Denise (![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png)
denise) wrote in ![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png)
dw_maintenance2016-04-15 07:11 pm
denise) wrote in dw_maintenance2016-04-15 07:11 pm
(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.
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.
Re: Oh, wow
I was curious what that looks like (I last set up MX records 10 years ago on my own website, so my memory is long gone on that) so I googled some and found a checking service which says DW has only one MX record - http://www.intodns.com/dreamwidth.org. I'm not sure how to interpret the data as the website checking DW's information could of course be wrong, or DW could in fact have just one MX record, like it says. I'm passing along what it says just in case it in any way relates to the current problem, which of course I doubt, but just to be on the safe side...
And thanks for the warning on running one's own mailserver...if it's that much trouble I probably won't do it (and this might make people who know me laugh, but I was eying the comment up above about AOL not experiencing delays with a lot of hope...because as much as I don't like AOL, as a company, I think I *would* switch to their interface before I'd switch to using Yahoo's or Gmail's).
Azz was telling me a story above that kind of reflects what DW's going through now with GMail, only worse (mail was not slow - nope, it simply disappeared thanks to someone else's bad behavior on the same server!) which makes me realize I'd probably have to buy my own rack space just to avoid most of the possible issues. With running your own mailserver being decidedly more difficult than running your own web server, I see no reason to put myself through that (after all, dedicated rackspace is very expensive).
I hope all the email slowness gets resolved soon!