idk, just a user report. my daily driver is my own jumble fork running at https://smesh.mleku.dev i added DM support to it and have been using it as a testbed for new features like NRC, a NWC/bunker s...
oh, probably your client isn't supporting nip-42 auth correctly. at least part of the problem could be that. i think both of my relays, i know my relay.orly.dev is auth-required and i think nostr.wine is too at least for publishing. both are publicly readable, and i'm pretty sure Mazin modified the strfry relay to not send DMs to users without auth.