dw_maintenance | (no subject)

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.

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Thanks!

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.

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

Oh, Gmail. *facepalm*

Thanks for the update!

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.

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

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.)

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*

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

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.

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.

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

Understood. Knowing it's just a temporary thing to slog through helps. Thanks for the excellent communication!

I just got Gmail copies of comments I made at 3:29 pm (comment timestamp), timestamped 5:59 in Gmail, if that helps any. I don't seem to be missing any, though, they're just delayed. For right now I'm just keeping my DW inbox open in its own tab.

Yeah, this is about what it's looking like for me as well, as far as I can tell. I've definitely been checking the DW inbox as best I can in the meanwhile, though.

that's cool. i'm just happy that you guys are always right on this stuff!

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?

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.

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.

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

We only hate it when it doesn't do what we want. To misquote Churchhill, it's the worst form of communication except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

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