Today, I just discovered one of my nodes has been offline for several days. I know I should my own monitoring/alerts setup, but typically I’ve just relied on the emails to inform me when something like that was wrong. But in this instance, I didn’t get any.
Anyway, I fixed the issue, and brought it back online and also never got any “your node is back online” emails, either.
So, the question is… do we still receive those emails? My email address configured using the EMAIL env var on the container. So unless that has changed, it should be configured to my correct and valid email.
Hello @CafeLungo,
Welcome back!
Did you check your SPAM folder (or the entire email box in the case of gmail)?
Yes, I checked spam. Nothing was there.
I can confirm this. I didn’t got Node offline, but I got Node back online email, and only on AP1.
Something is missconfigured on satellites backend.
Usualy I get offline emails on all 3 sats minutes apart, and then back online emails on all 3.
Also, as I run 2 nodes on almost all systems, I get emails for both. Now I got the email just for one.
The offline stat is caused usualy by power outages.
Uptime Robot:
Asked the team to check configuration.
A few hours ago I got the Node offline for AP1 email, after the Node online email. There is no new issue with the node, so it must reffer to the initial power outage of 3 hours. Something is off. I use gmail btw, but I don’t think that matters.
Do “Show headers” on that email (or whatever gmail calls it) and paste them here: Email Header Analyzer, RFC822 Parser - MxToolbox
It shall check DKIM/SPF/alignment. Ideally you want to see somethign like
If not – down lower on the page will be explanation, of what specifically does storj need to fix.
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Man, you are a great collection of usefull tools, AR_sysutils_CD.iso… 
So, I see a blacklist mark on the same field on both headers and a verry big delay from the sender to receiver, if I interpret this correctly.
I edited out the fields were it sais edited out, it seemed like a key or something, on the 1st email, but the second email already had blank fields there.
So it seems that they were sent at the right time, but a verry big delay made them be received in revers order; like they stood in line at 2 different checkpoints. One moved 4x faster then the other.
the flashbacks… 
So, Gmail heavily delayed acceptance of both messages from at least two Mailgun relay IPs.
Storj shall pull Mailgun logs for affected messages and inspect Google’s raw SMTP replies for these two IPs / this stream.
Maybe they have bad ips in the pool storj happens to be served by.
Would be interesting to see if this is gmail specific issue. But likely it’s malgun being mailgun. I had issues with it as a private individual, and moved to Amazon SES long ago. Maybe storj shall consider doing the same.
Are you receiving forum emails? Do they also experience similar delay?
The conclusion and course of action for storj is obvious. Not only MailGun is vastly more expensive than SES, it’s also demonstrably shittier, on at least two accounts, and I remember seeing references to email deliverability issues on this forum more than once before.
It’s one of those cases, where it’s not what you pay is what you get, it’s WHO you pay is what you get
Actually satellites should use SES, but maybe something has changed.
ok, I ran a test. I have 2 nodes. I turned both off.
After 4 hours, I received offline for AP1, US1, and Saltlake for the first node. And when I started it back up, I received online emails from the same 3 satellites.
I received nothing for the second node. I have no idea why this might be.
In case it helps, my node IDs are:
- 16teeC7ueyDZQKJqJA7HqyjLDeMGbJzuLCUxptuzFghKTH5Evz (received emails)
- 1maDgqaEK2oCSiHxYYT6eARKgUaMofGsTq6akEj4fiqsEV7hV1 (no emails)
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Because you didn’t configure email for that node, it’s empty
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Should not having a valid email be a requirement for starting a node?
Without email you, as a company, can’t associate nodes to identity to comply with tax reporting. Or do you go by wallet and expect node operators to reach out and provide identity for the wallet? What if they don’t?
No, it’s optional. Exactly for the case to do not receive notifications.
However, this one could be impossible to do:
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Good point. I guess “up to 3” is easy to satisfy: We wanted to contact you (Tried 3 times to lookup your email in our database) but you did not give an email, so we’ll start backup withholding and wait for you to show up on the forum shortly after complaining
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I never received those tax id emails, and I made more than 600$ per year each year. I use valid email address for all nodes, same wallet for all.
I sent a tax id form one year, don’t remember when, but just to be ahead of it. Storj never asked me about it and never withhold percents of my payout.
Maybe they sort the nodes based on node IP geolocation? Or maybe the accounting department is lazzy?
As an extra: we should have a notification on the Dashboard, when we need to provide that tax id form. Once it is received and processed by Storj, it should dissapear.
You can identify one specific SNO only by 2 things and associate the node IDs with him: email provided in config and wallet address.
Once you have it filled out once, you don’t need to fill it out every year. If you are in US you would have received 1099-MISC form. If you are not (and based on how you wrote “600$” I strongly suspect you are not :)) – then no idea, perhaps you have to report stuff yourself to your tax authority.
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What’s wrong with my writing? 
I already said in various posts I’m in EU. 
Yeah, I was just reporting about that US tax form. Here we must report ourselfs, and from 1.01.2026 the majority of EU countries collect and exchange data about all the crypto transfers and tradings. In 2027 they will start exchange the actual agregate data and will compare it with what you have reported to the tax authority…. and start collecting for a lot of unreported income. 
Historically in English (USA/UK/Canada/Australia/NZ) the convention is to write currency symbols before the amount; French and many continental EU conventions put it after. You wrote it logically – “six hundred dollars” → “600$”, but logic is not what we do around here 
Nice.
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Ahhh, ok. it seems I had an erroneous space at the start of the EMAIL env var, preventing it from picking up the email. I’ve fixed it, and the node now logs my email address when it starts.
Sorry, PEBKAC.
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