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l008com · Apr 21, 2010, 02:33 AM

I haven't gotten an email from this forum since October 2009. My default setting is instant email notification, and I've I always check it on each post. Yet the forum NEVER messages me. Checked the junk folder, nada. Has this forum turned off email? Or does it just not like me? This isn't the first time the emails stopped, this happened a few years ago too.

Andy8 · Apr 21, 2010, 03:06 AM

Have you changed your email address over the years?

Perhaps you should give a fresh email address a try and see.

reader50 · Apr 21, 2010, 04:03 AM

Your account does show subscription setting as "instant email notification". Either your email address is incorrect, or the board emails are being trapped as spam. Check junk folder, and if your email is a branded gmail, log into their web interface to check their spam folder.

Do you get email notifications on private message receipt? I've just caused the board to send you a "password reminder" email, which you can ignore. As a test to see if board emails are being caught as junk mail.

Simon · Apr 21, 2010, 04:15 AM

Others haven't been getting notification either. Maybe the board isn't sending them at all?

reader50 · Apr 21, 2010, 04:33 AM

I just made a bogus Report on a post in one of my forums. The email notification of the Report arrived normally. Guess I'll subscribe to this thread, see if anything happens.

chimaera · Apr 21, 2010, 04:41 AM

email test - admins are pansies

reader50 · Apr 21, 2010, 04:43 AM

Notification email received seconds after the test.

l008com · Apr 21, 2010, 05:14 AM

I have gotten NO emails from this thread or anything else in months. My email address hasn't changed in 7 years give or take. And I checked, my profile has the right address. There is nothing in my junk mailbox. And my mail isn't gmail. I host it myself, and I use spamassassin, but it doesn't delete spam, it just marks it as spam. Either the forum isn't sending, or the forum's mail server found it's way onto one of the realtime blacklists I use. Those are:
cbl.abuseat.org
sbl.spamhaus.org
xbl.spamhaus.org
bl.spamcop.net

The address works, I get email from other forums regularly, as recently as two days ago.

reader50 · Apr 21, 2010, 05:41 AM

cbl.abuseat.org - not listed.
sbl.spamhaus.org - not listed.
xbl.spamhause.org - domain name for sale.
bl.spamcop.net - not listed.

In your userCP, check your thread subscriptions - confirm you are subscribed. You can also identify subscribed threads in thread listings - a checkmark appears.

-Q- · Apr 21, 2010, 06:31 AM

Not that it helps the OP, but I am receiving notifications just fine, so the system does still appear to be working as it should. It appears to be personal.

l008com · Apr 21, 2010, 04:05 PM

reader50: I corrected the (obvious) typo, I suggest you test that one last db.
I have 1334 thread subscriptions, all with instant notification.
The only other option is there's a magical wizard somewhere on the internet blocking email from macnn.com to my domain name. That just seems a little unlikely.

reader50 · Apr 21, 2010, 04:11 PM

I caught the typo - in fact, the spamhaus check gives results for all three of their DB versions. We were negative for all, on both IPs that I checked.

Perhaps vB has trouble with very large numbers of thread subscriptions? You could unsubscribe from the older ones, see if notifications resume. hmm ... let me check integrity on that table.

Edit: all subscribed tables check as OK.

l008com · Apr 21, 2010, 04:28 PM

I got a js popup about your PM, but no email. fyi. Which suggests that the subscription list probably has nothing to do with it. Remember I also didn't get the password email.

seanc · Apr 21, 2010, 04:32 PM

Not that it helps you, but my notifications are also working fine.

Please try changing your email address to see if it makes a difference. If it does, try changing it back.

command-tab · Apr 21, 2010, 05:50 PM

Relaying a message from l008com:

"I changed my email address and now I can't post anything at all, to any thread. The site gave me a quick message about emailing me when I changed my address. Needless to say I have received no messages from the site and now I'm completely locked out. The message the boards sent me only stayed up for about 2 seconds so I couldn't read it in full. reader50 please re-enable my account"

AKcrab · Apr 21, 2010, 06:42 PM

Ha! They fixed him good!

reader50 · Apr 21, 2010, 07:08 PM

l008com, you account is re-enabled. Sorry about the delay, I was away in the real world.

email changes result in the account being disabled for posting, and an email is sent to the new address. Clicking the link inside that email re-enables the account. I've done that manually.

l008com, your new address is in the same domain as the old one. Could you try a free address, like gmail, for testing? I'm thinking the emails are going out, but are not reaching your current domain (server) for some reason.

l008com · Apr 21, 2010, 09:08 PM

I switched it to a different one then switched it back to the original, but both were on my server yes. Also a little warning might have been good, knowing that if my problems continued, changing my address was going to lock me out!!!

And speaking of warning, I'm going to change it to a mac.com email address. So if I don't reply again in a few minutes, please manually reactivate my account. Actually definitely reactivate my account in a few minutes because even if .mac works, ill be switching back to my domain right after.

l008com · Apr 21, 2010, 09:13 PM

OK that worked. That's odd, the absolute ONLY things on my server that truly STOP mail from coming in, are those four blacklists. I'll check my SMTP log and see if i see anything from your server when I change my email back. Also if it's 5 minutes or more after this post was posted, please reactive my account, it will be broken for sure...

reader50 · Apr 21, 2010, 10:41 PM

Re activated. Good thing I didn't move it to the 'Moderators' group by mistake.

I was away again. So mac.com emails work, I take it?

l008com · Apr 21, 2010, 10:44 PM

Yes. The mails are getting to my server, but they are getting bounced back. And I think I know why, they are not coming from "[email protected]":

reader50 · Apr 21, 2010, 10:51 PM

I had to use the mailto when I ASCII-encrypted the link, and vB suggests it. Before the link encryption, the spam was getting out of hand. Since then, the spam has very slowly tapered down. This was done in October 2009 - might that be when you stopped getting the emails?

l008com · Apr 21, 2010, 11:02 PM

That is exactly when my last mail was. But that's not the right from address. When my server bounced your server's mail, it was bounced back to me because mailto:admin isn't a valid user at macnn.com I'm not sure what advantage there is to using mailto:admin ? If it doesn't work anyway, might as well just make it [email protected]

besson3c · Apr 21, 2010, 11:20 PM

Originally Posted by l008com

Yes. The mails are getting to my server, but they are getting bounced back. And I think I know why, they are not coming from "[email protected]":

SpamAssassin doesn't care what you set the from address to, it concerns itself with the envelope address of this board, which is postoffice.macnn.com. This is the domain you should be using to search the various public RBLs.

Can you post your mail logs so that we can see why the messages are being bounced? Do you admins here have access to the mail logs? The answer to this problem will be in there.

What has your experience been using Spamcop? I'm hesitant to use them, I don't think I care for their user driven model...

reader50 · Apr 21, 2010, 11:25 PM

We have a publicly-posted mail link in the nav bar, instead of a contact form to hide the address. I ascii-encrypted the link back then, in order to control the spam while keeping a visible link. If memory serves, browsers handled the link properly with the mailto: on the front, but didn't always render the escaped text properly if mailto was missing.

I got access to the admin box back then, and found out why there were so few replies when people contacted us: the box was clogged with over 40,000 emails - 273 MB of spam. It took me over a week to clean out the junk, and I obscured the email link to reduce future spam.

Can you code in an exception for our emails?

Edit: the admin box does not show any bouncebacks. I don't have access to the mail server logs.

l008com · Apr 21, 2010, 11:29 PM

What I don't get is why the FROM address from server emails are from "mailto:[email protected]" though. You can't set that to the RIGHT address, and still encode the link in the nav bar?

reader50 · Apr 21, 2010, 11:51 PM

I just made a change to the board email settings. See if this one gets through. And I'm going to manually send you another 'password reminder' email, which once again can be ignored.

l008com · Apr 21, 2010, 11:51 PM

Got both right away.

reader50 · Apr 21, 2010, 11:53 PM

Excellent, and the public link remains obscured.

btw: you can thank RAILhead for the obscure utility "SpamStopper". Very handy, I've had it on hand for years.

l008com · Apr 21, 2010, 11:55 PM

And suddenly thousands of people will be getting emails again and ad impressions should go back up.

My server btw, is just a standard OS X Server 10.5. So I'd imaging lots of people on this site were having the same problem. In fact looking back, I actually moved my domain from one 10.5 server to another, and clearly both had the same problem with the invalid ":" in the address.

reader50 · Apr 21, 2010, 11:59 PM

The colon - used in HFS/HFS+ as a folder separator. I'll bet the OSX mail server won't allow it, because email account names are used as folder names within the Mail folder.

On the other hand, client OS X Mail.app had no trouble with it.

l008com · Apr 22, 2010, 12:01 AM

Its just standard (or relatively standard) postfix. Also : as folders was an OS 9/Carbon thing, no? Modern OS X doesn't use that. But from what I was able to google, ":" is one of the invalid characters for an email address. Maybe OS X Server is just set up to be strict about that sort of thing.

besson3c · Apr 22, 2010, 02:08 AM

Oh never mind, you're talking about mail rules, not spam filters... Sorry, misread.

reader50 · 02:49 PM

Well, something's working again. I've gotten bouncebacks on ~~four~~ 15 people so far. Apparently they were subscribed to something, then changed email addresses without updating their forum profile.

I'm PM'ing them if they've been online this year (and getting another bounce for each PM). If they've not been here this year, then I'm dropping their subscriptions. I'll probably have to narrow that window if we keep getting a lot of bounces.

Reasonably, we must have been getting the bounces all along. This is just the first time in months that they've reached us. Back when I cleaned the junk out of the admin box, there *were* a ton of delivery failure bounces.