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[Faulkner]

Without boring all of you to tears -- my host provider has a little snafu with email. The emails arise from various sources; web email accounts that I create, notifications to tickets I submit, the mailing list, and notifications that come from this bulletin board.

It looks like they finally got their act together. I've tested email from all of those sources, except here. Would someone please reply to this post -- so I can examine the notification I receive?

Thanks
Dan

(P.S. Roger -- Comcast is rejecting email to you for perhaps a different reason -- I'm still working on that)

[Ron Keij]

Hi Dan,

I noticed recently that I did not get email notification after a reply was posted in one of my active topics. No big deal because I check the forum at least once a day but it would be nice if it'll work again.

Comcast must be the worst provider in the world! They are blocking my emails to Roger no matter what address I use to send one

Ron

[Denver 59 Fin Convert]

Dan, test email worked fine for me, I received it on my AOL account today.

John Quinn
Denver 59 Fin Convert
Arvada,Colo

[Nighthawk]

Dan, test email worked fine for me, I received it on my AOL account today.

John Quinn
Denver 59 Fin Convert
Arvada,Colo

Yeah, worked fine for me too!

[Faulkner]

Hi Dan,

I noticed recently that I did not get email notification after a reply was posted in one of my active topics. No big deal because I check the forum at least once a day but it would be nice if it'll work again.

OK, here's the deal about this... (prepared for a long-winded, boring explanation!)

Every server has a name and an "address" -- an "Internet Protocol" address, or IP address. Names are useful to people, but computers want to know addresses. Every time we use a name (e.g., 59plymouth.net), our computers use something called DNS -- Domain Name Services -- to look up the address from the name. DNS servers talk to each other all over the world, and when a name is added, removed or changed (as ours was changed recently, because I moved to a more secure server with a new IP), they communicate that. That way, when you use your service providers DNS, it knows where to send your browser.

Email servers use DNS too. Recently, someone very clever realized that a lot of spammers "forge" names -- that is, they say mail is coming from mail.ibm.com, when in fact it's coming from I.am.a.spammer.net. So they realized that the way to block a lot of spam, is to do "rDNS" -- reverse domain name services. So if a mail server gets an email from a certain IP address that says it's ibm.com, it does a reverse lookup on the IP to get the name -- and if it's not ibm.com, but something else, it rejects it.

My mail admin (for rad.upenn.edu) recently incorporated rDNS, and I stopped getting notifications from 59forum. He made an exclusion so I started getting them again -- but here's why it failed...

For rDNS to resolve properly, an email server needs to define two records correctly -- an "A" record and a "PTR" record. These define the name to address, and address to name mappings. The provider for our website has not defined these properly! I've identified the problem to them, and they've fixed (1) the mailing list (which is why I sent the test email yesterday), and (2) notifications from their own trouble ticketing system -- but not from the 59forum. Not yet, anyway... At least they are working with me, so I hope this resolves soon.

I don't know if that's why you're not getting emails, Ron -- either rDNS was working with the old set of servers, but isn't now -- or, your service provider (zeelandnet.nl) has recently incorporated rDNS to cut down on spam.

Comcast must be the worst provider in the world! They are blocking my emails to Roger no matter what address I use to send one

Yes, I think this is a different problem. Comcast has a high sensitivity to spam, and when they decide spam is coming from another user on a mail server (could be on opentransfer.com, the server that handles our website's email, or a real spammer elsewhere on zeelandnet.nl), they block the whole server.

There's a way to request that you become "whitelisted" after you've been "blacklisted" -- it may actually involve Comcast sending Roger an email saying, "do you want to get email from this person?" I don't know -- but I'm working on it. Stay tuned...

Dan