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

A follow up notice I got from them was:

Google had said, "It's still not showing the outbound activity though, presumably where the delay occurred, which would need to come from Amazonses' server logs. "

that means the message coming from Dreamwidth (going thru the Amazonses' server) is where the delay is occurring. Once it's delivered to Google it goes nearly instantaneously to the recipient. Obviously, Google isn't privvy to the information before it reaches Google.

However, I had a couple more questions and have asked my Google contact. It has to do with Amazonses in particular. When I hear back, I'll reply in this thread.

So it looks like you might have to have a chat with amazonses.

AmazonSES is Amazon's Simple Email Service (or something like that), which Dreamwidth and a lot of other sites use for sending large volumes of email. It's generally pretty reliable, though, and if it was affecting everyone using Amazon's cloud services and SES, we'd probably hear about it more widely.

It's confusing. Could the Google forum people be looking just at the last attempt, and not seeing the earlier attempts that got greylisted and delayed, because only the last one is coming through?

Honestly, I'm not entirely sure as I'm not at all technically inclined. I just did as asked, which was to c/p the 'show original' in the delayed notif and send it to them. I also included the original site link to the notif in question so they could see that there was indeed a delay of 2+ hours from when I got the DW notif on site/when it was posted to when the email came through on my end. There may be more info to cross, I don't know, but I'll just have to wait to hear back from the person helping on that site. I don't actually know if maybe this is greylisting for DW on AmazonSES's end, but this definitely all started on/around the most recent code push and it has gotten steadily worse since then, with it starting with small windows of notif delays to now where we have notif delays consistently for the last 2-3 days.

Other than what I'm doing, which is relaying info, I don't know what else to do. If anyone has any suggestions, I think we'd be happy to hear them.