A flood of old notification e-mails

[whole diary]

[stuving]

I just received a dozen notification e-mails, originally sent 15-16 November. They had been held up (according to the headers) inside wellho.net. Looking back, there are some other days going back at least two weeks with none received - so are there more lurking in the innards of that node?

[grahame]

I just received a dozen notification e-mails, originally sent 15-16 November. They had been held up (according to the headers) inside wellho.net. Looking back, there are some other days going back at least two weeks with none received - so are there more lurking in the innards of that node?

Looking at the innards of our node (quite an interesting exercise) I see 27 emails pending - all have which have been tried and await trying again.  25 are from the Coffee Shop domain, and 2 from another site we host.   The 25 that are awaiting are - without exception - "sign up" emails where people have given what appear to be false email addresses in signing up - the sort of activity that necessitates sites to send you emails that check you're real when you join something; we get a very large number of false requests.   So - immediate answer - there is nothing lurking in our innards as I write this, unless you are attempting to sign up for another account from an email domain such as adult-work.info, discardmail.com, happyfreshdrink.com, maxsize.online, rambler.ru or spambog.ru - which I really hope you are not 

That is only half the story.   Emails from our server (any server sending emails) go in lots of different directions, depending on the destination domain, and those can individually get stuck / blocked.   And sometimes the receiver will blacklist or refuse emails for a time from a sender.  Your registered email address on the forum is not at one of the common domains - not a hotmail or gmail, aol or outlook account - rather it's a domain with very few email accounts on it (like my own @wellho.net - a similar example).  Without crawling back, uncompressing log files (I would have to learn how to analyse their content) I can't tell if this happened.

I can assure you there is nothing for you in the queue as I write (or wasn't 10 minutes ago as I started writing) - your initial question.   If you send me (email, please, graham - at - wellho.net ) an example of the full headers of an email that got delayed I can look further, and if you suspect that emails to you are again blocked because nothing is coming through, please let me know and I can take a look while the blockage is still present.   We did have a couple of issues setting up email on the new server in September, but no problems reported prior to yours in the last six weeks - so I suspect it's not a general issue on our system, rather confirmed by my look around.   It could be that your domain/email service provider is sensitive to email that's not 101% checked, or that they have had spam problems from another system "near" to our machine in the cloud and have included us in their "dirty" zone.

It could also be that the emails forwarded promptly from us and got blocked up nearer to you ... in the equivalent of your "local sorting office". Don't you love email systems!

[grahame]

A follow up ... having examined headers of a sample email including headers.

Your (our member's) email service was blocking us - perhaps due to a flood of notifications in excess of a norm which that service sets, which caused us to be blacklisted for a while - I have sent you the specific log.  You may wish to whitelist 88.202.183.177 (also known as www.vcrp.org.uk) - that applies to any other members who have trouble receiving emails too.

I have just written a script (testing it as I post) which will send me an email (!) if our mail queue starts to grow with anything except false signups.  Not sure how I can let members know - can't email them - if they are blocking us ...

[grahame]

I have just written a script (testing it as I post) which will send me an email (!) if our mail queue starts to grow with anything except false signups.  Not sure how I can let members know - can't email them - if they are blocking us ...

Update - just one report of a single email being delayed at our server in the last fortnight, and that looks like it was a glitch in the email system at the mail server we were sending it forward to, as it had been accepted on retry within the hour.   Think we're running OK 

[grahame]

I have just written a script (testing it as I post) which will send me an email (!) if our mail queue starts to grow with anything except false signups.  Not sure how I can let members know - can't email them - if they are blocking us ...

Update - just one report of a single email being delayed at our server in the last fortnight, and that looks like it was a glitch in the email system at the mail server we were sending it forward to, as it had been accepted on retry within the hour.   Think we're running OK 

First "real" issue - an email to member on NTLWorld is stuck at the moment.  I suspect that the problem is at the NTLWorld level, bearing in mind other emails are all looking AOK.

[grahame]

I have just written a script (testing it as I post) which will send me an email (!) if our mail queue starts to grow with anything except false signups.  Not sure how I can let members know - can't email them - if they are blocking us ...

Update - just one report of a single email being delayed at our server in the last fortnight, and that looks like it was a glitch in the email system at the mail server we were sending it forward to, as it had been accepted on retry within the hour.   Think we're running OK 

First "real" issue - an email to member on NTLWorld is stuck at the moment.  I suspect that the problem is at the NTLWorld level, bearing in mind other emails are all looking AOK.

One further issue ... notifications to the email address of a member who's not been logged in for two years (but could, of course, still be viewing as a guest).  I think the email address remains correct, but his email server (which is a personal domain) has been reconfigured or has logged the Coffee Shop as sending lots of messages and marked us as spammers (when, in reality, he has lots of notifications switched on).

In some ways, good to have the occasional proof of issues being trapped rather than silence from the monitor.

[grahame]

Update - just one report of a single email being delayed at our server in the last fortnight, and that looks like it was a glitch in the email system at the mail server we were sending it forward to, as it had been accepted on retry within the hour.   Think we're running OK 

First "real" issue - an email to member on NTLWorld is stuck at the moment.  I suspect that the problem is at the NTLWorld level, bearing in mind other emails are all looking AOK.

A further email has got stuck - if you're a member with an NTLWorld email and didn't get a notification you're expecting - yes, I know you haven't got it!   

On investigation, it appears that the NTLWorld email system is exceptionally fussy in terms of who it accepts emails from, and we may have something in our configuration that is (uniquely so far) worrying it to the extent we are rejected. I am looking into this and would like to resolve it, but it does need an action from an Internet Service Provider to enable me to make the change.

[grahame]

I just received a dozen notification e-mails, originally sent 15-16 November. They had been held up (according to the headers) inside wellho.net. Looking back, there are some other days going back at least two weeks with none received - so are there more lurking in the innards of that node?

A few issues with notification emails to you and to one other member at the moment - there are six caught up for you and one for someone else. Looking at email black lists, our email system is fine for most people but a few don't like us sending to them. From http://multirbl.valli.org/



Looking at details of mail servers blacklisting us, several are in Poland and Russia which figures as there are lots of sign up attempts from email addresses in those countries.  Let me know if it worries you (or others in the future) - we could try setting up an intermediate email address for forwarding on another server clear of the signup spam for a few members.  No guarantee it would work as we have already established you have a fussy email hosting service, but it probably would.

[stuving]

I just tried a couple of blacklist checkers and 88.202.183.177 does flag on one as listed only by senderscore. As far as I can see, senderscore bases its listing on other mail services' spam filters, perhaps more than other blacklisters like Abusix do (who were responsible last time). As it happens, the spam filter on my mail provider has gone hyperactive recently and started flagging loads of innocuous stuff as spam, including these notifications. So I'll start by doing the tedious job of whitelisting them all (which I've been putting off).

[stuving]

I've just seen the expected small flood of delayed notifications, dating back to the 25th, and mxtoolbox.com now says 88.202.183.177 is no longer on any of their posse of blacklists. The list it was on is fronted by senderscore, but they refer to it as "Validity's RPBL". They go on about how their  "calculations are centered around sender behavior and content such as threatening attachments, spam trap hits, and authentication failures", and their "robust data sources". Well, they would say that ...

[grahame]

I've just seen the expected small flood of delayed notifications, dating back to the 25th, and mxtoolbox.com now says 88.202.183.177 is no longer on any of their posse of blacklists. The list it was on is fronted by senderscore, but they refer to it as "Validity's RPBL". They go on about how their  "calculations are centered around sender behavior and content such as threatening attachments, spam trap hits, and authentication failures", and their "robust data sources". Well, they would say that ...

Yes - Senderscore has gone from the list.   Now 5 out of 242 report "dirty" - 3 of which are at clueless.org, one is a Polish anti-spam site and the other is a Russian one.  And my blocked mail queue has shrunk to just a single email to another member, who I have previously alerted to the problem.