No, the download counter for attachments should be zero unless they are explicitly clicked on. There are certainly bots that crawl the forum constantly (such as Google), and it's likely that the bots are hitting the attachment links.
This is a bit of a complicated issue. The forum sends a ton of emails, and over time there has been a growing list of users whose emails are no longer valid. This results in many emails getting bounced, and worse, continuing to send emails to accounts that are no longer valid. Mail providers frown upon this behavior and your domain will earn a poor reputation for doing this. Some providers were sending a lot of AtariAge.com email to spam folders, such as Gmail, Yahoo!, and Hotmail, even though AtariAge has never been used to send spam.
To try and fix this, I first setup an external SMTP email service, in this case, Amazon SES (Amazon Simple Email Service), along with Amazon SNS (Amazon Simple Notification Service). Together, along with a third-party application ("Mail Bouncer"), this allows the forum to monitor when emails are hard bounced. When this happens, the forum disables the user account until the user changes their email address. This also immediately disables email notifications for that account, which will stop emails to that address from bouncing.
There are also soft bounces, where an email cannot be delivered immediately, but are still reported. These do not result in the account being blocked, but will show a warning that deliveries are failing.
Here's what one of the bounces looks like:
Looks like Microsoft blocked one or more Amazon IP addresses that were being used to send emails to their customers (Hotmail, MSN, live.ca, etc.) Until I can dig into this further, I have disabled the application that monitors bounces and also stopped using Amazon's email service. Hopefully that will allow things to return to "normal" for now. Which is too bad, as it was working pretty well for a time, greatly reducing the number of bounces the forum was generating, and improving the domain's reputation. I'm guessing another user was abusing Amazon's mail service and happened to be sharing the same IP that was being used to send AtariAge forum emails.
I can lease a dedicated IP from Amazon, which costs $25/month to do so. This would likely fix the issue, as long as that IP doesn't already have a poor reputation.
I sent a test mail from the AtariAge mail server to a Hotmail account I rarely use, and it immediately was immediately sent to the "Junk Email" folder. I marked it as not spam, sent another, and that one came through fine. Really annoying.
Now that I've disabled the forum application and have stopped using the Amazon email service for now, I would appreciate if people can report whether their notifications start coming through again.
There are several countries where the majority of spam and other attacks originate where I've set this up. These countries almost never have legitimate AA users (don't think we've ever had someone from India, for instance) so you're one of the first people to bring this up.
If you have a static IP (or a relatively small range of IPs), I'd be glad to punch a hole in the firewall for you.
Yes, they will be able to see the entire conversation. If you want to avoid that, I suggest creating a new conversation with the relevant parties instead.
We have to wait until the background tasks are finished churning through all the content. The very last thing to be built will be the search engine index, which these queries depend upon to show older content. Once that's completed, if this still happens, I can then investigate. I suspect it'll be fine, though.