Emails

How Nova sends emails

Unlike many areas in Nova where we leverage built-in CodeIgniter libraries, for email we use a custom library implementing SwiftMailer for sending all emails from Nova. We've built this in such a way that it should mirror the way that CodeIgniter handles email.

When Nova needs to send an email, the controller where that page lives will have a method called _email that handles all of the email situations for that controller.

When Nova sends emails

Area	Situation	Recipient
Application	Application accepted	The joining user
Application	Application rejected	The joining user
Application	Application rejected	All game masters
Awards	Award nomination is submitted	All users with level 2 `user/nominate` permissions
Contact form	Contact form is submitted	All game masters
Docking form	Docking form is submitted	The submitting user
Docking form	Docking form is submitted	All game masters
Docking form	Docking application is accepted	The submitting user
Docking form	Docking application is rejected	The submitting user
Join form	Player applies to join	The submitting user
Join form	Player applies to join	All game masters
Login page	Player resets their password	The submitting user
Mission post	Joint mission post saved	All participating users on the post
Mission post	Mission post published	All users
Mission post	Approval required for new mission post	All users with level 2 `manage/posts` permissions
Mission post	Comment added	The author(s) of the mission post
Mission post	Approval required for new comment	All users with `manage/comments` permissions
Moderation	Approval of pending comment	The entity's author(s)
Moderation	Approval of pending mission post	All users
Moderation	Approval of pending news item	All users
Moderation	Approval of pending personal log	All users
News item	News item published	All users
News item	Approval required for new news item	All users with level 2 `manage/news` permissions
News item	Comment added	The author of the news item
News item	Approval required for new comment	All users with `manage/comments` permissions
Personal log	Personal log published	All users
Personal log	Approval required for new personal log	All users with level 2 `manage/logs` permissions
Personal log	Comment added	The author of the personal log
Personal log	Approval required for new comment	All users with `manage/comments` permissions
Private message	A new private message is received	The recipient
User profile	Password is changed by an admin	The user
User profile	Leave of absence status is changed	All game masters

Configuring emails from Nova

Nova and CodeIgniter provide a wealth of configuration options for how email is handled. You'll find all of the available configuration options in either Nova's System/Email tab of Site Settings or in the email config file found in the application/config directory. We've provided sensible defaults for emails, but your specific server and situation may dictate changes.

Be sure to test

After making any changes to configuration, you should send a test email through Nova to ensure that all your players are properly receiving email with the changes.

Deep dive

You can read more about CodeIgniter's email configuration options in their documentation.

Changing the files used for emails

You might be surprised to find out that Nova treats emails almost identically to how it treats pages in the system. That means there's a view file that's used to structure and lay out the emails that are sent to players. This also means you can use seamless substitution to change the structure and layout of the emails.

Learn more

For a complete explanation of seamless substitution, please refer to its documentation.

Email issues

Over the last couple of years, email has become a significant pain point for more and more Nova games. We've heard about tons of people dealing with a whole host of email issues:

"No one gets emails sent by Nova"
"Some users get the emails sent by Nova, but others don't"
"Some emails from Nova take hours to arrive"
"I get an error when Nova tries to send emails"

By default, Nova uses PHP's mail() function for sending all mail. When the system was originally built, this was a reliable way of handling email. Over time and with the drastic rise in spam, more and more email service providers are cracking down on the ways that email has been sent from PHP applications. As a result, people have started to see situations where email isn't being properly delivered. So how do we fix these issues?

Third-party email service providers

The answer we've begun advocating is using a third-party email service provider. These are companies that offer to handle the sending of emails (also known as transactional emails) from a system like Nova to whatever recipients are on the email. We highly encourage users to use a third-party email service provider, and here's why:

They specialize in sending emails
They will increase your deliverability rate, often dramatically
Your emails are less likely to be labeled as “spam” and/or blocked completely (quite common)

Who's out there?

It can be a little daunting to step into the world of third-party email service providers, so here's a little primer on who's out there, ranging from completely free services to some that charge you monthly for the number of emails you send.

Some assembly required

It's important to understand that there may be additional work that has to be done for some of these services. For example, Mailgun requires domain verification before you can send emails. While it's a technical process, Mailgun has documentation that will walk you through updating the DNS records. In other cases, these are relatively new services that we don't have much information on. We encourage people to look at the different options and make decisions based on what they think their needs will be.

Any of the above SMTP services will work in Nova. If you're having issues today with emails not being delivered, you can get up and running in short order by signing up for one of the above services and plugging in the details in your email config file in Nova.

Using SMTP in Nova

In order to get Nova working with your SMTP service of choice, you simply need to update the application/config/email.php config file with the information you got from the service when you signed up:

1$config['protocol'] = 'smtp';
2$config['smtp_host'] = 'http://smtp.example.com';
3$config['smtp_user'] = 'username';
4$config['smtp_pass'] = 'password';
5$config['smtp_port'] = 25;

Save the file and upload it back to your server and you should be all set!

You can run a test by using the contact form to send something to yourself. If everything is working, you should get the contact page email like normal. If you don't get the email, you may need to use the SMTP service's dashboard to figure out if the email got to the service. (This goes back to what we talked about earlier about some services requiring additional setup in order to get it working properly.)

Not interested in third-party email service providers?

If you don't want to pull the trigger on a third-party email service provider, there are other methods you can try that have seen limited success:

Under Site Settings on your Nova site, click on the System/Email tab. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and input an email associated with your domain as the "Default Email Address." For example, if you run a game at the domain uss-enterprise.com, you'd enter the email nova@uss-enterprise.com. (You may need to sign in to your hosting account to create a matching email address for this solution to work properly.)
If you have the ability, try refreshing your DKIM/SPF records. If you don't know what that means, or if you don't have the ability, contact your web host. (This solves an issue where Google won't deliver your site's emails.)
If your Nova sends hundreds of emails, your server might have a sending limit that blocks some emails from being delivered. Remember, every time you publish a post Nova has to send an email to each user on your site, not only one email. Either contact your web host and ask them to increase the limit or upgrade to a hosting plan with a higher sending limit.