Troubleshooting & FAQ

Debugging setup issues should be done in the Matrix rooms for the bridges (linked in the READMEs), rather than in GitHub issues. Additionally, this page will collect some of the most common issues.

Why is the bridge bot not accepting invites? (or not receiving messages from Matrix)

If the bridge starts up successfully, but inviting the bot doesn't work and the logs don't show any errors, it usually means the homeserver isn't sending events to the appservice.

In the case of mautrix-imessage, there's no need to invite the bot for setup, so this issue manifests as outgoing messages not working.

There are a few potential reasons this can happen:

  • There was a misconfiguration in the appservice address/hostname/port config or the homeserver can't reach the appservice for some other reason. The homeserver logs should contain errors in this case (grep for transactions in Synapse's homeserver.log).
    • Note that grepping for transactions will show some data even when it's working correctly. If it shows nothing at all, something is broken.
    • Also note that transaction is not the same as transactions. If you don't include the s at the end, you'll get tons of unrelated logs.
    • For mautrix-imessage, you should also check the wsproxy logs.
    • As of Synapse v1.84 and bridges released after May 2023, the bridges will automatically use the appservice ping mechanism to detect configuration issues and report them in bridge logs.
  • The bridge was down for longer than a few minutes and the homeserver backed off. The homeserver should retry after some time. If it still doesn't work after an hour or so (exact backoff depends on how long the bridge was down), check the homeserver logs.

I don't see any responses from the bridge bot in Matrix, but the responses are visible in the bridge logs

Make sure you didn't ignore the bot.

Settings -> Security & Privacy -> Advanced -> Ignored users on Element.

Why are direct messages showing up under "Rooms" instead of "People"?

All chats in Matrix are actually rooms, and there's no good way for bridges to declare that a room is a DM. Specifically, the DM status is stored in the user's account data in the m.direct event, rather than in the room itself. Since the flag isn't stored in the room, there's no way for the room creator to force the room to be a DM.

The bridges include a hacky workaround, which uses double puppeting to update the m.direct account data event directly. It can be turned on with the sync_direct_chat_list config option. Alternatively, you can manually add individual rooms using the /converttodm command in Element Web/Desktop.

Canonical DMs (MSC2199) should fix the issue permanently by actually storing the DM status in the room itself, but so far it has not been implemented in any clients or servers.

How do I bridge typing notifications and read receipts?

Bridging ephemeral events (EDUs) is enabled by default in the bridges, but currently those events aren't sent to appservices by default. There are two config options to enable the bridges to receive EDUs:

  1. bridge -> sync_with_custom_puppets - calls /sync with your Matrix account to receive EDUs. See the double puppeting docs for how to enable double puppeting in general.
  2. appservice -> ephemeral_events - enables MSC2409 support to have the homeserver push EDUs directly to the bridge (the same way it pushes normal messages).
    • This is currently only implemented in Synapse.
    • This also requires the de.sorunome.msc2409.push_ephemeral field in the registration file to be set to true. If you regenerate the registration after enabling the config option, the relevant fields will be added automatically. Remember to restart Synapse after updating the registration.

You should only have one of the two enabled at any time.

Why are contact list names disabled by default?

Some bridges like WhatsApp and Signal have access to the contact list you've uploaded to their servers. However, the bridges will not use those names by default. The reason is that they cause problems if your bridge has multiple Matrix users with the same people in their contact lists.

  • Contact list names might be leaked to other Matrix users using the same bridge.
    • Per-room displaynames could somewhat mitigate this, but even that wouldn't work if you're in some bridged groups with the other Matrix users.
  • Bridge ghosts might flip between names from different Matrix users' contact lists.

If the bridge only has one user, then contact list names should be safe to enable.

Signal: Identity failure occurred while sending message to +phone

This error happens if the remote user's encryption identity changed (e.g. if they reinstalled Signal). In groups, it usually means one or more of the participants changed devices, but the message was still sent to everyone else.

To solve it, you can either use !signal safety-number +phone and then copy the safety number to the mark-trusted command, or you can run signald with the --trust-new-keys and --trust-all-keys-on-start CLI options to have it automatically trust new keys. See https://signald.org/articles/config/ for more info on those options.

pip failed building wheel for python-olm

fatal error: olm/olm.h: no such file or directory

When building with end-to-bridge encryption, you must have a C compiler, python3 dev headers and libolm3 with dev headers installed.

If you want to build without encryption:

  • For Python bridges, don't install the e2be optional dependency.
  • For Go bridges, either build with -tags nocrypto or disable cgo with the CGO_ENABLED=0 env var.

fatal error: olm/pk.h: no such file or directory

libolm2 is too old, you need libolm3.

fatal error: pyconfig.h: no such file or directory

python3-dev is required.

error: command 'gcc' failed: No such file or directory

build-essential is required.

Configuration error: <field> not configured

You didn't change the value of <field> in the config, but that field must be configured for the bridge to work (i.e. the default value will not work). Dots in <field> mean nesting, e.g. bridge.permissions means the permissions field inside the bridge object.

ForeignTablesFound: The database contains foreign tables

As mentioned in the setup page, you should not share a single Postgres database between unrelated programs.

You can create a separate database either using the createdb shell command that is usually included with Postgres, or the CREATE DATABASE SQL statement.

For existing installations, you can use the flag suggested in the error message and hope that there are no table name conflicts in the future. To use the flag in Docker, you'll have to override the startup command, either with a copy of the docker-run.sh script (which can be found in the bridge repo), or just the startup command (python3 -m mautrix_$bridge -c /data/config.yaml --flags).

The as_token was not accepted

This error means you either:

  • didn't add the path to the registration file to the homeserver config,
  • didn't restart the homeserver after adding the path to the config, or
  • modified the tokens somewhere and didn't copy them to the other file

Make sure the tokens match everywhere, that you're looking at the right files, and that everything has been restarted.

The as_token was accepted, but the /register request was not

This can happen if you either misconfigure the homeserver -> domain field, or change the username_template without regenerating the registration.

Usually it's the former, so make sure that the domain field matches your homeserver's server_name exactly. If it doesn't, fix it, regenerate the registration file and restart everything.