If you are using an MSN email account

[Dave A]

This notice affects any members that have joined The Forum SA using an MSN related email account.

Please be advised that MSN has blocked The Forum SA's IP address for email delivery to MSN group email accounts. This applies to all live, hotmail and msn email accounts. The precise cause of the block being implimented by MSN is not currently understood.

I am currently communicating with MSN in an attempt to resolve the issue. However, if the problem is not resolved by the end of today I will have to suspend all profiles associated with these email accounts to prevent further harm to the good email practices of The Forum SA from occuring.

I regret any inconvenience caused.

[IanF]

Dave
We had some emails blocked to hotmail and they cited a Hetzner ip address as the problem. Hetzner are looking into this but said we should use our adsl provider for sending emails in the meantime. If they send me further info I will post it.

[Dave A]

Hetzner are looking into this but said we should use our adsl provider for sending emails in the meantime.

Not an option when it comes to system generated email from TFSA

But thanks for letting me know Ian. That indicates that it's quite possibly an IP range involved, so not something that TFSA has done specifically.

So far MSN has been unresponsive (now 13 hours since my first enquiry to them).

This reminds me of an incident a couple of years ago when the entire South African IP range was RBL'd by a spam filter service. That was a circus too.

[Dave A]

The latest update I've got on this issue is a number of South African ISPs are affected.
None seem to have gotten to the bottom of what has caused it, or any closer to resolving it.
There has been no feedback from MSN to myself, or any of the ISPs I've spoken to.

I am currently communicating with MSN in an attempt to resolve the issue.

Perhaps I should have said "I've been collecting support tickets from MSN" - communicating implies a two way dialogue

Seeing as this issue is not specific to TFSA, I'll not be suspending account profiles associated with MSN emails at this time, and will try to ride the issue out until there's more news.

[Dave A]

Email just in:

Hello,

My name is Gary and I work with the Windows Live Hotmail Sender Support Team.

We have reviewed the information in your ticket and your IP/s and determined that it is eligible for mitigation of your deliverability problem. This process may take 24 - 48 hours to replicate completely throughout our system. Please note that mitigating this issue does not guarantee that your email will be delivered to a user's inbox.

The good news is the situation should return to normal shortly.

Unfortunately no feedback on the original cause of the problem, though.

[Norri]

Dave, I use Mandrill.com to make sure emails from my sites get delivered. It's great and it's free up to 12,000 emails a month.

You just need a free MailChimp.com to take advantage of the free 12,000 emails offer.

[Dave A]

I've always held that TFSA shouldn't have to use third party mailers at all - emails from the site shouldn't need to be cloaked in another sender's reputation. So I'm quite happy to work through the occassional email deliverability problem - it helps keep our practices up to date with the latest standards.

Happily deliverability issues are a pretty rare occurence nowadays. The last major one was over two years ago, and that was as a result of someone trying to monetize their RBL service by blackmailing bulk mail senders into subscribing to a paid whitelist service. It backfired - the whole ISP industry just dropped the RBL service instead.

I've got a sneaking suspicion this latest issue might be because MSN is looking to drive greater adoption of their feedback loops. But that's just a wild guess.

The other possibility is a reverse DNS lookup timeout. I had to run MSN's reverse DNS lookup test a few times as I was working through the resolution process, and it failed once - probably as a result of a time out (damn the lag on SA's international connectivity). But that's a problem for all SA local hosting.

[Norri]

Mandrill is a transactional email service, the benefits of which include:

- Wrapping your emails in templates. With this, you can have your "lost password" and similar emails be branded properly AND include 10%-20% marketing material, like Amazon does. Very effective stuff as transactional emails have an open rate MANY times higher than marketing emails.
- Tracking emails sent from your site.
- Knowing what got delivered and what bounced.
- Having logs to see WHY something from your site bounced.
- Seeing what links people are clicking (even in plain-text emails, through link re-writing)
- Improved deliverability because that's all they do, deliver email, so they do it well.
- It's more like outsourcing your SMTP server than relying on their reputation for your email sending.
- You need to modify your DNS records to add SPF and DKIM records to "authorise" their servers for sending on your behalf.

I've saved me money on people cancelling accounts with me because they didn't receive replies to their support requests. I've also saved money on clients requesting refunds because they never got the email from the site saying their payment was received. And I've made money in renewals from people who otherwise would have not received their renewal reminders.

Mweb.co.za is a particular pain in the ass. I've had countless issues with emails from my site never being delivered to an @mweb.co.za address. Pretty serious stuff when you're trying to email people support replies, payment notifications and renewal reminders!

Having said all that, it's admittedly a service better suited for e-Commerce sites (like www.just1.co.za) than forums. (Still, I now use it on every site and have definitely noticed an improvement in activations of accounts, etc.)

[Dave A]

Having said all that, it's admittedly a service better suited for e-Commerce sites than forums.

Precisely.

[IanF]

Hetzner have just replied and said this has been resolved with hotmail so I can go back to using the normal address.

[SilverNodashi]

Hetzner have just replied and said this has been resolved with hotmail so I can go back to using the normal address.

Did they state what the problem was?

[IanF]

Did they state what the problem was?

Nothing was mentioned about the problem just an email from them.

[Dave A]

Did they state what the problem was?

Nothing was mentioned about the problem just an email from them.

That would probably be because even MSN doesn't know what's causing it.

Anyhow, the problem is back (Best I can tell their fix only lasted 14 hours). And once again the affected IP range is all around us.

I've taken it up with MSN - and here was the response:

Hello,

My name is Joseph and I work with the Windows Live Hotmail Sender Support Team.

We have reviewed the information in your ticket and your IP/s and determined that it is eligible for mitigation of your deliverability problem. This process may take 24 - 48 hours to replicate completely throughout our system. Please note that mitigating this issue does not guarantee that your email will be delivered to a user's inbox

Looks familiar

My occassionally shaky faith in Microsoft being now thoroughly undermined, I have felt obliged to take some measures. So currently all MSN hosted free email services have been blocked from making new member registrations. This will continue until my faith in Microsoft has been restored some - which might be a while at this rate.

So if you are using an msn, live or hotmail email account - I suggest you try pretty much anything else, because the msn group seems to be the only email service that has this problem at the moment.

Of course, that's only because Microsoft is the best

[kleva]

On the SPF issue that Norio mentioned, your server is already confirming SPF (not DKIM though). But then I also remember the "Eish" about the DNS RFC we had earlier this year with my domain

SPF Confirmation header:

Authentication-Results: my mailserver name
smtp.mail=webmaster@theforumsa.co.za; spf=pass
Received-SPF: pass (my mailserver name: domain of webmaster@theforumsa.co.za
designates your IP address as permitted sender)

[Dave A]

your server is already confirming SPF (not DKIM though).

DKIM is set up, though

Mind you, I have changed from qmail to postfix a couple of months ago (actually as a result of our correspondence when you were joining TFSA as I recall). Qmail's pedantic concern about how the receiving domain's email service was set up was something I felt we could do without.

So is my server not validating the DKIM given in the email, then?