support.

[Wolfgang.DE 1]

On 10/8/2021 at 10:15 PM, Scott T. said:

So we explicitly changed from evernote:// links to en:// because legacy registered the former URL prefix. In order to make sure links opened in newer clients, we had them (10.x) register to use en://. So links in emails should all now use the en:// URL format causing them to be opened in 10.X and not legacy.

This may be the cause of the behavior you are seeing. Though I haven't explicitly checked the reminder emails code to confirm.

Could you make it smoothly working again, please?