(no subject)

[denise]

People getting mail at Gmail are reporting email delays of about an hour. As far as I can figure out, it's because some of our recent changes to our network have wiped out our existing sending reputation with them and made us start building reputation again, and they're refusing all mail on first delivery and making us re-send it. (It's a common spam reduction technique, because spammers don't bother retrying if the first attempt fails.)

There isn't much we can do about it but wait it out until Gmail decides that we're legit senders again, but we'll poke at it and see if there's anything we can do to make the process go faster. (I doubt there will be, though; Gmail is persnickety.) In the meantime, to get comment notification email faster, you can switch your confirmed email to a different provider, or just refresh your on-DW inbox.

EDIT: And people are now letting me know that mail's delayed to other providers, too, which is probably follow-on effects from having to send everything to Gmail at least twice. There isn't a lot we can do about it; I'm sorry about the hassle, folks.

Comments

[alexseanchai]

Thanks!

[minim_calibre]

I'm noticing them with Yandex, too, which is odd for Yandex. (I switched to it because I had so many issues with other providers.)

That said, it's just in the last couple of hours that I've seen it.

[denise]

Sigh. I'm guessing that Gmail greylisting us has started other mail backing up, since now we have to send every piece of mail to Gmail at least twice and since 90% of our users use gmail, that's a lot of mail.

Again, we'll see if there's anything that can be done about it, but my best guess is, not really. (I hate email.)

[vorbarra]

Thanks for the explanation! I appreciate knowing what's going on. :)

[niqaeli]

Oh, Gmail. *facepalm*

Thanks for the update!

[broken_arrow]

I use a different provider, Yahoo Mail, and I'm not getting notifs either. They were delayed by about an hour last night, and tonight I've been tagging with someone for two hours now and haven't gotten a single notif.

Just wanted to let you know, it's not just gmail.

[denise]

Ugh, my best guess is now that Gmail greylisting us is backing everything else up, since we now have to send everything at least twice (and since 90% of our users use Gmail, that's a lot of mail).

I don't think there's much that can be done, but we'll see if there is anything.

[resipiscent]

hello! i'm on hotmail and i'm GETTING notifs but they're very delayed! thank you for the update though :)

[denise]

Ugh, yeah, the increase in volume to Gmail (since we have to send everything at least twice) seems to be backing up everything else, too.

There isn't really much that can be done other than waiting it out, sadly.

[utselet]

Just to chime in, it's way more than an hour, and has been since last night. I'm getting some notifs in my inbox from hours ago, and I haven't gotten email notifs at all on some replies.

[denise]

Looking into this more, it seems that the massive increase in volume to gmail (since we have to send everything at least twice) is backing everything else up as well. I don't think there's much we can do to improve things other than just waiting it out, but we'll look into it to see if there is anything. (I'm not optimistic. Email is just a fundamentally broken protocol, sigh.)

[jordannamorgan]

Would the backups caused by the Gmail mess be delaying replies to other email services (as in not-free, ISP-based ones)? Because I'm on one of those, and... yep. *sigh*

[denise]

Yeah, we're now starting to see some delays on our end with getting things sent (when I posted this, there weren't) because of the volume of stuff that's being delayed to Gmail. I'm really sorry; we're just going to have to wait it out.

[the]

is there a super loosy-goosy ETA on when notifs might be back to normal?

[denise]

Zero idea, sorry, or I would have said! I have no idea how long it takes Gmail to stop greylisting a new MX record.

[kore]

Oh, GMAIL. (They've started to send good mail to my spam and spam to my inbox again.) Also, thank you for keeping us updated and being so informative about issues like this.

[brave_heart_verity]

Try more like three hours. I just got the notification about this post.

Livable, but annoying. Any idea how long it'll take before it gets better?

[denise]

No idea, sadly. I've asked Robby to look into whether there's anything we can do on our end to speed things up (Mark is on vacation) but I don't think there is anything other than "wait for Gmail to acknowledge that we're not spammers".

I hate email.

[betyoucanbetyoucant]

So far I've seen that AOL/AIM is letting you get alerts. That's the email I connected this journal specifically to after trying to get with gmail and hotmail.

[supraliminally]

Is there anything we can do on our ends? Like some kind of account setting to manually whitelist anything from your domain?

[denise]

No, the problem is on the provider level, not the individual account level!

Oh, wow

[marahmarie]

People getting mail at Gmail are reporting email delays of about an hour.

For reasons related to Microsoft flagging DW's email as spam, I forward my DW email from Gmail to Outlook, which means the same delays, I guess, and that I have no provider left to switch to that I could tolerate (in fact, I can't tolerate GMail nor Yahoo, which is why I forward email to Outlook - the latter's interfaces are too garish, cluttered and arcane for me to deal with).

But I'm wondering how Dreamwidth is not whitelisted with all major email providers by now (it's been online for eight years! I think!). It seems weird that major email providers don't make more of an effort to ensure legitimate organizations such as Dreamwidth don't get flagged as spam senders.

And it's frustrating. If the bottlenecks continue with big providers as reported in the OP I guess I'll have to find a smaller provider to switch to (or buy a website to set up an email server like I've talked about but have never actually done) as Outlook is my favorite but has not, as far as I know, let DW's email through in the last year (edit: just checked my own DW and according to a post I made about it, it's been a year and four months since that particular problem started).

Re: Oh, wow

[azurelunatic]

My buddy and I were just chatting tonight about spam blacklists and how hard it is to navigate even when you know what you're doing. He manages his own email server and subscribes to one of the less extortionate blacklists (there are many spam blacklists out there, and some are more reliable than others) and this week he got a call from his insurance agent asking whether he had the information ready to send over that the agent had asked for in his last email. Turns out that while the agency's automatic mass email stuff was getting through just fine, his agent was sending from home or some such thing, via an outgoing server shared with a lot of other customers ... and when one of the 1000+ other people using that server gets compromised and starts sending out spam, then everything sent via that outgoing server is suspect. And it had got onto the blacklist, badly enough that my buddy's mail server wasn't just dropping it in the spam bucket, it was just kinda dropping it without acknowledgment. He would have never known if the agent hadn't called, because other email from the same domain (but being sent via a different mail server) was getting through. Best of luck if you do wind up managing your own server! I salute everyone who makes the attempt, because the world needs people willing to make a go of it to see if they can.

Longevity doesn't necessarily mean that much when there's been a sudden change in pattern, since there's always the chance that a spammer compromised a legitimate provider and is now attempting to fire the spam-cannon double-quick before they get shut down and have to compromise someone else's mail server. I suspect that the bigger the provider, the less they care about individual email getting through as long as they can lower their spam volume and reduce their hours of labor to email traffic ratio. :\

[jeeps]

I live about 10 minutes from Google, want I should go bust down their doors?

[azurelunatic]

Ooo, a field trip?! :D :D :D

[saturnofthemoon]

Thanks for keeping us updated.

[jazzyjj]

Thanks for your excellent work as always. I've actually been wondering something for some time now. What exactly is a "subdomain" of gmail? Not to stray too off topic here, but that is the address with which I signed up on Dw in the end, and it also happens to be my work account. Lol don't tell them I said that. Actually they've been pretty cool with me working from home, at least ever since I started doing so. I'm using a web interface, but it's not at all cluttered like some of them are. At least not in the HTML view. I'm pretty sure that's how I'm accessing it. But back to Dw. I've not experienced this yet but if and when I do I'll report back. Btw, not a big deal about the subdomain question, but if one of you kind souls can offer up an explanation of this that would be cool.

[azurelunatic]

I'm not sure exactly what it means in context of gmail, but in the broader sense of domains, it's something like:

Say you own example.com. You want to have a main website, and you decide to put it at www.example.com. www is the subdomain that's set up for the website.

Say you want to have a different website on a completely different server. The easiest way is to set up a separate subdomain, something like website2.example.com. website2 would be the subdomain.

Commercial email service providers

[babysprite]

Each seems to "do its own thing" and maintain it's own set of inter-networking standards.

I stay with my ISP email, read and send correspondence in plain text.

[dollie]

I guess it's not just Gmail. I use Yahoo for all my accounts and I get notifs at least 6-8 hours later, depending. Hopefully things work out and good luck.

[talkswithwind]

My deepest sympathies on email deliverability problems. That kind of thing falls into my Dayjob responsibilities, so I know those feels.

I noticed that dreamwidth.org doesn't have a DMARC entry yet. This is Yet Another Thing to say to mailers, "no, really, I'm me". It works along with SPF and DKIM, which are already set up.

Last month, Amazon SES added support to customize the MAIL FROM: address in the SMTP conversation. This is a big thing for SES customers, as it makes DMARC much easier to set up. Create an SPF record in the 'dreamwidth.org' domain, set it up right with -all at the end, and deliverability would increase a bit. Better yet for troubleshooting, gmail will put a helpful additional header in messages saying how well incoming email passes DMARC, SPF, and DKIM

dmarc=pass (p=NONE dis=NONE) header.from=dreamwidth.org

Pretty handy.

One caveat I know from bitter experience. Setting a policy to enforcing will break mail-forwards. People who have gmail addresses but forward email off of gmail will generate bounces like, "Mail administrators at $domain have administratively prevented this email from delivering," which will break things. Great for platforms where nonrepudiation is more important than deliverabiity, not so great for platforms where deliverability is paramount.

[azurelunatic]

One of the things that has turned out to create difficulties is that Dreamwidth offers an @dreamwidth.org forwarding address as well as sending notifications from an @dreamwidth.org address. Therefore a lot of the stuff which could be done to verify Dreamwidth's notifications would screw up that.

`\_(ツ)_/`

[burn_the_world_down]

Have we heard any word about this? I know you are trying, but it is starting to get a little old, getting everything on time, then going back to not getting anything. It's not even consistent anymore, the delay.

[denise]

I know it's frustrating, and I'm really sorry. There isn't anything we can do, though -- it's entirely out of our hands. Gmail is a black box: we get no feedback, no timetable for changes, and no hint as to what's causing the problem. It's frustrating as hell for us just as much as it is for you.

The problem where greylisted mail to Gmail was causing all mail to slow down has mostly stopped being an issue (although it can start up again at any time if the backlog to Gmail gets too large), so if you have another email address available, you might want to confirm that email address on your account and switch to it temporarily. If you forward the mail from that account to your gmail account, you might get mail to your gmail account more quickly: when you forward mail, Gmail thinks it comes from the intermediate sender, and whatever intermediate sender you pick probably isn't on Gmails' greylisting list right now.

[zunge]

I am noticing this problem with yahoo mail. Notifs are late by anywhere from fifteen minutes to several hours.

[denise]

Sadly, that's happening because if we have too many backed up messages to Gmail (because Gmail is refusing the first attempt at sending), the queue gets clogged and mail to other destinations can't make it through the backup. I know it sucks and I'm sorry -- I wish there were something more we could do to fix it, but we're just going to have to wait it out.

[blueraccoon]

Did the issue with Hotmail/Outlook ever get resolved? I switched to Gmail for notifications when Outlook listed DW as a spammer, and this post just made me think about it.

[denise]

I'm not entirely certain, honestly!

[sockiness]

I've been through a lot of code pushes here and I'm generally used to notifs being borked for the day of/into the next day after something pretty big. This, however, takes the damn cake. And no, I'm not blaming you at all, but I'm sort of beyond frazzled now that this has gone on as long as it has (as I'm still getting windows of both delays from an hour up to 3+ as well as blips of normal notif time) and no real way to contact gmail and tell them to smarten up beyond leaving feedback (which I have) and just sitting here waiting. If this is them being 'unsure' about a site, they can just... I don't know. Figure out a way to validate quicker, because anything over 3 days is bullhooey and this is well past that. (again, not blaming you, but just venting a wee bit)

[nopesock]

Okay, you know what? This is obviously not going to get fixed. It's time to shitcan support for gmail on this site.

[denise]

Considering that 90% of DW users use Gmail, that would be kind of counterproductive!

Believe me, I know this is incredibly frustrating -- we're just as frustrated. The worst of the problem to non-Gmail accounts only happens at times of high mail load, but "times of high mail load" inherently mean the times the most people are using the site. If there were anything at all we could have done, we would have done it a long time ago.