mark: A photo of Mark kneeling on top of the Taal Volcano in the Philippines. It was a long hike. (Default)
Mark Smith ([staff profile] mark) wrote in [site community profile] dw_maintenance2010-04-08 02:08 pm
Entry tags:

Earthlink email delivery

First off -- we've constantly had problems with Earthlink blocking us since we launched over a year ago. I've had to request us be unblocked on average once a month and it's kind of frustrating -- they're the only provider that is doing this!

So, I'm sorry to anybody who's using Earthlink to receive email. We do our best to get unblocked as soon as we hear about it, but sometimes we don't find out about it until after you do -- and I know that's frustrating. Getting notifications in a timely fashion is really important on a site like Dreamwidth.

We're trying to work on a better long term resolution (getting on some sort of whitelist?) but it's going to take some time.

But! Maybe you can help:

Does anybody reading this have contacts within Earthlink's systems administration/mail group? If we could talk to someone directly, we could probably get this resolved permanently in a few hours. It's finding someone to talk to that's the hard part!

Thanks in advance!
trixtah: (Default)

[personal profile] trixtah 2010-04-09 11:01 am (UTC)(link)
Um, the convention, if you are suffering from issues sending mail, is to email postmaster@[domain], which should be a monitored address, per the terms of RFC 2821. Or abuse@[domain] for spam.

I certainly don't muck about trying to negotiate "customer support", because I am not a customer. I represent an organisation that is trying to send mail to a customer of theirs, and it's not the same thing at all. You'd be surprised at the number of organisations that have no provision for raising trouble-tickets for external parties, assuming they actually care. So it's best to just cut to the chase, or get an ACTUAL customer to raise it as a support issue with the approved channels.
green_knight: (Archer)

[personal profile] green_knight 2010-04-09 11:35 am (UTC)(link)
Trying postmaster is a good idea, but I see the main problem differntly from you: as far as I make out, what I am trying to do in situations like this is to get _past_ the customer support person (who might be working from a script, and might be working without any authorisation at all) and to get the situation escalated to the managerial level where someone *can* take an action.

If the information isn't publicly available, 'who do we need to contact to resolve this' is a legitimate question. (And yes, I've dealt with this on both sides of the equation.)
trixtah: (Default)

[personal profile] trixtah 2010-04-09 12:16 pm (UTC)(link)
Yes, but my point really boils down to the fact that "postmaster" is publicly available information, when it comes down to sending email.

I do actually agree with your broader point - every organisation should have a "Contact Us" or "Info" address - but there is a standard route for email (and web sites - "webmaster").