Are we having mail problems today?

[dmcdivitt]

I see where Powweb had an email service issue yesterday, and the advisory says the issue is resolved, and it was because of a bad disk. But email service is extremely slow. Maybe the servers are in the process of catching up. With severe backlog that may take awhile.

At this time I'm hardly getting any email. I have several domains. Some I filter for spam and greylist, and some I don't. For mail with trusted sources I use an unfiltered domain. Last night my wife attempted to set up an eBay account and still has not received a reply through an unfiltered domain address.

I use Yahoo or my cable company ISP for SMTP, and do not send through Powweb. Nothing I send to a Powweb domain gets to me. Maybe it will eventually. I don't know.

So what's the issue? Are we just catching up following an outage? Thanks

[dmcdivitt]

I finally got the test emails I sent out. They were sent through Yahoo SMTP and came back through Powweb. It took about six hours. Man, the email server must really be working hard! That is a considerabler backlog since normally there is no delay at all.

[johnbor]

Are we having mail problems today?

I can receive but cannot send, nothing was changed!

anyone else ?

[roland_oc]

I can't receive. 10 minutes and waiting for two test messages from two different domains and so far nothing.

[YvetteKuhns]

My email has been working fine. Is it possible that your ip addess has been blocked by your ISP? My ISP is RCN.

[roland_oc]

No, not likely. I sent from wo different domains, one of them Hotmail. Hotmail test arrived after about 15 minutes. The other one is still MIA.

[patr547]

I can't receive. 10 minutes and waiting for two test messages from two different domains and so far nothing.

roland, do you have graylisting enabled for your e-mail? if you do it is normal for it to take several minutes to several hours for e-mails to get through unless they are recognized by the graylist filter as coming from an e-mail address which you have recently communicated with

[roland_oc]

Yes I do have graylising enabled. I just sent another test and it arrived immediately. The first test message is still MIA and no NDR on the original server.

[patr547]

ok, graylisting is why you are having your "problem" (which is not actually a problem..)

what graylisting does is basically this:
1) someone sends an e-mail to you
2) server catches it and determines if you have recently communicated with that e-mail address (i believe it is within the past week)
3) if yes, it delivers the messsage immediately
4) if no, the server rejects the message as a "temporary rejection"
5) the sender's mail server eventually realizes that the message was rejected, and then resends it
6) once the destination server receives the message for a second time, it will allow it through

the problem lies in step #5: different mail servers wait different amounts of times to attempt re-delivery of the message. so, it should eventually come through, it's just a matter of when the message is resent by the sending server.

and the point of this? many spam servers do not attempt to resend the message, therefore, blocking spam.

[roland_oc]

Thanks patr547 for the esplanation. I had a vague idea, but now I'm clear. Any idea why/how the second test message from the same user/domain went right through?

[patr547]

i'm finding it hard to put this into words, so if this is confusing just tell me.

-you sent an e-mail from address me@xyz.com, which was rejected by the graylist
at this point, the graylist records the email address/server address and will remember that it has already blocked a message from that address.
-you sent another e-mail from address me@xyz.com. This was allowed by the graylist because the sending e-mail address/server has already been added to the graylist filter from message #1
-you haven't received message #1 yet because the mail server at xyz.com hasn't tried to resend the message yet. once it does attempt to resend, you should get it

does that make sense?

[roland_oc]

Yes it does. Thanks Pat. I added the sender, who a client, to my whitelist, so hopefully the problem won't come up again in the future (unless graylist takes precedence over whitelist)

[YvetteKuhns]

ok, graylisting is why you are having your "problem"

I agree. I never use graylisting. It was a fiasco for clients who have ecommerce sites.

[patr547]

i've gone back and forth on it. i've had it enabled since i joined, but haven't been able to decide if i want to turn it off or not. sure, it would make e-mails go through faster if it is off, but i look at the logs for it and see a bunch of spammers being blocked by it.. decisions, decisions...

[roland_oc]

Does Powweb give you the option to do RBL blocking? I use RBL filtering on my Exchange clients and 99.99% of spam never even gets to the server.

BTW, I just checked my MIA emails and the sending server thinks it went through just fine. The log says it did the handshake, transferred the data and closed the connection with the final message:

"11/19/2007 9:56 AM message transferred to impinc05.yourhostingaccount.com through SMTP"

That was 8 hours ago and still there is no NDR and no message and I could be wrong here, but I don't think the server is going to retry anything. As far as it knows, the messag went through. This is not good.

[IanS]

If the original sender account is from an e-mail provider with many servers then they may keep trying with different servers and continually be added to the greylisting. Check to see if that is happening. When you whitelist it is best to use *.*.*.* as the IP address of the sender.

[marklar]

Patr547, I'm pretty sure that is not exactly how greylisting works. Given your example, I get sent 1 piece of spam, greylist bounces it and adds the server to the list, I get a 2nd piece of spam, greylist lets it straight through as the server has been added to the list. This is obviously not how it works.

[IanS]

Somewhere on these boards I'm sure that Dwight has provided a very full report on how the greylisting works now at Powweb. This was part of discussion on spam filtering when the filtering was percieved by many customers as a big problem. I just can't find it at present :(

[Doc C]

Here is the sticky (http://forum.powweb.com/showthread.php?t=73953).

[patr547]

aha! yeah, you're right marklar, i didn't even realize what i said. now that i look back at it, i couldn't tell you why that 2nd message came through. from my understanding of graylisting, a sender shouldn't be allowed through until the original message was re-delievered.

i'm open to any new ideas..

[dmacminn]

The precedence for inbound mail from an external source:
1. Commercial RBL (SURBL, etc.) check at Server level
2. Valid recipient address exists on Powweb system
3. Check against Whitelist entries -- if listed, send immediately to recipient mailbox
4. If not White, then is it Black? -- if listed, discard message immediately
5. If not White, and not Black -- is Greylisting enabled?
6. If greylist enabled -- a) log the entry as hitting the greylist
b) Is this an entry in the list we have sent to?
(an address is added/auto-whitelisted for 7 days -- if it is already in the list
it is not updated, it expires at the end of 7 days and then gets re-added the
next time you send -- the "sent to" list works differently than the greylist which renovates the date each time it is seen)
If Yes to "sent in 7" then accept the inbound message
c) If not "sent in 7", but already in the log (matching address + IP)
then accept this email and forward to the Spam Threshold Filter
( if it is active (YES)) - otherwise deliver to the recipient mailbox
d) Otherwise, we have not sent in 7, or seen the message sender combo before ---
return a a 452 GL/GL message to the sending server advising that the mailbox
is temporarily unavailable; the sending server should back off 10-15 minutes at minimum, then re-present the email from the same server (IP and address combo), [it should always retry within 4 hours, if it doesn't, the server is not following the RFC rules)
This second send should hit rule/item (c) - logged as already seen, so the message is accepted the 2nd time it is seen.

Remember that if the Spam Threshold filter is on (YES) -- even after a message clears the greylist, it is subject to additional filtering level based on the setting of the recipient mailbox.

How a Greylist Entry is Formed:
There are 3 elements to a greylist entry: the recipient address, the sending IP, and the sending email address. Once this triplet is greylisted, emails from the same triplet will be "ok" for the next 7 days. If any one of the triplet changes, the address is greylisted (the sender is given the GL/GL bounce message - "mailbox temporarily unavailable") and must wait for a retry. An "ok" greylisting entry is valid for 7 days since the last time that triplet was seen. In other words, each time an email is received from that triplet, the 7 day clock is reset (the datestamp is "renovated") and the triplet is ok for another 7 days.

[roland_oc]

Thanks dmacminn for the clarification. I turned off Graylisting on my domains but left spam filtering on. So per your explanation RBL is on by default? If yes which list(s) does Poweweb use?

The missing emails, now almost 24 hours later, are still nowhere to be found and there was not NDR or delivery failure notices to the sender. I don't know how many other emails I may have missed. Is there any way to see if there were any more that got lost?

[retro]

For several minutes, I could not get a response from my domain's POP server (while able to access other internet sites with no problem). It is responding again at the moment.

[dmacminn]

An RBL rejection gives a bounce to the sending server...
A Greylist rejection sends a GL/GL mailbox unavailable response to the sending server
Messages that hit the Greylist update the list for last seen date/time...

[carpenoctem]

The problem I seem to be having is emails coming from yahoo and hotmail are not coming through.....

Any issues on that???


I do not have greylisting or spam filters turned on... this is something that just started today.

[jollymoon]

I have noticed that my email on 3 different domains hosted at powweb are Extremely Slow when I check them and this has been going on for about a week. It is really weird to have DSL 3meg and have to wait 4-5 minutes for email to load. The rest of the webpages I access anywhere on the internet are blazing fast...just email...

What gives?

[YvetteKuhns]

My email often is received instantly while other times it takes minutes (especially when there is an attachment). My ISP is RCN, the PowWeb mail filter is simply adding a prefix to suspicious mail, greylisting is disabled, and I use Squirrelmail/webmail to check mail.

[thmgroup]

We just started experiencing a problem with mail from msn.com email addresses. No problem was seen until last Friday (11/23). As of that date, email from three different msn.com addresses is not coming through. Any ideas?

[jollymoon]

I turned off greylisting and the spam daily journal that is sent automatically.

No change...still very slow....

I haven't noticed a trend in particular email senders...msn...yahoo..etc. Just very, very slow email checking.

I did a chat box and a ticket number at powweb.com support but havent heard back from them ( 3 days now)

I just hate waiting...and worse...maybe I am missing emails that I don't even know about?

[dmacminn]

Hotmail was having some issues -- if you logged in there you would have seen sometimes their site was stalling; and they were issuing Policy Rejection (blocks) that seemed to come and go from what I could see ... maybe one of their servers got into the Christmas punch a bit early...

[IanS]

I'm closing this thread as the OP was referring to a perceived problem of a long time ago.

E-mail problems, if they occur, can be posted in a new or other existing thread depending on the nature of the problem.