Roku setup

From linking a device to your account to adding channels, find Roku setup troubleshooting help and activation support from our community support forum.
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Re: Roku will not send activation link to my email

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I  had the same issue. After reading the entire thread I saw a DNS issue. 

So I just connected the Roku ultra 2022 to my phone as a hot spot long enough to send the activation link. 

Worked like a champ then reconnected to regular network. 

🙂 

LoneRider191
Reel Rookie

Re: Roku will not send activation link to my email

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Yes, this works, thanks! In the end, the activation thing was so annoying that I dug up an unused Amazon Firestick and set that up instead of the Roku. Works perfectly and the Firestick has no activation problems. I still have the Roku but it is now relegated to a backup role. 🙂

doghouse2
Newbie

Re: Roku will not send activation link to my email

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I am a loyal customer from your company's first days. It is beyond belief that your company is allowing loyal customers to be driven away by the 100s if not 1000s over more than a year. Apparently, RoKu has partnered with Google to place spyware into the Roku system by demanding members acquire "gmail" addresses which are monitored stored and information sold by google, in order to connect a newly purchased device. How laws have you broken by not divulging this "merger" and requirement before selling the new device and removing services from the old ones.  "Bait & Switch" and privacy laws have certainly been broken.       I'm sure google can pay you more for our information and to pump "streaming" commercials into our homes than any subscription we can afford to pay you to stop it.         Congratulations, you have destroyed RoKu as the 1st and original free choice tv service.  I shall be returning the spyware and cancelling my subscriptions. Get your pocketbook and lawyers ready. NCSWIC. 

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Mooselake1
Binge Watcher

Re: Roku will not send activation link to my email

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@doghouse2  I traced it back to an issue with AWS a while back (last spring, maybe), which seems to be what Roku uses to send those messages, and posted an analysis.  I'd attribute it more to lack of competence from whatever programming team they used, not malicious intent and certainly not a gmail bias.  They may not have the in-house resources to understand the problem and fix it, their expertise is streamers and not email and webby stuff.  The flailing around with changing DNS servers (huh?  What does that have to do with anything, they should all do lookups exactly the same) and the stock try this reply kind of points you in that direction too.  If I wasn't so stubborn I would have returned the Roku TV (our 6th if you count a Roku 3), more effort that it was worth for a guestroom,  and I no longer remember what actually made it work.  It took about a week of back and forth, including a call from Roku (they tried hard but it was beyond them), until I finally stumbled on a solution.

I'd blame outsourcing to the cheapest vendor, but that's personal bias.  On top of that I'd add in poorly done spam detection, probably by AWS, spam detectors often have block lists of email domains that are poorly maintained and updated.  I'm retired and didn't bother to figure out how the AWS email sending works or exactly where it was being blocked.  No reason to spam check activation requests on previously authorized accounts, that's just plain silly.  If they're worried about DDOS type attacks (again, why?  there are easier ways to lose friends and uninfluence people) then rate limiting is much better than these outbound email address checks.

A long time ago I dealt with email spam blocking.  It's not as easy as it looks at first glance, and it doesn't look like they (meaning the probably contract programmers) even bothered going that far.

 

Edit: Found it in an old post.  I capitalized the domain name in my email, whoever@DOMAIN.COM, to make it work.  Email domains are case insensitive, domain.com, DoMaIn.CoM, etc are all treated the same way.  Means the problem is pretty brain dead and not very effective if it's purpose was blocking spam.

Mooselake1
Binge Watcher

Re: Roku will not send activation link to my email

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FWIW here's what I found tracing where the finally successful email (@DOMAIN.COM) came from.  Of course since I'm not privy to the actual code it's all just educated guessing.

Interestingly the ID and serial number they keep asking for can't be used to activate your device, the support person I talked to escalated that up and got a response back that it wasn't enough to activate.