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Mail Not Coming Through


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BTW, neither Email_support nor Don D'Minion (SpamCopAdmin - from the reporting, not the email side) have logged into the forums for at least a week. Does anyone else feel a little abandoned?

Yes. It's for that reason that I will not be renewing my account the next time the bill comes due. It's no longer worth the aggrivation.

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It seems it's time to terminate the partnership between SpamCop and CES Mail and find a vendor that knows how to manage and provision to an acceptable service availability agreement.

Does anyone have any idea why this hasn't been done already -- other that to speculate that they just don't care any more.

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Does anyone have any idea why this hasn't been done already -- other that to speculate that they just don't care any more.
...Oh, I'm sure they care! However, only SpamCop staff would be able to explain why it hasn't been done. And they may either be unable (contracturally) or unwilling to do so.
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...I understand your point but it's based on a complete misconception: just because your e-mail domain mentions "spamcop" does not mean that the SpamCop staff have any control over its behavior.

Complete and utter bullsh**. One and only one entity controls the domain. They have chosen to redirect subdomains to a provider that, at least at one time, they must vet. They could choose to review the integrity of the service as often as spamcop likes. If the service does not live up to the good name then they can ask them to shape up or ship out.

It's either a partnership or it's not. If it's not, then it should be opened up to any Internet mail provider who wishes to deliver reliable service in "partnership" with spamcop.

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Complete and utter bullsh**.

<snip>

...We'll just have to agree to disagree. I defend your right to hold any position you choose but will assert that your view is no more authoritative than mine. And, frankly, I see nothing in what you wrote that in any way contradicts what I wrote. The fact that SpamCop has chosen to not exercise any control over "SpamCop e-mail" (my point) is orthogonal to your argument, with which I agree, that they should.
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With all due respect, you say "just because your e-mail domain mentions 'spamcop' does not mean that the SpamCop staff have any control over its behavior."

I say that's not true. One entity controls the domain, not two. The entity that controls that domain - Spamcop, Cisco, whatever - has the ability to control anything that is done in that domain's name. They can ask for improvements from CES, hold them to a higher standard, kick them out for sullying the service's good name. But to say the owner of the domain "has no control" is just plain doublespeak.

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The fact that SpamCop has chosen to not exercise any control over "SpamCop e-mail" (my point) is orthogonal to your argument, with which I agree, that they should.

Agreed then. They can, and they should. But getting a straight answer out of SC's staff or management is as easy as getting CES Mail to tell their customers what they have done to ensure this doesn't happen again.

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<snip>

But getting a straight answer out of SC's staff or management is as easy as getting CES Mail to tell their customers

<snip>

...True but not comparable because we are (mostly) not paying customers of SpamCop (Cisco) but you are a paying customer of CES. My sense of why we don't get much visibility into SpamCop is that either they can not provide it to us due to legal considerations or they're busy enhancing the parser to handle evolving spammer "tricks" or they fear making information public that might help spammers avoid being caught by the parser.
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...Oh, I'm sure they care!

What is your evidence for being sure they care?

I can tell you with certainty that this kind of poor service would not persist on MY watch month after month after month if I cared -- and I expect that most members of this newsgroup hold themselves to a similar standard.

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All fairly recent stuff. Not seeing the messages from earlier today yet though. They will probably be the last to arrive. It was a server that died then they would have to retrieve the data from backups first I suppose, assuming they have backups.

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No, I don't think this situation will involve restoring from backups, because it was a "pass-through" filtering and routing server that appears to have been offline, not the MX or the final webmail system. The MX couldn't talk to the filtering server, so it was rejecting all incoming mail, so I'm pretty sure what we're seeing is entirely the "retries" coming from outside sources, and their retry intervals vary, so things will be jumbled until all the external servers that couldn't deliver decide to try again.

DT

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No, I don't think this situation will involve restoring from backups, because it was a "pass-through" filtering and routing server that appears to have been offline, not the MX or the final webmail system. The MX couldn't talk to the filtering server, so it was rejecting all incoming mail, so I'm pretty sure what we're seeing is entirely the "retries" coming from outside sources, and their retry intervals vary, so things will be jumbled until all the external servers that couldn't deliver decide to try again.

So what happened to the email which they retreived over the past 14 hours from external POP servers? Did CES just bounce all of it?

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Rejecting all incoming mail? Oh crikey, that means all my mail since last night until the trickle that just started is lost, because I doubt very much if any ISP will process huge volumes of rejected mail. Is Spamcop trying to get us all labelled as spammers or what?

I hope you are wrong there. My ISP is typical of many and they tend to act first and think later, so if I get my service terminated SC will be hearing a lot from me.

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What is your evidence for being sure they care?

<snip>

...I deduce that they care from the fact that SpamCop staff (Don D'Minion) has been much more visible than the CES staff and doing what little is in his power to help (via communication with CES) when the e-mail issues arise, in spite of the fact that he has no direct control (or at least has opted, for whatever reason, to not execute whatever control he might have) over the behavior of the e-mail product.
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So what happened to the email which they retreived over the past 14 hours from external POP servers? Did CES just bounce all of it?

I don't know. I just know that the MX server couldn't talk to the next-level server (which I think is "filter8") and so was giving a 400-level failure during the SMTP delivery attempt. I don't have my account doing much POPing, so I don't know the details of how those messages work their way through the system. You'd have to check with Email_Support.

DT

Rejecting all incoming mail? Oh crikey, that means all my mail since last night until the trickle that just started is lost, because I doubt very much if any ISP will process huge volumes of rejected mail. I hope you are wrong there. My ISP is typical of many and they tend to act first and think later, so if I get my service terminated SC will be hearing a lot from me.

Mail servers are almost universally programmed to handle multiple failed attempts at delivery, as long as they're 400-level errors and not fatal 500-level ones (such as "no such user" etc.). If I'm correct, external sources that were trying to deliver to our spamcop.net (or cesmail.net) addresses during the outage would come back hours later (or sometimes a day later) and try again. This typically will continue for up to about three days, if I remember correctly.

DT

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Oh crap! Here are the two most recent updates from Email_Support:

As of approx 5PM EDT mail started to be delivered to user mailboxes. It will take several hours for the system to completely work through the backlog. Thanks for your patience.

~~~Update ~~~

The box that failed has proven to be unreliable and we are on site reconfiguring the system.

This explains why some of us received a few hours' worth of mail and then everything ground to a halt again. No ETA given, unfortunately.

DT

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Yeah, all I got was 6 spams. I finally redirected my email away from spamcop and asked people (who I know had sent email) to resend and have already received the 2nd copies.

It was good for a long time and maybe it will be again, but at the moment it's just too finicky for my use. (And the lack of communication is even more annoying.)

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Well at least it's working now, thankfully.

Unfortunately not. See the message about reconfiguration of a server.

Some mailing list stuff arrived, often duplicated or triplicated and ordinary mail but nothing in the last three hours.

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Well it is working, with delays in some of the mail that was originally blocked. That should eventually arrive. I too am missing some mail from earlier yesterday.

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Actually, I think it depends on if you're having mail auto-forwarded to your CESMail address or having CESMail POP it from somewhere else. I do the former, and I think I received everything eventually, but in the other thread, Sten, who uses the "POP from elsewhere" method is apparently missing lots of mail:

I've been receiving recent email, but messages retreived by CESmail from my POP accounts between 3am Apr 30 and 3am May 1 are missing. When will they be delivered? As they were successfully delivered to the POP server, they will not be resent by the source in response to a bounce.

If the POP process was merrily grabbing the mail from POP servers but then couldn't talk to the filtering server(s), I guessing that a lot of mail could have been permanently lost, but that's a guess. Email_Support hasn't posted nor tweeted lately.

DT

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