I thought people would quickly figure out on their own from the new email address what happened, but maybe it's not as clear as I thought. Maybe later I'll put a big red notice about it on the Account Settings page if you've been affected, especially if more people keep coming to Meta and asking about it.
So what happens if an existing email address suppose "
testmail123@gmail.com" gets disable or ban for some unknown reason? The address won't exist then. Google recently made a new policy where inactive gmail are deleted.
You weren't receiving email before because your email got banned/disabled, and now you'll still not be receiving email. Nothing is lost. The forum account isn't banned or anything.
Another possible issue is if email can't be received temporary, because of maintenance or outage.
If it's temporarily down, then it won't give a bounce message of "No such mailbox" (or similar), so the email won't be affected. Gmail for example respond via SMTP, "550-5.1.1 The email account that you tried to reach does not exist. Please try 550-5.1.1 double-checking the recipient's email address for typos or 550-5.1.1 unnecessary spaces. Learn more at 550 5.1.1
https://support.google.com/mail/?p=NoSuchUser". We're detecting several variations on that "no such user" SMTP response.
Longer-term, I would also like to do something about emails where the domain times-out or returns a "temporary" error in like 3 of the last 12 months or something like that. If you register with an email like asdfwerwe@werwetwerwer.com, then somebody could
register werwetwerwer.com and steal the account that way. But this issue isn't on my short-term to-do list at all.