Email Notifications Changed?

[Ikrananka]

Yesterday, or perhaps the day before, I stopped receiving all email notifications/subscriptions from AtariAge.  Visiting the site today, I was presented with a red message stating that my email address had stopped accepting emails.  My email is a hotmail account that is still receiving emails from many other senders and so is definitely still working.  AtariAge.com is on my safe senders list and so emails from AA aren't being sent to junk mail, i.e. both my inbox and junk mail show no signs of any emails from AA over the past few days.

 

Has anything changed on the AA email notifications side that may have caused this issue for me?

 

I did update my email on AA, using the same email address, and again am still getting no email notifications from AA.

Edited January 16, 2021 by Ikrananka

[Albert]

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  The forum sends a ton of emails, and over time there has been a growing list of users whose emails are no longer valid.  This results in many emails getting bounced, and worse, continuing to send emails to accounts that are no longer valid.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.

 

Thank you,

 

 ..Al

[Ikrananka]

Well strangely I suddenly received two email thread notifications but no others, despite there being updates that I have found where I should have received an email.

[+InsaneMultitasker]

5 hours ago, Ikrananka said:

Yesterday, or perhaps the day before, I stopped receiving all email notifications/subscriptions from AtariAge.  Visiting the site today, I was presented with a red message stating that my email address had stopped accepting emails.  My email is a hotmail account that is still receiving emails from many other senders and so is definitely still working.  AtariAge.com is on my safe senders list and so emails from AA aren't being sent to junk mail, i.e. both my inbox and junk mail show no signs of any emails from AA over the past few days.

 

Has anything changed on the AA email notifications side that may have caused this issue for me?

 

I did update my email on AA, using the same email address, and again am still getting no email notifications from AA.

I've noticed the same thing where I failed to receive email updates today and possibly yesterday.  I wasn't presented with any AtariAge messages stating my email address had stopped accepting emails.  There is nothing in the junk folder (besides junk) and email from others is working properly.  

 

 

[Pixelboy]

I had to change my recorded e-mail address to an alternate address, as Hotmail is blocking atariage.com. I can't even "re-register" my Hotmail address linked to my account on the AtariAge forums, because the confirmation e-mail is getting blocked.

 

I'm worried they will block e-mails from Team Pixelboy (I've had problems with this in the past) since it's on the same e-mail server.

 

[Ikrananka]

2 hours ago, Pixelboy said:

I had to change my recorded e-mail address to an alternate address, as Hotmail is blocking atariage.com. I can't even "re-register" my Hotmail address linked to my account on the AtariAge forums, because the confirmation e-mail is getting blocked.

Well that's not good - what is going on with Microsoft!!!!  I assume that you had to change to a non-Hotmail address and that outlook.com addresses will be similarly affected.  I might just have to change mine to my ISP provided email until this is resolved.

 

Has anyone been in contact with Albert about this?

Edited January 17, 2021 by Ikrananka

[Ikrananka]

Just tried an outlook.com account and AA is being blocked there too.

 

So, I've now changed to a gmail account and that is working fine.  All very frustrating.  I'll PM Albert just to make sure he is aware of the problem.

[Albert]

4 hours ago, Pixelboy said:

I'm worried they will block e-mails from Team Pixelboy (I've had problems with this in the past) since it's on the same e-mail server.

The Team Pixelboy site is on a completely different server, so that won't be affected by this at all.

 

 ..Al

[Pixelboy]

8 minutes ago, Albert said:

The Team Pixelboy site is on a completely different server, so that won't be affected by this at all.

 

 ..Al

Good to know, thanks. 

 

[Ikrananka]

Thanks Albert.  I'll reset my email back to my hotmail account and will let you know if I have any more issues.

[Albert]

1 minute ago, Ikrananka said:

Thanks Albert.  I'll reset my email back to my hotmail account and will let you know if I have any more issues.

Thank you!

[Ikrananka]

Just reset my email to hotmail and got the validation email within a minute.  Notifications already seem to be coming through okay but I guess time will tell.....

Edited January 17, 2021 by Ikrananka

[Albert]

Just now, Ikrananka said:

Just reset my email to hotmail and got the validation email within a minute.  Notifications already seem to be coming through okay but I guess time will tell.....

Thanks for confirming.  Should be fine until I start playing around with this again. 

 

 ..Al

[Ikrananka]

3 minutes ago, Albert said:

Thanks for confirming.  Should be fine until I start playing around with this again. 

Noooooo......  Just kidding.  What a complicated mess.  I wish you luck with getting this resolved.  Must be very frustrating.

[+InsaneMultitasker]

Indeed, what a mess     I received five notifications today via my usual email address

3 hours ago, Albert said:

I would appreciate if people can report whether their notifications start coming through again.

Thank you very much

[Albert]

1 minute ago, InsaneMultitasker said:

Indeed, what a mess     I received five notifications today via my usual email address

Excellent, thank you for confirming!

 

 ..Al

[Thomas Jentzsch]

Thanks for explaining, Al. That might explain why I got some notifications and some not.

 

BTW: That voting is new, no? But isn't that somewhat redundant with the likes? Also I don't like the option of down voting on a friendly website like AtariAge.

Edited January 17, 2021 by Thomas Jentzsch

[Thomas Jentzsch]

Thanks for explaining. In this context the voting makes sense.

[Albert]

2 hours ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

Thanks for explaining, Al. That might explain why I got some notifications and some not.

Email is such a pain in the ass, especially when you are sending so many emails. The forum sends about 10,000 emails a day!

2 hours ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

BTW: That voting is new, no? But isn't that somewhat redundant with the likes? Also I don't like the option of down voting on a friendly website like AtariAge.

This is a "Question and Answer" forum.  This is the only forum I've setup like this so far, but if you can think of more forums where such a format would be useful, please let me know.  The up and down voting is to allow the best answer to percolate to the top.  An admin or moderator and ultimately select the best answer, and that will then appear directly below the original question.  So it's not really the same as the likes.

 

 ..Al