What the heck is going on with email?

[drobee]

In the last few months, and more importantly the last few weeks, the email system at Vortech has been horrendous at best. We have had numerous clients leave us because of email.

In addition to *daily* rejections by comcast, msn and sbcglobal, there have been inordinate delays in sending messages, receiving messages and overall mail reliability.

And today - hosted applications aren't able to send emails, the @mail client isn't able to send out emails?



So far, the only responses which have been received is:

"We setup greylisting"
"Take a look at a site that talks about how bad comcast is, etc. "
"The ip has been rotated"
"Comcast won't get back to us"

Am I the only one seeing these issues day in and day out? Is anyone getting a proactive answer about this? While we have been a customer for about 6 years and have referred numerous customers, we will not be able to continue if this keeps getting this way.

[mdallarosa]

Yes cutomers are complianing about forms not working here too.

It seems they are setting up greylisting again. It is unbelievable that no one at VT take just 5 minutes to announce this changes and the impact we should expect from them.

[MasCon]

ditto

I got my a$$ reamed today from clients CEO/Presidents. A conference call with 4 offices across the US and 15 people listening in just so a President of a company can show his people how to deal with vendors that consitently provide poor service.

oh it was a beauty....
and all I could do was take it.

[mdwatkin]

I'd have to say that for the most part, things have been quiet here in Texas and my customers have had few and very sporadic complaints about speed or email this year. So all in all I'm not unhappy with VT, but what is very disconcerting is the lack of response to threads. Silence can be deafening.

Brad, Craig and the crew have tried their best in the past to be responsive and I've been very surprised by some of comments from customers in other the postings. If you look at the postings over time, there's been a gradual and steady decline of posting from the execs, so I'm not overly concerned.

With all the hub-bub going on in the forums I would expect someone to pipe in - or - maybe VT is about to be sold off. Who knows, but having a backup plan is always a resellers best bet.

[orvals]

Same here. As drobee mentioned, for the past few months, the email service has been terrible. I contacted support and the excuses do not stop, blaming others.
Brad, please foolow this up. I have been a VT customer for years, and would like to stay here, however, I am actively looking at other hosting companies.

[ixie02]

Originally Posted by orvals

Same here. As drobee mentioned, for the past few months, the email service has been terrible. I contacted support and the excuses do not stop, blaming others.
Brad, please foolow this up. I have been a VT customer for years, and would like to stay here, however, I am actively looking at other hosting companies.

I wonder if the silence is VT's way of telling us something?

[Clayton]

I apologize for the lack of posting in the forums, but almost our entire shift is dedicated to support tickets/live chat/phone support.

I would also like to apologize for all the e-mail issues with Comcast, Msn, ATT, etc etc. I assure you that we are doing everything in our power to resolve the spam issues.

[orvals]

Thanks for the post Clayton, however, the issues are not only the spam issues. Slow connects, failed deliveries, mail system hangs etc.

[drobee]

This is the latest response:

"We have a large mail queue right now on the server. This is causing delay but mail will be delivered today."

That's great. Thank god I only check email once a day.

[dvanburen]

Originally Posted by orvals

Thanks for the post Clayton, however, the issues are not only the spam issues. Slow connects, failed deliveries, mail system hangs etc.

9/10 of this is due to the massive volume of incoming spam. It puts the mail server in a very bad position to deal with legitimate email. Really, we can break this down into 2 separate issues:

1) Incoming Spam
2) Outgoing Spam

Both are difficult to deal with, but outgoing spam is probably worse.

For Incoming Spam we plan on rebuilding the mail servers from scratch. This won't happen overnight but it is in the works. Right now the mail servers can be broken into two groups, mail-mail6 and mail7+. mail7+ run a bit better since they can run spamd (greylisting) which helps immensely with incoming spam. The only downsides are that the greylisting process itself takes time to build up a good database of trusted ips, and that some mailservers to not retry properly and have to manually be added to the list. mail-mail6 cannot run spamd as they do not support pf (packet filter). As such they do not have nearly the protection the others do from incoming spam.

Outgoing spam is problematic. As you all know it causes the mail servers to be blocked by various agencies, the most notorious of which is comcast/aol. There are a few problems here:

1) We currently allow users to send mail from arbitrary addresses via forms. We can lock this down to only domains we host, but I have a feeling this will drive away customers as many prefer to send their forms as if the user submitting the form has sent it. Another is to do away with forward altogether and force users to send using their normal mail servers. This is even worse as most forms/cms/carts have no provision for sending as an authenticated user. However, this would do away with almost 99% of the outgoing spam.

2) Many users either cannot or choose not to secure their forms properly. These forms are then exploited and because of point 1 this results in massive amounts of outgoing spam from arbitrary addresses.

3) Forwards. Users will configure their vortech email address to forward to a comcast/aol/other email address. Then when they receive spam, that was forwarded at their request, they mark it as spam and our servers are flagged. The only real solutions to this are to either filter all outgoing mail, disallow forwards (not really an option), or educate everyone that sets up a forward (difficult at best). We are seriously considering filtering all/some outgoing mail, though I do not know how many of you would react to this. One possibility is to just filter outgoing mail that is to be delivered to ISP's that are known to be quick to blacklist for incoming spam, such as Comcast/AOL, bellsouth, att etc.


Anyway, I hope I've outlined as best I can exactly what the problems are. I may not have time to visit this thread again for a week, so please do not be upset if I do not reply immediately to any question.

[onsitetech]

I was working onsite with a business client today that my company doesn't host thier site. While watching an end user who by the way the client is in the medical industry, I actually witnessed an employee copy and pasted an entire list of email addresses which contained about 60-70 addresses, that was received from another email forwarded to the employee in the content section of MYSPACE in attempts to broadcast it out so they can be her buddy. She was so excited that she has built up her myspace buddy list to over 500 while at work. So now this post "done at work" is now viewable to 500 buddies who can easily do whatever they want with those emails. I was totally blown away. Needless to say I was there to consult on how to stop web surfing and abusing company time surfing the web. I knew of wasted activity but this took the trophy. No wonder COMCAST, BELLSOUTH, AOL webmail systems have easy Block as Spammer buttons in use today. One or 2 blocked as spammers from VT mail servers and we're all paying the cost.

The support team at VT has a lot on thier plates and guess what? It hasn't even started. Blocked emails as spammers will be the topic of the homeowners who have no clue what they are doing. Ecspecially using webmail software which they have to look through every email. But they won't. They'll just click the "select all" button and click delete as SPAM. You guessed it maybe one or 2 emails are legitimate but they'll never know it, and it has VT webservers IP tagged to it.

My email has been around for years and I setup a whiltelist only. Can this be the future. I think so. Can we make money for setting up whiltelist only? I think so!!!

Just my 2 cents!!! Maybe 4 in the future :-)

[oglee]

Outgoing spam is problematic. As you all know it causes the mail servers to be blocked by various agencies, the most notorious of which is comcast/aol. There are a few problems here:
1) We currently allow users to send mail from arbitrary addresses via forms. We can lock this down to only domains we host, but I have a feeling this will drive away customers as many prefer to send their forms as if the user submitting the form has sent it. Another is to do away with forward altogether and force users to send using their normal mail servers. This is even worse as most forms/cms/carts have no provision for sending as an authenticated user. However, this would do away with almost 99% of the outgoing spam.
2) Many users either cannot or choose not to secure their forms properly. These forms are then exploited and because of point 1 this results in massive amounts of outgoing spam from arbitrary addresses.
3) Forwards. Users will configure their vortech email address to forward to a comcast/aol/other email address. Then when they receive spam, that was forwarded at their request, they mark it as spam and our servers are flagged. The only real solutions to this are to either filter all outgoing mail, disallow forwards (not really an option), or educate everyone that sets up a forward (difficult at best). We are seriously considering filtering all/some outgoing mail, though I do not know how many of you would react to this. One possibility is to just filter outgoing mail that is to be delivered to ISP's that are known to be quick to blacklist for incoming spam, such as Comcast/AOL, bellsouth, att etc.

so basically the long & short of it is that there is really no clear-cut practical solution for dealing with the blocks from comcast etc., correct? sounds like a no win situation! very frustrating.
however on a positive note - and i speak for myself - i certainly appreciate the communication and explaination to the issue at hand

[Danl]

I just got off the phone with a comcast supervisor (This is my 60 to 70th time calling them) and this is what they told me.

They said, we need people who are comcast customers to call in to their tech department and tell them about this issue. They want you to have the bounce backs in front of your so they can investigate this further. I'm not a comcast customer unfortunately but some of our other techs are. We need to have as many people as possible contact comcast if you are/your customers are customers of comcast.

[treeves]

Just my two cents. We have noticed some real severe problems as many of you are with Concast blocking, as well as email being delivered several hours later, and every once in a while, not at all. And no, the emails don't sit in a spam folder somewhere. They just aren't received. by both the client and a third party recipient

The other issue is that in one of our test email accounts, we have SpamAssassin set for a "1" for email block, extremely conservative, but the most obvious email gets through.

Which brings up a generic question that I hope someone can answer. How does email routing work wiht Vortech, specifically related to external email, SpamAssassin and Blackberry POP? There is no spam blocking on @MAIL (which I believe is an outside service) or email that I receive on my BlackBerry, so I assume that SpamAssassin block (if any) is later on in the process before the email is POPed to a desktop client.

Woudl having a Barracuda installed on the Vortech system help matters? A number of hosts deploy that type of solution to control spam.

[Danl]

If you have spamassassin setup using 1 for mail block that's the highest blocking you can get, that's the required points it takes for it to be considered spam, you may want to change that.