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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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

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

Ah, that's too bad.

Well, thanks for keeping us updated on the situation. We know you're working really hard and we appreciate everything. Good luck.

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

I don't use GMail, so don't know what you should tweak, but my understanding (I'm on a mail-manager's list where the GMail representative often explains how to sort this sort of thing out, as well as how not to get here in the first place) is that this *is* the best way to get gmail to like DW emails again.

If email from DW gets into your spam folder do tell Gmail that it got it wrong; the GMail artificial intelligence will learn that DW mail *is* wanted, then as more people say that they want DW mail their reputation will be restored.

That's the solution for "I'm not getting mail from a place because Gmail is putting it into my spam folder", but this isn't a per-account issue: the problem is that when we tell Gmail "hey, we have this email for one of your users", Gmail says "we're not sure yet that you're not a spammer, so go away and come back in an hour to try again". It's called greylisting, and it happens because people sending legit mail will try again in an hour, while spammers don't.

Once you've sent them enough mail that they're reasonably confident you're not spammers, they stop greylisting you and start delivering mail immediately. It takes time, though, and that's something we can't control. I'm pretty sure that there's nothing Gmail users can do on their end to get a "new" sender out of greylisting faster. (They think we're a new sender because we changed some of our MX records.)