[BUG] Invitations dont get sent via email

[DavidsBees]

Describe the bug
When admin uses invite feature of sending emails (both new users + existing users), the emails dont get sent

To Reproduce
Round -> Participants -> Invite participants -> enter email(s) -> Invite participants

Expected behavior
Participants or new users should get an email

[DavidsBees]

Another report that might refer to the same issue:

Here's what I did:

Sign in on cobudget with my email,

Create a new round which is now here: https://cobudget.com/c/refraction-23-24

Massage the settings a bit, eg set it to hidden and invite only

Go to our google docs spreadsheet which contains participants for our event

Copy the email column

Paste it in a text editor (vscode) where I replaced line breaks with commas

Go to "participants" inside the round on cobudget and click "invite participants"

Paste from the text editor and click "add people"

I pasted all the email addresses at once, separated by a comma and a space, and there was no comma or space or else after the last email address. The number of participants is under 100 and this is a free account.

In the email addresses there is a healthy mix of alphanumeric, regular and capitalized, and punctuation or signs. I didn't see any "+" signs, I know in theory that could cause issues with different variants of the same email.

Some of these people already had an account on cobudget when I sent out the invite, while others did not. I imagine that most of the people who already had an account signed up using lower case letters, or perhaps your system automatically converts those to lower case at registration.

As far as I know, all the invite emails went out, however none of them worked at first, even when everything was perfectly in order and the person was already signed in when clicking on the invite email link. In fact, even in the participants list it showed everyone but me as unverified, even if they used cobudget before and had their email registered. I cannot take a screenshot of that as I later removed those.

Firstly, I tried with myself using an alternate email address, and the invite email link just doesn't work if I'm not already signed in when I open it. So first I need to separately sign in instead of the email link doing it for me, which would perhaps be reasonable.

After one person who already used cobudget before and was signed in and still couldn't accept the invite contacted me, I removed him from the list and then reinvited him with exactly the same email address, and it magically worked! And I'm sure there was a fault in the system before, because he shared his screen and I could see that it doesn't work when he clicks on the link in the invite email. It showed an error message, something like the round either doesn't exist or you don't have access...

So I did the same with everyone, removing and readding their email, also manually changing everything to lowercase. However, I ran out of space, because even though I removed invited people from the list, those still counted towards the 100 limit.

Now it seems that people who were already added can still join through a new invite link but I cannot add anyone new because of the 100 limit. To be clear, the total number of participants in our event is still well below 100.

So it is a very messy start with most people having a lot of trouble getting access and with the tight deadlines we have for the event it is unfortunately becoming impossible to sort out the funding for the dreams.