No email alerts for six days now - Help Please!

[steve_s.]

Brian, it has been six days now that I have not gotten email

summaries for the B&W Film Processing Forum. I was getting them the

week of May 24. Can you give me ANY information that will help?

 

Your help is greatly appreciated.

 

Steve Sphar

[constance_cook]

Hi Brian:

 

Still nothing arriving here, either.

 

Conni

[pmj]

As a test, I registered for a daily alert on the Nikon forum yesterday and my alert arrived just fine this morning. Maybe Brian has changed something? Did they start working for you as well?

[steve_s.]

Patrick, I have been having this problem for many, many months now. I will get the email alerts (the daily summary of postings to the B&W film processing forum) some days and then not for others. This week was the worst. I did get my daily summary today, but it is the first time since May 31!

 

So I doubt the problem is fixed. Brian, has anything changed?

[mottershead]

<p>I fixed some more problems with the alerts that were preventing many of them from being sent since May 31.

 

<p>However, Conni, you haven't been receiving alerts because your mail server is bouncing them. The error message is:</p>

<code>

< ... your address ... >:<br/>

Connected to 207.115.57.15 but sender was rejected.<br/>

Remote host said: 550 5.0.0 Access denied<br/>

</code>

 

<p>I removed your address so as not to have it posted in the forum. Looks like your ISP mail server doesn't like photo.net; so you probably need to resolve that before you will receive any more alerts. Let me know if there is anything your ISP needs from me.</p>

[constance_cook]

Thanks for letting me know. Today the alerts are back. They arrive in Chicago in the middle of the night sometime so they were there when I checked this morning.

 

I have not changed any of my settings and I sure never noted anything from the board as spam so it is a puzzle.

 

Conni

[oofoto]

Hi, I no longer recieve mail alerts for eos or people photography..

 

are there problems again?

[steve_s.]

Brain, thank you. I have received email alerts for the last two days. I will let you know if I have more problems.

[pmj]

Paul, your e-mail address is marked as bouncing. Please make sure it is working properly, then visit "My workspace" to clear the bounce flag.

[pmj]

<i>Brain, thank you. [...]</I>

<br>-- Steve Sphar

 

<p>

 

Aha. So it's not just me who makes that typo!

[steve_s.]

Patrick, good catch! Sorry, I meant Brian, although I am sure he doesn't mind being called "Brain."

 

On a sadder note, I once again did not get my email alerts today. So the problem is not fixed. I get them for a few days and then not again for a few days. It is extremely frustrating. The main way I use photo.net is to keep track of postings by the daily email summaries. Do you know if this problem is going to get permanently fixed? It has been this way for many, many months.

 

steve

[steve_s.]

Well, I did not get my email alert summary today either. That makes seven days not getting it, then two days getting it, and now two days not. Do you have any information on why this happens?

 

Also, I have asked a couple of times in this post if my email is being bounced but have not gotten an response. Patrick, can you check to see if my email is being bounced back to photo.net? I see no indication of this at My Workspace, but I may not be checking in the right place.

 

Any information you can give me would help. I feel really in the dark here.

[mottershead]

You have been receiving alerts intermittently because you have an earthlink.net mailbox, and there are problems with their setup. Although it is technically correct, it is unusual, and a number of mail servers besides ours have problems with it. But because it *is* technically correct, Earthlink reckons it isn't their problem, and perhaps they have a point. To their credit, they did point us towards some possible workarounds and patches for our mail server, after George Kenney eventually tracked down someone there who knew what he was talking about. With George's help, I only got to the bottom of this yesterday, and I put in what I hope is a workaround to the problem yesterday afternoon.

 

As it happens, the alerts are sent around 3 to 4 AM Eastern Standard Time. But last night, the photo.net servers were down most of the night because of a database problem. So no alerts were sent to anyone, Earthlink or not, and I don't know if the workaround worked. Tonight's "daily" alerts should include two days worth of posts.

 

But, Steve, this complaining about alerts all the time is tiresome. I don't consider alerts to be critical and I don't spend much time monitoring the alerts. There is no commitment whatsoever, even to subscribers, that the forum alerts will be sent, or that if they are sent, that they will get through all the spam-filters, IP blocks, and so forth, to the recipients. The paid photocritique alerts, which are an advertised subscriber benefit, have a much higher priority than the unpaid photocritique and forum alerts. We hardly have enough time to troubleshoot web server and database problems, without trying to figure out why alerts aren't getting through.

 

If you would like to follow a forum, the best thing to do is to visit the site. While you are at it, glance at a couple of ads, and click on one from time to time if you see something that looks interesting. Apart from subscriptions, this is how the site makes enough money to keep running. If you want, you can also get yourself a newsfeed reader. All the photo.net forums have RSS feeds, and these actually are a lot more useful than alerts. Because of this I might eventually get rid of forum alerts, especially considering how much of a pain in the rear they are.

[constance_cook]

Brian:

 

If you do away with alerts, there is no reason for many of us to bother with photo.net again. I have absolutely no interest in photo critique from which you get endless whining but I figure others are interested and we all have our own method of learning.

 

Next time you have a subscription drive let us know which of us won't benefit from being here anymore.

 

My IP says the problem is on the photo.net end which seems reasonable since the problem has appeared recently and affected several of us with different providers. In my case, I have SBC DSL at home but I did not receive alerts at the uiniversity either and they certainly aren't on SBC. When that many of us have a problem in the same time period and it comes from more than one provider, that's pretty good evidence that the problem doesn't reside with the providers. But it won't matter will it, if you do away with the troublesome alerts?

 

Conni

[mottershead]

Conni, only the photocritique alerts are a subscriber feature. Forum alerts are free. If you subscribed to the site to get forum alerts, I guess you wasted your $25.00.

 

To be honest, I don't like the alerts much, especially the forum alerts. Besides putting us in the position of being the bad guy and having to troubleshoot why various mail providers are bouncing alerts, I feel that they take more traffic away from the site than they bring by drawing people back to it. When somebody is "interacting" with the site by reading alerts, they are neither participating in the community, nor are they contributing to traffic and ad impressions. If they are subscribers, then the subscription makes up for it, but most of the forum alert recipients are not subscribers, and at present they don't need to be.

 

I actually had someone a few months ago who appeared in the Site Feedback forum to complain about not receiving his alerts. He admitted in the course of the discussion that it was not only his first post on the site but actually his first actual VISIT, in over a year. Tell me how that helps the site.

 

Regarding SBC, those alerts were bouncing because the photo.net mail server was identifying itself as "www.photo.net". When SBC was doing a reverse DNS lookup on the IP address it was coming back as "photo.net". "www.photo.net" is an alias for "photo.net". But according to SBC, "www.photo.net" does not match "photo.net", and therefore we must be spammers. Bounce the alerts. I changed our mail server to identify itself as "photo.net", which had all sorts of side-effects that had to be resolved. Maybe this will fix the problem, or more likely SBC will find some other thing to object to, and will continue to bounce the alerts.

 

Or how about all the people with "mailblocks" and similar whitelist anti-spam "services" that automatically respond to the alerts by sending me a message asking me to visit some web site and fill in a form or click on a URL, or some stupid thing or other, so that Joe Schmo can receive his mail, since I must otherwise obviously be a spammer. Joe then gets all upset because he isn't receiving his alerts, and all I had to do was follow the simple instructions.

 

This is the kind of thing that we have to deal with now with the alerts, and I'm getting fed up with it, and really wonder if they are worth the trouble.

[constance_cook]

So sorry I bothered you by wasting my money.

Conni

[steve_s.]

Brian, first, thank you for the information about earthlink.net and the workarounds you are doing. I really do appreciate this.

 

Second, this is the first time in four months that you have responded to my inquiries, either on this forum or in emails to you. I am sorry you find this "tiresome." I don't do it to annoy you. I kept asking because you have never answered or even acknowledged my many requests for help.

 

Third, please do not get rid of the forum alerts. It is MUCH easier than using RSS, which I have tried. RSS only gives you the new threads each day, not the responses to previous threads, unless you go into each thread and add an RSS feed to it. If you do that, you might as well just go in a read all the postings.

 

Forum alerts are the main reason I use photo.net. Without them, there is no reason for subscribing to photo.net. I have been a 2 year subscriber and I make my purchases from the advertiser links on your site. Up until now, you have benefited from me financially because of the forum alerts. I am sorry they are a pain to work with.

 

Fourth, please keep up your hard work. It really is appreciated. I just wish I was treated with more consideration and my questions were responded to. At present, my subscription has expired. I am going to see how the forum alerts work out over the next several weeks before I re-subscribe.

 

Best of luck,

 

steve

[constance_cook]

I have been here four years. Over that four years, I have subscribed three times ($75). In April, I bought a Minolta Dimage 5400 film scanner, Silverfast, and 60 rolls of Portra UC through B&H going through photo.net. I do more of that than I should (purchases, I mean - got to cut back).

 

As Steve mentioned in his post, the alerts are useful - the proposed solution is not. If this is just a photo posting site, that should be stated up front. All we have heard for the past year is "photo.net is not free" and that we all needed to pony up. Now, it's just for photo posters useage and the rest of us can take the proverial flying grab. Should have said so upfront. And if photo posters are "it", then why the worry about all the bandwidth useage? That's why the site is here - right? Photo posting?

 

$75 is not a lot of money, but it is more than I would have spent if I had known that the fora users didn't matter and that in the future I would have to go through weird gyrationst to get the information I'm interested in.

 

I visit the site every day unless something happens and I can't get online. So it's not a matter, probably with most of us who get alerts, that we don't visit the site and see the vendors, we do, but it does make the site worthwhile to us.

 

Take the number of visitors to the site each day. How many are subscribers or will buy anything? If they all did, like many of us do, what difference would it make to the site owners? Take all of us who pay up and only use the fora. Eliminate us. What difference will it make to the site owners?

 

Conni

[mottershead]

Conni (and Steve), I think you took what I said the wrong way. If you subscribe, you are certainly doing more towards supporting the site than the vast majority of users, even if you never look at an ad or purchase anything from an affiliate.

 

And, second, the alerts don't use any bandwidth to speak of, and for years they hardly required any attention at all. The reason they have become burdensome is that because of spam and mail-borne viruses, primarily, but also because of the growth in email traffic generally, people who operate mail servers have created a huge variety of different hurdles for people who send mail in bulk to overcome. photo.net does not actually send that much bulk mail, and almost all of it consists of alerts that have been requested. The few messages that are not alerts are normal things like account-opening welcome messages, subscription expiration notices, and the like, and actually people complain because we don't send enough of those kind of thing. We don't send spam, but it is getting harder and harder to get our mail through, and it is requiring more and more attention. Adding to the confusion is the fact that photo.net members are now so concerned about spam that a very high percentage of them change their email addresses to something bogus, usually without bothering to cancel their alerts first. So we also have to try to figure out which bounces represent people who are potentially upset with us because they aren't getting mail, and which ones are alerts that should just be permanently deleted because they can now never be delivered.

 

When it took no work, whether the alerts were good for the site and who was paying for them weren't really issues. But now we have a very high rate of alerts bouncing and people complaining. When you realize how much effort it is taking to get alerts through to a two or three thousand people at the most, mostly non-subscribers, versus improving the site for the 80 to 100,000 visitors per day, you really start thinking that the alerts aren't worth the effort they require.

 

If there was only one mechanism for getting a mail originator declared to be a "white hat", and having jumped the hurdle you could then just send out your mail -- then things would be a lot easier. But that isn't the case. It seems like every mail server has a different set of criteria that you have to satisfy and have added all sorts of additional requirements, all different, on top of what is supposed to be a pretty simple protocol for delivering email. And if you don't happen to meet these requirements, then it is pretty hard to get any cooperation because you are treated as if you must be a first-class scumbag spammer and you are dealing with people who are exasperated and irritable (or else a technical support person in India, etc, who can't actually do anything to help and is mostly being paid to get you off the line as quickly as possible.)

 

Running mail systems, even at the relatively trivial level on which photo.net operates, is extremely not-fun at present, and makes you question whether you really want to be in the situation of trying to send out email at all.