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

Putting you in the awkward position of being both an automated mail-generator, as well as remailer. That's a tough position, and there is no way to keep everyone happy. We can't use enforcing-mode DMARC at DayJob because we need deliverability far more than anti-phishing; all it really does for us is tell other mailers that subdomains should be bit-bucketed.

Waiting for IP reputation to regenerate sucks a lot.

The incredibly painful thing about all of this is that there's windows of normal delivery and you think 'hey, maybe it's gotten back to normal', then you have an hour to six/seven hours up of delay, and it sucks.

Yeah, exactly. We've discussed a few ways of fixing it while keeping the DW mailing address -- a necessity, given how much certain people, myself included, rely on it! -- but all of them require more than a bit of work, so we haven't settled yet on what the best solution is.

Fucking email!