invites to blog.crossplane.io are broken

[jbw976]

It appears impossible currently to invite someone to be an author on blog.crossplane.io.

Error sending email! Error sending email: Failed to send email. Please check your email settings and resend the invitation.

I debugged for quite awhile when this first happened a few months ago, but was unable to find a permanent fix at that time. The Ghost email settings show that we're using the direct mail option, so I suspect that we're not sending authenticated mail and email providers like gmail reject it.

The current known workaround is to follow the procedure outlined in https://blog.tiga.tech/posts/invite-users-to-a-ghost-blog-without-sending-an-email/

special notes when trying the workaround:

• get mysql connection info from /var/www/ghost/config.production.json
• remove the trailing = or == chars from the token when crafting the URL

workaround commands:

# access droplet console in https://cloud.digitalocean.com/droplets

mysql -u ghost -p
# enter password from mysql connection info

use ghost_production;
UPDATE invites SET status='sent';
SELECT email,token FROM invites;

# go to URL with https://blog.crossplane.io/ghost/#/signup/<token with trailing ='s removed> and finish creating account in the UI

[github-actions]

Crossplane does not currently have enough maintainers to address every issue and pull request. This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has had no activity in the last 90 days. It will be closed in 14 days if no further activity occurs. Leaving a comment starting with /fresh will mark this issue as not stale.

[jbw976]

With all the email security implemented for the crossplane.io domain, it may be possible to configure Ghost to send email securely without errors. That's just a hunch though, but worth looking into 🤔

[jeanduplessis]

@jbw976 can/should we move this issue to a different repo? Feels slightly unrelated to crossplane/crossplane