There’s a special kind of frustration reserved for bugs that produce no errors. Your code runs; the logic executes as expected, but you aren’t getting the output you expect, and things aren’t functioning as they are supposed to. This was an issue I had with a column in my database. I was sending a confirmation email to users when they registered for a waitlist, but each time I add them to the database, and try sending them a confirmation email, it won’t work. In this article, I will discuss how I was able to fix this. Turns out the problem was actually quite simple but hard to decipher.
My goal was straightforward: Send the user a confirmation email when they are successfully added to the waitlist, and then update the email_status column in the database to reflect the status of the email delivery. The 3 possible delivery states are pending, delivered, and failed. This was simple enough in theory, but not in application. After the email was sent successfully, the email_status column stubbornly stayed on pending; no error was thrown, no warning, just silence. The issue wasn’t that the email wasn’t sending or even failed to send in some cases, but that the email_status column wasn’t reflecting the delivery status of the email. After days and almost a week of debugging this issue, I figured out the problem was a missing RLS Policy for UPDATE Operations.
