Activation key invalid when using certain webmail providers

[henrywright]

I've found that some members always get an invalid activation key message when they use mail.com webmail.

Steps to reproduce:

1. Set up an email account with ​http://www.mail.com - I selected email.com as my email domain i.e henry@…
2. Register on a BP site with your new mail.com email address
3. Go to your mail.com webmail, then attempt to activate your BP account via the activation email you receive.

Note: If you do the same steps above but use another webmail service such as Gmail or use Thunderbird as your mail client, you won't get the invalid activation key message. Your account will be successfully activated.

[boonebgorges]

henrywright - I'm having a hard time getting a mail.com account to receive the right kinds of emails (beats me). Can you share the format of the activation link as it appears in your email? If you can, share following:

• the address that shows up in the text of the email
• the address of the auto-generated link (when you hover over it, what do you see in the status bar? or what does View Source or Inspect Element tell you?)
• the address that shows in your browser's admin bar after clicking through on the link

[r-a-y]

Sounds like maybe the formatting of the email generated inside mail.com is causing this.

Can you switch to plain-text mode inside mail.com and see if the link is correct? I'll test this myself in a bit.

[henrywright]

@boonebgorges and @r-a-y

Tested again - This time I noticed something strange happening after clicking the activation link. A 'deferer' notice flashes on screen. "The page you requested is not part of our service. You will be redirected shortly."

It seems as though mail.com have a redirect in place which is causing a problem with the activation link. Not entirely sure how this can be resolved aside from advising members to use a different email client or webmail provider.

[r-a-y]

Thanks for the update, henrywright.

Marking as invalid as it's a problem with mail.com's web interface and usage of a dereferer.

Users with a mail.com email address should copy and paste the activation link from the email contents instead of using the altered link by mail.com.

Preferably, those users should use an email account that supports IMAP / POP3 so these links are unaltered when viewed from an email client.