email notification

[WTBurke]

Steve,

I saw something a while back regarding email notification. I'm a sbcglobal.net subscriber and I'm not getting post's I'm subscribed to? It's not going into my spam folder... I'm just not getting anything? Do I need to change something in my set up?



Thank You

William

 

[Steve St.Laurent]

It's a problem on SBC Global's side. I've contacted them several times as have a number of users to no avail. Their mail server responds with "Data format error" - and they are the only ISP doing so. Thousands of emails a day are successfully sent to other ISP's. You can try contacting them but I doubt it will do any good. Here's the log entries from one of your emails (with your email address asterisked out) so you can send it to them if you wish:

Dec 31 01:28:00 turbodieselregister sendmail[88957]: mBV6S0rx088957: to=<*********@sbcglobal.net>, delay=00:00:00, mailer=esmtp, pri=32256, stat=queued

Dec 31 01:28:00 turbodieselregister sendmail[88956]: mBV6S03X088956: to=*********@sbcglobal.net, ctladdr=webmaster (1007/1007), delay=00:00:00, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=relay, pri=32084, relay=[127. 0. 0. 1] [127. 0. 0. 1], dsn=2. 0. 0, stat=Sent (mBV6S0rx088957 Message accepted for delivery)

Dec 31 01:30:42 turbodieselregister sendmail[89013]: mBV6S0rx088957: to=<*********@sbcglobal.net>, ctladdr=<webmaster@turbodieselregister.com> (1007/1007), delay=00:02:42, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=esmtp, pri=122256, relay=sbcmx7. prodigy.net. [207. 115. 37. 21], dsn=5. 6. 0, stat=Data format error

 

[WTBurke]

Thank you Steve,

I'll make a call and ask for a review on this for what it's worth. Darn SBC!

William

 

[brods]

Have fun WTB. First you'll talk to someone in a foreign country, this is the "first" level tech. No matter what you try to tell him he'll ask all the standard questions about your computer and modem, is it on, have you tried restarting it, bla, bla, bla.

Then finally they will transfer you to a "second level" tech who sounds like they are in this country and are more knowledgeable. It is hit or miss at that point. One of the techs I talked with and emailed the error message Steve posted, said there was supposed to be more info contained in error message so he couldn't help. He did spend some time working on it so it wasn't the brushoff. They told me the TDR webmaster needs to work with tech support, which they have done and as we know SBC still hasn't addressed the issue. My last notification was on June 10th 2008.

Complicating matters it sounds like it might not be just SBC. I got the impression that Yahoo might be part of the problem as well.

Oh yeah, emailing SBC support does no good since they tell you to call and ask for a second level support tech. And good luck getting the first level guy to transfer you before having to describe the entire issue and getting the standard run around. It is all very frustrating.

 

[WTBurke]

Thanks brods,... I stand informed so I'll just make noise for the heck of it.

Cheers,

William

 

[brods]

Wow how time flies. Its coming up on a year already since the notifications stopped in June of 08. SBC was no help and Yahoo wants to deal with the webmaster, not the end user on this issue. Only the TDR is blocked for me and 5 or 6 other forums’ email notifications come through fine. Go figure. Anyhow, here is an easy workaround for those who haven’t figured something else out already.



First get a free gmail account from google. Next change your email address that the TDR uses by going into your TDR user control panel, click edit your details, and then click email & passwords. Change your current sbcglobal email address to your gmail one and click save changes. There will be a notice that comes up (which disappears too quickly for slow readers like myself to finish reading) that says something like a confirmation email will be sent to the new email address which you have to respond to before you can get full TDR website access back. Next go to the gmail account, open the email from TDR and click on the link to confirm the email address change. Thats it. Now you can check the gmail account for any TDR notifications. If you prefer you can have gmail forward the emails to your sbc account (which works great by the way).

 

[RWinzen]

This is something I deal with everyday. AT&T and all their domains, SWBell, SBCGlobal, Prodigy... , Are a real pain to deal with. If a Customer changes their IP range or Email Server... You have to get AT&T to change settings again. Last time it took me 7 attemps before they acknowledged the change.

 

[WTBurke]

brods-

Good idea... . I've not received notifications for over a year. Talking with those people is a run-around and no results. I just scan the TDR each morning just in case I'm subscribed to a topic. Caught this posting this morning.



William

 

[SNGLESHOT]

Hey brods, I have yahoo email and I get all my subscribed forums responses. what do you mean yahoo may be part of the problem? Just curious is all. Thanks in advance for a reply

 

[brods]

SBC global somehow uses or passes through Yahoo for email. One of the SBC techs said the problem might be with Yahoo blocking the emails.

 

[Steve St.Laurent]

It's not Yahoo. Notification emails are getting through to Yahoo. It could however be prodigy because that's where they are routing through. I've tried multiple times contacting sbc with nothing ever getting done about it. I've spent hours on this issue with them and they can't seem to fix the problem.

 

[JSellers]

Email blocking by ISP?

Thousands of emails a day are successfully sent to other ISP's.

Steve, is there a list posted anywhere of ISPs that are denying email notification? I have missed notification messages for a while with my AT&T service (previously Bellsouth). Same problem happened with another forum - for which I saw a note of explanation - but I've since gotten email from this other forum. However, I still don't see any from TDR, and have checked my user settings to ensure the notification switch is on.



If this problem originates with our ISP, what steps can we take to have it resolved?



Thanks,

John

 

[p-Bar]

Here's a good read:

Who's the Worst DNS Provider?

by Ed Sawicki
Accelerated Learning Center
Tailored Computers

September 28, 2005

Many Internet sites will deny you access unless your IP address resolves to a DNS name that resolves back to the same IP address. The industry has informally given a name to this technique - paranoid DNS checking.

The technique is simple. I'll use fictitious addresses and names to illustrate the concept. Suppose your ISP assigned your computer the IP address 1. 2. 3. 4. If you lookup this address in DNS it resolves to the name 4. 3. 2. 1. isp.net. If you lookup this name in the DNS it resolves to the address 1. 2. 3. 4. The addresses match - all is OK.

If the address 1. 2. 3. 4 resolves to 4. 3. 2. 1. isp.net but 4. 3. 2. 1. isp.net resolves to 2. 3. 4. 5, that's a problem. An Internet site may think you're an attacker (you've pirated an IP addres) and deny you access. Frequently, this is a mistake caused by an ISP's software or DNS administrator. The fix is simple - the DNS must be changed so the names and IP addresses agree - a one or two minute job if done by someone well-versed in DNS.

This problem affected one of my customers who recently switched ISPs to SBC. SBC is the Bell Regional Operating Company that purchased AT&T in 2005. I was hired to solve my customer's email problems. It took just minutes to identify the problem as a paranoid DNS checking issue. The customer was told to report the problem to SBC and have them fix it. A few hours later the customer reported that SBC didn't seem to understand the problem so they couldn't fix it.

I called SBC on the customer's behalf. I was on the phone for 2. 5 hours. During that time, I had to endure senseless questions such as whether I was running Windows or Mac. Was I using a 2-wire or 4-wire DSL circuit? Someone told me that they didn't make DNS changes for home users. When I said that we were a business and had a /29 network, he asked how many IP addresses we had. CIDR notation is but one of the many things they don't know about. At one point, I told them that I shopped at Safeway. After a pregnant pause, I said that this was as relevant to the problem as the questions they were asking.

The call was escalated to four levels of tech support. There wasn't an appreciable increase in DNS expertise as the levels increased. The last level - the highest level - the best and the brightest - didn't comprehend the simple problem. They said that I'd need to contact the people that handled IP address allocations in their company. However, I was not allowed to call them by phone - I could only send them email. They gave me the email address. I sent email to that address but it bounced because of

... . wait for it ... .

a DNS problem.

While researching this SBC problem, I found a July 2, 2004 story from the San Francisco Chronicle about SBC spam problems. This article inspired me to seek out related information elsewhere. It seems that SBC customers were being flooded with spam. SBC decided to solve the problem in part with paranoid DNS checking but didn't tell their tech support people about it and didn't train them as to what it was.

We never could get SBC to solve the problem. It was unlikely that any amount of additional time on the phone would result in a SBC person understanding what we needed. The customer was told to switch ISPs or to live with the problem.

This experience with SBC is the worst I've had but dealing with other large ISPs comes close. Generally speaking, it's easier dealing with smaller ISPs. The larger the company, the greater the tolerance for incompetence.

 

[steved]

Other than its not a real "fix", you could always register a free account through gmail or yahoo... I know they both work.

I had SBC through yahoo for a little while (several years ago), they were nothing but headaches...