# Errors when answering by email
**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/errors-when-answering-by-email/1242
**Category:** Meta Elastic
**Created:** [May 25, 2015, 6:57am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/errors-when-answering-by-email/1242 "2015-05-25T06:57:16Z")
**Posts on this page:** 18
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@dadoonet](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/dadoonet)
#### Post date: [May 25, 2015, 6:57am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/errors-when-answering-by-email/1242/1 "2015-05-25T06:57:16Z")
I'm getting this now:
> We're sorry, but your email message to ["[discuss+35309678d2f68e7f4eeba30249bfc97c@elastic.co](mailto:discuss+35309678d2f68e7f4eeba30249bfc97c@elastic.co)"] (titled Re: [Elasticsearch] Failed to send ping to) didn't work.
> The provided reply key is invalid or unknown, so we don't know what this email is in reply to. Contact a staff member.
---
### Author:  [@mvg](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/mvg)
#### Post date: [May 26, 2015, 11:26am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/errors-when-answering-by-email/1242/3 "2015-05-26T11:26:48Z")
This morning I relied to messages in two topics, but my reply never was visible visible in the forum. I didn't get an error like dadoonet is reporting.
Threads:
> [@"watcher\_state" : "starting",](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/watcher-state-starting/1165/4):
>
> i m using one node for master see the config from master node here cluster.name: express index.number\_of\_shards: 6 index.number\_of\_replicas: 0 index.mapping.ignore\_malformed: true node.name: "master1" node.master: true node.data: true path.data: /data path.logs: /mnt/logs bootstrap.mlockall: true network.host: 172.0.11.104 discovery.zen.ping.multicast.enabled: false discovery.zen.ping.unicast.hosts: ["172.0.11.104", "172.0.11.47"] script.disable\_dynamic: false http.jsonp.enable:…
> [@Getting problems in install Watcher](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/getting-problems-in-install-watcher/1253/7):
>
> What ES version are you on
---
### Author:  [@dadoonet](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/dadoonet)
#### Post date: [June 2, 2015, 9:26am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/errors-when-answering-by-email/1242/5 "2015-06-02T09:26:40Z")
Got again an error this morning (100% of my answers get this response):
> We're sorry, but your email message to ["[discuss+6b3819b9b4cdfba09740f57fcfc7a6e7@elastic.co](mailto:discuss+6b3819b9b4cdfba09740f57fcfc7a6e7@elastic.co)"] (titled Re: [Elastic In Your Native Tongue/Discussions en français] Combiner deux résultats d'aggregations et les diviser) didn't work.
> The provided reply key is invalid or unknown, so we don't know what this email is in reply to. Contact a staff member.
---
### Author:  [@nik9000](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/nik9000)
#### Post date: [June 2, 2015, 1:08pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/errors-when-answering-by-email/1242/6 "2015-06-02T13:08:06Z")
Me too!
> From: [noreply@discuss.elastic.co](mailto:noreply@discuss.elastic.co)
> Date: Tue, Jun 2, 2015 at 9:05 AM
> Subject: [Elastic Discuss] Email issue -- Unknown Reply Key
> To: [nik9000@gmail.com](mailto:nik9000@gmail.com)
> We're sorry, but your email message to ["[discuss+770f92b92818289cfdfc164940a8faae@elastic.co](mailto:discuss+770f92b92818289cfdfc164940a8faae@elastic.co)"] (titled Re: [Elasticsearch] Are segments stores on heap or off heap?) didn't work.
> The provided reply key is invalid or unknown, so we don't know what this email is in reply to. Contact a staff member.
---
### Author:  [@Leslie\_Hawthorn](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Leslie_Hawthorn)
#### Post date: [June 2, 2015, 1:24pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/errors-when-answering-by-email/1242/7 "2015-06-02T13:24:24Z")
I've escalated this directly to the team at Discourse who will help us with
troubleshooting. More news as we have it.
Updated this thread:
Interestingly enough, I was able to reply via email with no issues. I am posting this update directly via the web interface.
---
### Author:  [@nik9000](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/nik9000)
#### Post date: [June 8, 2015, 10:16am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/errors-when-answering-by-email/1242/9 "2015-06-08T10:16:14Z")
I get the email issues inconsistently. Maybe half or 1/4 of the time.
---
### Author:  [@Leslie\_Hawthorn](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Leslie_Hawthorn)
#### Post date: [June 9, 2015, 9:05am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/errors-when-answering-by-email/1242/11 "2015-06-09T09:05:11Z")
Cool, will do. Thanks.
---
### Author:  [@costin](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/costin)
#### Post date: [June 10, 2015, 5:34pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/errors-when-answering-by-email/1242/12 "2015-06-10T17:34:27Z")
Same here - below is the content of the email (and the key) in case it helps:
> We're sorry, but your email message to ["[discuss+083d324519b9e473a07d299150d3dd2b@elastic.co](mailto:discuss+083d324519b9e473a07d299150d3dd2b@elastic.co)"]
> (titled Re: [Hadoop and Elasticsearch] Insert data from hive to elasticsearch) didn't work.
> The provided reply key is invalid or unknown, so we don't know what this email is in reply to. Contact a staff member.
If the key is there, sounds like a visibility/concurrency/race-condition.
---
### Author:  [@nik9000](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/nik9000)
#### Post date: [June 24, 2015, 1:20pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/errors-when-answering-by-email/1242/13 "2015-06-24T13:20:30Z")
> [@codinghorror](#):
>
> This is a tricky problem -- we see this intermittently on several customers but we can't reproduce it, and when we check for the existence of the key, it is indeed present.
I hit this again this morning. Its a nasty problem! I don't like losing half my posts. As much as the forum has been a success these failures are demoralizing and make me wish I had google groups again.
Maybe do a backoff/retry thing? Add tons of logging? All the normal stuff I guess.
---
### Author:  [@Sam\_Saffron](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Sam_Saffron)
#### Post date: [June 25, 2015, 12:09am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/errors-when-answering-by-email/1242/15 "2015-06-25T00:09:31Z")
Just to help debug this, if you reply a second time with the exact same reply does it go through?
---
### Author:  [@costin](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/costin)
#### Post date: [July 13, 2015, 3:38pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/errors-when-answering-by-email/1242/16 "2015-07-13T15:38:02Z")
It just occurred for me and no, resending the email does not work.
[This](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/finding-errors-while-inserting-data-into-hbase-through-hive/25006) is the thread I'm trying to reply to and this is what I got 3d ago and now as well:
```
We're sorry, but your email message to ["discuss+1f2a66ede4c23843e7b27f6b218ee8fb@elastic.co"]
(titled Re: [Hadoop and Elasticsearch] Finding errors while inserting data into hbase throudh hive) didn't
work.
```
Basically it looks like the key provided in the email is not valid. Hopefully checking the records and potentially the email logs for this thread/user sheds some light.
---
### Author:  [@costin](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/costin)
#### Post date: [July 13, 2015, 4:16pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/errors-when-answering-by-email/1242/17 "2015-07-13T16:16:59Z")
And again, got an invalid reply to another thread:
```
We're sorry, but your email message to ["discuss+ea2de3fbd163a266c975d1d2828884e4@elastic.co"]
(titled Re: [Hadoop and Elasticsearch] Is there a guide from creating uber jar with spark core and
elasticsearch-spark?) didn't work.
```
It looks at this point, at least for me, replying by email simply does not work...
Update: I sent two emails; the first one got the reply above, the next one made it as it can be seen in the thread [here](http://discuss.elastic.co/t/is-there-a-guide-from-creating-uber-jar-with-spark-core-and-elasticsearch-spark/25427/2). This looks like a classical race condition when allocating keys...
---
### Author:  [@Joe\_Lawson](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Joe_Lawson)
#### Post date: [July 30, 2015, 2:28pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/errors-when-answering-by-email/1242/18 "2015-07-30T14:28:18Z")
+1ing this one. It happens to me very often when I reply via gmail. Very frustrating.
---
### Author:  [@Sam\_Saffron](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Sam_Saffron)
#### Post date: [July 31, 2015, 7:14am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/errors-when-answering-by-email/1242/19 "2015-07-31T07:14:22Z")
Today I spent a fair amount of time debugging this, first I added an option to very aggressively log any email failure
>
Once that was done I deployed and turned it on here, I have been trying to reply to this very topic by email and kept on getting that message.
When I looked at the log I saw nothing ...
So ... the process running this site were not even getting the messages, where were they going ??
Well, elastic is an enterprise customer, they have a staging instance with all data and settings, the staging instance has been polling email ... and it has reasonably old data.
I went ahead and disabled polling there, however... this leaves me wondering, do we even want to keep running this staging instance @nik9000 / @dadoonet are you using it for anything?
---
### Author:  [@dadoonet](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/dadoonet)
#### Post date: [July 31, 2015, 9:10am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/errors-when-answering-by-email/1242/20 "2015-07-31T09:10:16Z")
Haha! Funny thing. Thank you for debugging that!
I don't use myself the staging instance. I guess it was use before the official launch or to test some import scripts or so...
May be @drewr or @tyler would know?
---
### Author:  [@tylerjl](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/tylerjl)
#### Post date: [August 1, 2015, 9:41pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/errors-when-answering-by-email/1242/21 "2015-08-01T21:41:19Z")
Wow - well, at least you found the problem, regardless of whether we inflicted in on ourselves or not. 😄 Thanks for putting in the debugging effort, @Sam_Saffron.
We've used the staging instance here and there for things like testing style changes, piloting the Google Groups import, and so on, but we don't use it _too_ often. If you anticipate more problems coming from the instance, then we should probably bring it down (if we can get another up relatively quickly if we need to test stuff.) If things look stable/safe to leave up, then I'd suggest leaving it up, as I'd hate to bring up a second staging instance for some reason in the future and have this problem duplicating if/when we forgot to change this setting again.
---
### Author:  [@Sam\_Saffron](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Sam_Saffron)
#### Post date: [August 2, 2015, 7:28am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/errors-when-answering-by-email/1242/22 "2015-08-02T07:28:54Z")
Sure, no probs, I think we can leave it, just be careful with site settings on staging 🙂
---
### Author:  [@Joe\_Lawson](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Joe_Lawson)
#### Post date: [August 19, 2015, 11:58pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/errors-when-answering-by-email/1242/23 "2015-08-19T23:58:35Z")
Yay! this seems to work for me now. Thank you!