Return to TheElectricBrewery.com
  [ Shop ]   [ Building ]   [ Using ]   [ Recipes ]   [ Testimonials ]   [ Gallery ]   [ FAQ ]   [ About Us ]   [ Contact Us ]   [ Newsletter ]

Log inLog in   RegisterRegister   User Control PanelUser Control Panel   Private MessagesPrivate Messages   MembershipClub Memberships   SearchSearch   MemberlistMemberlist   Photo AlbumsPhoto Albums   Forum FAQForum FAQ


Forum Emails
Goto page 1, 2  Next
 
Post new topic   Reply to topic   Printer-friendly view    TheElectricBrewery.com Forum Index -> Forum Feedback
View previous topic :: View next topic  
Author Message
Greg Vitag




Joined: 19 Oct 2014
Posts: 9



PostLink    Posted: Sun Oct 26, 2014 3:35 pm    Post subject: Forum Emails Reply with quote


        Register to remove this ad. It's free!
Why am I not receiving forum emails? I have my setting s set to receive responses to threads I am watching.

But nothing appears in my inbox or spam filter. I am using gmail.

Thanks
Back to top
Kevin59




Joined: 03 Aug 2012
Posts: 1047
Location: Fort Collins, CO

Drinking: Imperial Brown Ale

Working on: Oatmeal Stout, IPA


PostLink    Posted: Sun Oct 26, 2014 3:47 pm    Post subject: Re: Forum Emails Reply with quote

Greg Vitag wrote:
Why am I not receiving forum emails? I have my setting s set to receive responses to threads I am watching.

But nothing appears in my inbox or spam filter. I am using gmail.

Thanks


I asked Kal about the same issue a few weeks ago, and here's the explanation he gave:

"Take a look here:

http://www.theelectricbrewery.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=27340

More discussion about it at the other forum I run (on the same server) if you want more gory details:

http://www.curtpalme.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=36284

Kal"

I made some changes on my ISP mail filtering but I'm still not getting emails. I used to get the emails so something changed with my ISP and I need to contact them.
Back to top
View user's photo album (6 photos)
kal
Forum Administrator



Joined: 12 Dec 2010
Posts: 11116
Location: Ottawa, Canada

Drinking: Pub Ale, Electric Creamsicle, Mild, Pliny the Younger, Belgian Dark Strong, Weizen, Russian Imperial Stout, Black Butte Porter


PostLink    Posted: Sun Oct 26, 2014 5:38 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Another reason for those that may be using corporate emails is that some companies block emails from websites that are categorized as being something they think you shouldn't read... for example, our site here is classified by many as "alcohol/tobacco" related.

Kal

_________________
Our new shop with over 150 new products: shop.TheElectricBrewery.com
We ship worldwide and support our products and customers for life.
Purchasing through our affiliate links helps support our site at no extra cost to you. We thank you!
My basement/bar/brewery build 2.0
Back to top
View user's photo album (21 photos)
Kevin59




Joined: 03 Aug 2012
Posts: 1047
Location: Fort Collins, CO

Drinking: Imperial Brown Ale

Working on: Oatmeal Stout, IPA


PostLink    Posted: Sun Oct 26, 2014 6:21 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

kal wrote:
Another reason for those that may be using corporate emails is that some companies block emails from websites that are categorized as being something they think you shouldn't read... for example, our site here is classified by many as "alcohol/tobacco" related.

Kal


Oddly enough your site doesn't get blocked by our otherwise stringent filtering system at work! Smile

I changed my forum email address a little earlier to my @msn.com email address to see if that one gets the forum emails. Depending on the timing of your last post (before or after the change I made) I'm not sure that one's working either. I'll keep watching today for other posts to threads I watch to see if anything changes. I've set @theelectricbrewery.com and *@theelectricbrewery.com as Safe Senders on outlook.com to see if that helps.

-Kevin
Back to top
View user's photo album (6 photos)
kal
Forum Administrator



Joined: 12 Dec 2010
Posts: 11116
Location: Ottawa, Canada

Drinking: Pub Ale, Electric Creamsicle, Mild, Pliny the Younger, Belgian Dark Strong, Weizen, Russian Imperial Stout, Black Butte Porter


PostLink    Posted: Sun Oct 26, 2014 6:43 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I get all the forum emails myself but that's because my mail server's on my own box (which hosts the site) and I don't block anything or use any mail filtering at all (I get 700+ spams/day).

Note that some emails sent by us such as our newsletters are sent through a different service (Amazon SES) so those make it through. The forum software here is too old to use Amazon SES so I need to try a different SMTP service. If anyone has any pay SMTP services they recommend, I'll sign up/do some tests.

Kal

_________________
Our new shop with over 150 new products: shop.TheElectricBrewery.com
We ship worldwide and support our products and customers for life.
Purchasing through our affiliate links helps support our site at no extra cost to you. We thank you!
My basement/bar/brewery build 2.0
Back to top
View user's photo album (21 photos)
Kevin59




Joined: 03 Aug 2012
Posts: 1047
Location: Fort Collins, CO

Drinking: Imperial Brown Ale

Working on: Oatmeal Stout, IPA


PostLink    Posted: Sun Oct 26, 2014 7:41 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

kal wrote:
I get all the forum emails myself but that's because my mail server's on my own box (which hosts the site) and I don't block anything or use any mail filtering at all (I get 700+ spams/day).

Note that some emails sent by us such as our newsletters are sent through a different service (Amazon SES) so those make it through. The forum software here is too old to use Amazon SES so I need to try a different SMTP service. If anyone has any pay SMTP services they recommend, I'll sign up/do some tests.

Kal


I hadn't thought about the fact I always get your newsletters in my email, but I guess this explains that. I use fatcow.com as my ISP and for hosting my own web sites and associated email addresses. They've been very reliable I'd say, with only a few downtime issues over the past several years. And their pricing isn't too bad.

Kevin
Back to top
View user's photo album (6 photos)
kal
Forum Administrator



Joined: 12 Dec 2010
Posts: 11116
Location: Ottawa, Canada

Drinking: Pub Ale, Electric Creamsicle, Mild, Pliny the Younger, Belgian Dark Strong, Weizen, Russian Imperial Stout, Black Butte Porter


PostLink    Posted: Sun Oct 26, 2014 8:03 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hi Kevin,

I'm not looking for a new place to move all my websites (that would be a major undertaking) - instead I'm looking for a pay SMTP service to send out emails that works with older software such as our phpBB forum software. It's a long shot, but who knows.

The forum software (phpbb 2) allows for outgoing email to be configured using only 3 fields:

SMTP Server Address
SMTP Username
SMTP Password

That's it.

Kal

_________________
Our new shop with over 150 new products: shop.TheElectricBrewery.com
We ship worldwide and support our products and customers for life.
Purchasing through our affiliate links helps support our site at no extra cost to you. We thank you!
My basement/bar/brewery build 2.0
Back to top
View user's photo album (21 photos)
Kevin59




Joined: 03 Aug 2012
Posts: 1047
Location: Fort Collins, CO

Drinking: Imperial Brown Ale

Working on: Oatmeal Stout, IPA


PostLink    Posted: Sun Oct 26, 2014 11:32 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

kal wrote:
Hi Kevin,

I'm not looking for a new place to move all my websites (that would be a major undertaking) - instead I'm looking for a pay SMTP service to send out emails that works with older software such as our phpBB forum software. It's a long shot, but who knows.

The forum software (phpbb 2) allows for outgoing email to be configured using only 3 fields:

SMTP Server Address
SMTP Username
SMTP Password

That's it.

Kal


Gotcha, I was just thinking you could register another domain name there (free the first year) and then use that smtp.bogusname.com address with whatever username and password you set up.

If you're interested I can set up a temp email address under one of my domains and give you a username and password to test with your forum software, if that makes any sense for you to do.
Back to top
View user's photo album (6 photos)
kal
Forum Administrator



Joined: 12 Dec 2010
Posts: 11116
Location: Ottawa, Canada

Drinking: Pub Ale, Electric Creamsicle, Mild, Pliny the Younger, Belgian Dark Strong, Weizen, Russian Imperial Stout, Black Butte Porter


PostLink    Posted: Mon Oct 27, 2014 12:44 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hi Kevin,

I appreciate the offer but I need to do it somewhere where if there's an issue with the quality of the emails such that it gets blacklisted again, it doesn't affect you. I'll spend some time looking into this and set something up on my own. Thanks anyway!

Kal

_________________
Our new shop with over 150 new products: shop.TheElectricBrewery.com
We ship worldwide and support our products and customers for life.
Purchasing through our affiliate links helps support our site at no extra cost to you. We thank you!
My basement/bar/brewery build 2.0
Back to top
View user's photo album (21 photos)
kal
Forum Administrator



Joined: 12 Dec 2010
Posts: 11116
Location: Ottawa, Canada

Drinking: Pub Ale, Electric Creamsicle, Mild, Pliny the Younger, Belgian Dark Strong, Weizen, Russian Imperial Stout, Black Butte Porter


PostLink    Posted: Mon Oct 27, 2014 4:06 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I've made some changes to have all forum emails go through a third party service. Let me know how you guys make out and if you start getting email notifications. Thanks!

If you're still not getting emails please check what email you have entered in your control panel by clicking here:

http://www.theelectricbrewery.com/forum/profile.php?mode=editprofile

Any emails that do not work will be blanked out to avoid causing bounces as that affects our reputation - too many issues and once again other sites will stop accepting email from us. So I want to avoid bounces as much as possible, and I especially want to avoid someone marking forum notifications as SPAM. Get that too many times and we'll get blocked again.

So if you go into your control panel and see that your email is blank, it's because I removed it because it's bouncing/invalid.

Kal

_________________
Our new shop with over 150 new products: shop.TheElectricBrewery.com
We ship worldwide and support our products and customers for life.
Purchasing through our affiliate links helps support our site at no extra cost to you. We thank you!
My basement/bar/brewery build 2.0


Last edited by kal on Mon Oct 27, 2014 6:54 pm; edited 1 time in total
Back to top
View user's photo album (21 photos)
Kevin59




Joined: 03 Aug 2012
Posts: 1047
Location: Fort Collins, CO

Drinking: Imperial Brown Ale

Working on: Oatmeal Stout, IPA


PostLink    Posted: Mon Oct 27, 2014 4:59 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

kal wrote:
I've made some changes to have all forum emails go through a third party service. Let me know how you guys make out and if you start getting email notifications.

Thanks!

Kal


It's working!!! Cool & thanks!!!

Kevin
Back to top
View user's photo album (6 photos)
James Edmonton




Joined: 29 Jan 2014
Posts: 124
Location: Edmonton, AB

Drinking: West Coast Dry Hopped IPA

Working on: Session Ale


PostLink    Posted: Mon Oct 27, 2014 6:10 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I received one today.
Back to top
stickyfinger




Joined: 04 May 2014
Posts: 176
Location: hudson valley, NY


PostLink    Posted: Tue Oct 28, 2014 2:57 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Awesome! I've gotten two emails today, very useful! I hope it works for PMs as well. No reason it shouldn't.
Back to top
kal
Forum Administrator



Joined: 12 Dec 2010
Posts: 11116
Location: Ottawa, Canada

Drinking: Pub Ale, Electric Creamsicle, Mild, Pliny the Younger, Belgian Dark Strong, Weizen, Russian Imperial Stout, Black Butte Porter


PostLink    Posted: Tue Oct 28, 2014 2:59 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Works for PMs too - it's all the same system.

Kal

_________________
Our new shop with over 150 new products: shop.TheElectricBrewery.com
We ship worldwide and support our products and customers for life.
Purchasing through our affiliate links helps support our site at no extra cost to you. We thank you!
My basement/bar/brewery build 2.0
Back to top
View user's photo album (21 photos)
kal
Forum Administrator



Joined: 12 Dec 2010
Posts: 11116
Location: Ottawa, Canada

Drinking: Pub Ale, Electric Creamsicle, Mild, Pliny the Younger, Belgian Dark Strong, Weizen, Russian Imperial Stout, Black Butte Porter


PostLink    Posted: Wed Nov 19, 2014 4:07 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

kal wrote:
I've made some changes to have all forum emails go through a third party service. Let me know how you guys make out and if you start getting email notifications. Thanks!

If you're still not getting emails please check what email you have entered in your control panel by clicking here:

http://www.theelectricbrewery.com/forum/profile.php?mode=editprofile

Any emails that do not work will be blanked out to avoid causing bounces as that affects our reputation - too many issues and once again other sites will stop accepting email from us. So I want to avoid bounces as much as possible, and I especially want to avoid someone marking forum notifications as SPAM. Get that too many times and we'll get blocked again.

So if you go into your control panel and see that your email is blank, it's because I removed it because it's bouncing/invalid.

Kal

So fast forward to today and and we've now been sending out forum emails using an external pay service (SendGrid.com) for 23 days and it seems to be working well. Our reputation is at 99.8% which is very high. This means that most emails are making it (not bouncing, not being marked as spam or being blocked by recipient inbox rules, and so forth). At first I spent some time every day looking at bounces and removing old email addresses from user accounts here to make sure that this value stays high. I'll continue to do so as time goes on to ensure it stays high.

The only caveat I'm seeing is that we're sending from an IP at this Sendgrid.com service that is used by thousands of others pay members, and from time to time that IP gets blacklisted because someone, somewhere starts spamming. At that point I see our emails start to get blocked with the following message (for example):

Code:
550 "JunkMail rejected - o2.shared.sendgrid.net [74.63.235.152]:60372 is in an RBL, see Blocked - see http://www.spamcop.net/bl.shtml?74.63.235.152"

This will always happen because with thousands sending emails from the same IP, once and a while someone will send something that appears spammy by accident (or be an outright spammer) and trigger a blacklist (spamcop.net in this example), blocking all the other customers sending from this IP to ISPs that also use this blacklist to filter out spam.

It usually takes SendGrid.com 24 hours to get that cleared up (SendGrid removes/cancels the offending account and contacts the blacklist), during which time some forum members here won't get forum emails. Some (most?) of you will still get emails during this blacklist period. It depends on your ISP and what blacklists they follow. So far in the last 23 days I've seen our IP blacklisted twice, which is a lot I find. The good news is that SendGrid does all the work here in getting their IP removed from the blacklist. It's no longer something I have to worry about.

There is a way around this blacklisting, but it means upgrading from the existing plan with a shared IP to a higher priced plan to get our own dedicated IP. Not that I don't love you guys, but I don't think it's worth it. Wink On the current plan it costs me about $1.30/month for our current volume of emails ($0.10 per 1000 emails). Plans with dedicated IPs start at $79.95/month and go up from there. Over 60x more expensive.

So from time to time expect some forum notification email outages that may last a day or so. You won't get a flurry of emails after the outage - the emails are simply blocked and lost.

I'm told that over time SendGrid may move us to a more reputable IP if our reputation stays high, but our send rates are so low this likely won't happen quickly. You need to show both quality of emails and send volume too. It'll probably take months.

Email is an astounding pain in the arse and I've definitely learnt more about sending best practices than I care to know about over the last few years. For anyone interested in learning, I recommend this white paper by Amazon:

https://media.amazonwebservices.com/AWS_Amazon_SES_Best_Practices.pdf

(Amazon has their 'Simple Email Service' which is similar to SendGrid. I use Amazon SES to send newsletters and my own personal emails as I like to keep this separate from the forum email which I can't really control. This ensures that I don't have all our eggs in one basket).

Kal

_________________
Our new shop with over 150 new products: shop.TheElectricBrewery.com
We ship worldwide and support our products and customers for life.
Purchasing through our affiliate links helps support our site at no extra cost to you. We thank you!
My basement/bar/brewery build 2.0
Back to top
View user's photo album (21 photos)
kal
Forum Administrator



Joined: 12 Dec 2010
Posts: 11116
Location: Ottawa, Canada

Drinking: Pub Ale, Electric Creamsicle, Mild, Pliny the Younger, Belgian Dark Strong, Weizen, Russian Imperial Stout, Black Butte Porter


PostLink    Posted: Tue Dec 09, 2014 4:58 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Another fast forward for those who enjoy a good yarn: After lots of careful watching and editing to make sure we hold our email sending \reputation above 99.9%, I sent off more requests to have us upgraded and we've now been bumped up a notch such that we should see less issues with the forum sending emails. They've placed us in a 'premiere' group of senders, so the odds of getting blacklisted again should be greatly reduced. For the last 6 weeks it's been happening at least once a week for many hours (blocking all outgoing forum emails). Hopefully that's a thing of the past.

In case anyone didn't know, I will once again state: I hate email!

Kal

_________________
Our new shop with over 150 new products: shop.TheElectricBrewery.com
We ship worldwide and support our products and customers for life.
Purchasing through our affiliate links helps support our site at no extra cost to you. We thank you!
My basement/bar/brewery build 2.0
Back to top
View user's photo album (21 photos)
Kevin59




Joined: 03 Aug 2012
Posts: 1047
Location: Fort Collins, CO

Drinking: Imperial Brown Ale

Working on: Oatmeal Stout, IPA


PostLink    Posted: Tue Dec 09, 2014 5:05 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

kal wrote:
In case anyone didn't know, I will once again state: I hate email!

Kal

Kind of one of those "can't live with it, can't live without it" things... Wink
Back to top
View user's photo album (6 photos)
huaco




Joined: 05 Apr 2012
Posts: 1506
Location: Burleson Texas


PostLink    Posted: Tue Dec 09, 2014 5:48 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

kal wrote:
I hate email!


Maybe it's not so much that you hate email... as maybe it's that email just hates you? lol

Conspiracy much?
Back to top
View user's photo album (10 photos)
kal
Forum Administrator



Joined: 12 Dec 2010
Posts: 11116
Location: Ottawa, Canada

Drinking: Pub Ale, Electric Creamsicle, Mild, Pliny the Younger, Belgian Dark Strong, Weizen, Russian Imperial Stout, Black Butte Porter


PostLink    Posted: Tue Dec 09, 2014 8:35 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Nope. I truly hate email. Wink

It's a completely broken system, with no rules.

Kal

_________________
Our new shop with over 150 new products: shop.TheElectricBrewery.com
We ship worldwide and support our products and customers for life.
Purchasing through our affiliate links helps support our site at no extra cost to you. We thank you!
My basement/bar/brewery build 2.0
Back to top
View user's photo album (21 photos)
huaco




Joined: 05 Apr 2012
Posts: 1506
Location: Burleson Texas


PostLink    Posted: Tue Dec 09, 2014 9:58 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

kal wrote:
Nope. I truly hate email. Wink

It's a completely broken system, with no rules.

Kal


Hey... we don't talk politics here! haha!
Back to top
View user's photo album (10 photos)
Display posts from previous:   
Post new topic   Reply to topic   Printer-friendly view    TheElectricBrewery.com Forum Index -> Forum Feedback All times are GMT
Goto page 1, 2  Next
Page 1 of 2
Jump to:  
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum
You cannot attach files in this forum
You can download files in this forum



Forum powered by phpBB © phpBB Group