Email notifications

[mickthemaverick]

The last 10 or so posts on my subscribed topics have not sent me an email notification. I have checked my preferences in User Control and I am set correctly. Is there an issue with the email server?

[xantia_v6]

There is an ongoing issue but intermittent with delivery of forum notification emails to users with microsoft, outlook, hotmail, yahoo, livemail accounts (all operated by Microsoft).

Due to the way that the large email operators (especially Microsoft) manage their spam blocking systems, email servers which send only a few hundred emails each day are penalised, and to get reliable delivery we have (for about 2 years now) used an Amazon email service to aggregate our emails into a larger flow which (until about a week ago) gets reliably through the Microsoft spam filters.

About a week ago something changed (not sure if it was at Amazon or Microsoft) and Microsoft have marked some of Amazons mail servers as spam sources and refuse to accept email from them. Amazon have several email servers and not all of them are affected, so some notification emails have been getting through, while others are blocked. The proportion getting blocked varies on a daily basis. Today seems to be 100% blockage.

The problem has nothing to do with the content of our emails, nor the FCF mail server. There is not much that we can do about this, other than hope that Amazon and Microsoft are talking to each other.

[GiveMeABreak]

You're not alone Mick, I am also getting notifications one minute and not the next from the Forum, so as Mike says, it's a bit hit and miss.

For now, Just check the notifications icon on the website to see if you have any new posts.

[mickthemaverick]

If I follow that correctly the emails are getting through to gmail accounts I take it? Thus if this is going to be an ongoing issue outside the FCF's control I may consider swapping to my gmail, which ironically is the one I give out to random retailers to avoid my hotmail account being choked.

[xantia_v6]

The issue does not affect gmail, nor other smaller email providers. I will try notifying Amazon (but there must be many other users affected). I know from experience that any attempt to contact Microsoft is futile.

[mickthemaverick]

I got my first email notification for 36 hours at tea time - maybe it's on the mend?

[xantia_v6]

I am in the process of moving our email delivery to a different Amazon regional centre to work-around this issue. It is not a trivial process and may cause general disruption to delivery of notifications if it does not go well.

Unfortunately I can't report the problem to Amazon, as to do so requires a monthly support subscription which casts about 10 times more than the monthly cost of the service with the problem...

[mickthemaverick]

I have had a further couple of notifications since my last post. I appreciate your efforts on this issue Mike, despite having your hands tied!! Good luck with it!

[xantia_v6]

Emails started bouncing again earlier today.

I have now reconfigured our email service so that forum notifications are sent via Amazon's London node rather than the one in Sydney Australia. At first glance it seems to be working, but it may all go wrong.

[mickthemaverick]

I'm getting a full service at the moment. Thanks Mike

[xantia_v6]

The email delivery system seems to have settled down with the new delivery node, and delivery rate is 100%.

Can I remind everyone to please refrain from marking forum notifications as spam, as this affects our sender reputation. If you don't want to receive email notifications, there is an unsubscribe link at the bottom of most notification emails.

[Tom309]

Sorry another question this time on the forum notfications. I only found your reply to my orginial request on the 307 by accident when I was surfing the site.
As my post was was moved (correctly) to another thread, I didn't get an email notification that you had replied. I have since checked on my notifications on the forum and I can now see that there was one there. Unfortunately I didn't check at the time as I seem to be "stuck" on 4 new notifications. I can't tick the box for read/unread on any but the 4 unread ones and ticking the box doesn't seem to make any difference. The others don't show up as new notifications. So some guidance on this would be appreciated. In the meantime I have changed my preferences to get email notifcation for quoted text.

[GiveMeABreak]

@Tom. Just go through and set up your notification preferences as you want them. Ticking the box next to individual notifications on the notifications list of the main Forum page (so they are unticked) won't do anything until you refresh the browser page, then when you go back into the notifications list, any items you previously unchecked are no longer there.

[mickthemaverick]

I fear the microsoft email gremlin may have raised its ugly head again. I have not received any new post notifications since around lunchtime so am continually checking the onsite notifications tab!!

[mickthemaverick]

Typically I just got a notification for Steve's post on POTD so I suspect Mike has been waving his magic wand?