In the past Starter team users were allowed to customize the email templates for Netlify Identity.
Now they are faced with this error:
I’m disappointed to see Netlify revoke these configuration permissions.
Can the starter teams at least be allowed to change the email subject lines?
Hi @citylights
We’re not happy about having to make the decision either. But a few weeks ago this feature was exploited by malicious users which caused us service degradation (incident here) and thus , we had to move this feature behind a paywall.
I don’t think this decision can be reversed, but the spammers are to be blamed for all the good and free available on the internet to disappear. I hope you understand.
I can understand the paywall in front of the customized email templates for security reasons but can the customized subjects line be decoupled from customized templates and the starter teams be allowed to customize the subject lines?
If subject lines are sanitized I don’t see how they can pose any security concerns.
Hi @citylights,
Right now, unfortunately that’s not possible! However, our wider team are aware of the issue and we’ll update the thread once we have anything to share.
Hi @hrishikesh,
a few weeks ago this feature was exploited by malicious users which caused us service degradation (incident here ) and thus , we had to move this feature behind a paywall.
I don’t think this decision can be reversed, but the spammers are to be blamed for all the good and free available on the internet to disappear. I hope you understand.
I understand your situation. Thanks for maintaining large parts of Netlify available for free.
An important usecase is impacted by this decision though:
A large part of the World does not speak english. The custom templates was the only way to make Netlify accessible to these users.
Do you know of potential solutions?
Hi @Roneo.org,
That’s a valid use case, but I don’t think there’s a workaround for that, not at the moment at least.
But to pass this feedback to the team, would it be helpful if you were to use a custom email delivery solution to deliver the emails if we were to allow setting custom templates again?
Hi @hrishikesh, I’m not sure to understand here (I’m not native english speaker)
If the question is “Would you use custom templates if available again?”, the answer is definitively YES!
It’s even a requirement as some user do not speak english at all.
Thanks for caring!
Unfortunately, that’s not what I was asking. My question was more like, would you still use custom templates if you have to configure custom SMTP to send those emails?
As of now, Netlify uses its own email provider to send all those emails at no cost to the end user. However, if you were to use a custom SMTP solution, you might have to subscribe to another paid service. Would you still be willing to use it?
Just to clear out, do note that I highly doubt the company will reverse this decision any time soon. We need to provide the service reliably and spammers and abusive people won’t let us do it. So, the solution for you would be to upgrade to a paid plan and continue using it.
Just to be sure to understand, do you say that this feature will be paid on the Netlify side, or that this service is not available for free? (We could manage this part, but should we still have to subscribe a paid plan on Netlify?)
Understood, thanks a lot for taking the time to answer
Regards
Yes, at the moment it’s not available for free. It used to be until it was abused to such an extent that it caused an outage on the service. Thus, we had to move it behind a paywall.
However, that was still not what I was trying to say. Since re-allowing the feature is now too-risky for us, we might have to think of another way to allow starter customers with legitimate use case like yours to be able to use it. Thus, I was wondering if you would still use this feature if you had to configure an external SMTP service like Gmail, Sendgrid, etc.
Yes, it sounds like a perfect solution
Great, thank you for letting us know. I’ll add that as a feature request. However, it might not get implemented any time soon.
