Email notification issue solved

[Steve St.Laurent]

Well, that was a ton of fun! The problem is with the way that vBulletin works although I've figured out a workaround. What happens is if a users email server is down or refusing connections for some reason sendmail keeps retrying for approximately 30 seconds and vB won't move on until sendmail finishes running. Yesterday verizon was refusing connections and we have 84 users on verizon. That was backing up sendmail big time. What I've done as a workaround is that any outgoing emails now go into a queue and that queue is sent out every 5 minutes. So your email notifications could be delayed by up to 5 minutes. The other option was to leave email notifications disabled. The next version of vBulletin is supposed to handle emails in a different manner and we will be moving to that version in 6 months to a year once it's stable and proven.



-Steve St. Laurent

Webmaster

 

[Cooker]

Thanks for the update Steve and thanks also for getting it working again.

 

[rbattelle]

This website is getting too big for its britches! Ever notice how the little "most users ever online" statistic always seems to be just a couple days in the past? And last night at one point I noticed ~225 users online and ~312 guests! There were more guests than users! Amazing how rapidly this site continues to gather a following. If the TDR were a publicly traded stock, I'd buy it!

 

[bighammer]

Nice work, Steve.



When you put in those terms, it almost sounds like I could've dealt with it. I'm sure FINDING the problem was not so simple.

 

[dseabaugh]

Thanks for all your work to keep us running. I can't believe you go to all that work. Can't get anyone to do crap at the many business' we deal with. I was really surprised when I got a notice that I had mail. Have a wonderful day!

 

[Gary - K7GLD]

STEVE, I'm not sure the Verizon bit is typical - I find that today their whole mail system seems to be down, and I'm unable to connect or get any of my Email - may just be a short term anomoly...

 

[Stamey]

A 5 minute delay does not seem like a big deal to me. I can wait a few minutes to get my notification.



Chris

 

[Steve St.Laurent]

GARY (no need to shout btw), Verizon has been a cause of trouble for a lot of webmasters for some time with email it turns out - look at this search and you'll see some of it http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=verizon+Deferred:+450&ei=UTF-8&n=20&fl=0&x=wrt . Regardless the problem is more than verizon. In watching the sendmail system once I knew what was going on quite a few email providers slow things down. The free ones and AOL are the biggest culprits on an ongoing basis. Turns out quite a few sites have simply banned using hotmail, yahoo, etc. I've always noticed that sometimes posting took some time and always thought it was MySQL. It turns out that probably 98% of the time it was sendmail - that won't be the case now.



-Steve

 

[Greg Boardman-RIP]

Three months with no mail. Now I get it..... Thanks, By the way, I can wait 5 minutes... ... Greg

 

[fest3er]

Originally posted by Steve St. Laurent
... I've always noticed that sometimes posting took some time and always thought it was MySQL. It turns out that probably 98% of the time it was sendmail - that won't be the case now... .

That explains why I would sometimes have a post or reply that would take 30-60 seconds or more for submission to complete.

As to the five minutes, I have my email program set to check for new mail every ten minutes. So I will rarely notice the five minute delay.

N

 

[jrobinson2]

Steve

I stopped receving email notifications a few days ago, is this a problem on my end or is it turned of again?

Jared

 

[Steve St.Laurent]

It's a problem on your end with your ISP. There are 20 messages waiting in the queue for you right now - the oldest one the system has been trying to send since January 30th at 4:29 pm. There's only 29 in the queue total and 20 of them are yours. Here is a log entry from the maillog for you:



Feb 1 00:02:53 turbodieselregister sendmail[78043]: i0VMJKu67307: to=????????@sandyvalley.net, ctladdr=webmaster (1007/1007), delay=01:43:33, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=esmtp, pri=1921015, relay=smtp. sandyvalley.net. , dsn=4. 0. 0, stat=Deferred: Connection reset by smtp. sandyvalley.net.



I replaced your username with the ??'s. You need to contact your ISP with that information and try to get them to fix it. The email would be coming from webmaster@turbodieselregister.com . BTW, this exactly the kind of situation that would have caused the system to slow to a crawl when posting. Any threads that you were subscribed to would have had a 30 second delay after hitting post while it was waiting to defer the request.



-Steve

 

[jrobinson2]

Thanks Steve, I sent her an email.

I recently stopped getting spam maybe that has something to do with it?

Jared

 

[jrobinson2]

Steve

My TDR emails are getting through now but I'm a bit confused. I got the following message from my ISP but don't understand any of it, it sounds like they are blaming you My ISP is a very small CO-OP that do a thankless job in a small community so I take it easy on them, I'm just happy to have my measly 26400 bps out here in the sticks

Just to let you know that we are communicating with the organization to correct the problem. It appears that they didn't use a reverse dns number, which would result in being rejected (to protect everyone on the system). In the meantime, we have made an exception to our rule so their mail can get through. With so much mischief out there, each ISP has protocol to protect you from getting viruses or being open to intrusion.

Jared

 

[Elite1]

I haven't recieved mail notifications for several months as well... . I wonder if it is on my end, or will your new fix cure it? Regards, Marty

 

[Steve St.Laurent]

I'm looking into what your ISP said Jared - AFAIK the server is setup fine for reverse DNS but I am verifying that.



Marty - your TDR emails are in your SPAM blocker. You need to go in there and let AOL know that emails from us aren't SPAM and you'll start receiving them again.

 

[jManz]

Howdy,



I am a brand new user here. So far I love what I see. I am curious as to what kind of emailings you are referring to. I have only received one email from TDR and that was my subscription confirmation. My ISP provides three levels of spam protection and I have it set to moderate. I just don't want to miss any of the good stuff!



-Joe

 

[Steve St.Laurent]

They are notifications of private messages and of replies to threads that you've posted on. The default is to receive them so you should receive one that I replied to this thread.



-Steve

 

[CIverson]

I've noticed today that I'm not getting alot of email notifications.



I had gotten some this morning and a few through the day, but have seen alot of new posts without email notifications.

 

[Steve St.Laurent]

You do know that you only get notifications of threads that you've either subscribed to or that you've replied to (assuming you have that option turned on) and that you'll only get one notification even if there's multiple replies since you were last on right? If your getting some of them you should be getting them all.