missing email (gmail, server, working, online)

[harry chickpea]

Interesting little roundabout with Earthlink this past week. I have one Earthlink email address I use both as a regular email address and as the target for forwarded mail from my website email. Another copy of that forward from the website email goes to another non-Earthlink email address as a backup. A little while back I began noticing missing emails in the Earthlink inbox. Stuff that should have forwarded didn't, even with the spam filter completely off. Also have had reports of some sending email to the Earthlink addy and my never getting it.

Spent a couple hours today on help chat and could not get an email from my website to Earthlink, no matter what was tried, even though a CC would successfully go elsewhere.

It is pretty obvious that the mail server at Earthlink is blocking my website email and one of the techs will be working the problem, but I can't think of any reason why that would happen. What also concerns me is if it blocked my email, what or who else has been getting blocked? (neither the domain or IP address are listed in spamhaus).

That is no way to run a business. At least I was able to catch it.

[thecoalman]

Diagnosing problems like this can be a ***** because no one wants to tell you why it's being dropped and since you have different policies amongst different companies there is no pattern.

For email going into a black hole the first thing to check is that your host has reverse DNS set up. That's a common problem and it will get dropped with no "Undelivered email" reply, *poof* it just disappears. Other reasons may include the IP is on a DNS block list. If you are on shared hosting there might be hundreds of people on the same server and it only takes one compromised site or customer abusing the service, if your host is slow or unresponsive to complaints of abuse the IP for that server or in some cases entire blocks of IP's can end up one of those lists.

neither the domain or IP address are listed in spamhaus

I'm fairly confident there is lot of internal block lists out there, not sure how but I know I ended up one distributed by MS. The public lists were clean. I will give them thumbs up for making the process of getting it unblocked easy and painless.

[swagger]

Without direct access to the logs, you're not going to be able to solve this. Earthlink probably won't care unless it's an issue affecting a large number of customers, and they're not going to let you see the logs.

This is why I'm not a fan of email for important things. If everyone operated according to the standard, things would be great - SMTP is a very robust protocol. But spam has changed how email works, and the standards haven't been updated accordingly. So we have an email system designed pre-spam, for a world where the bulk of email communication is spam. I'm actually surprised that it works as well as it does.

[jzeig104]

switch to gmail. i use hotmail, gmail, yahoo, and comcast, and hands down gmail is the most reliable.

[thelopez2]

Earthlink has a human verification system, but I don't know if it tied to the spam filter or if it independent.

Is there a valid "from" email address from the emails coming from your website. Have you checked the inbox of that email address?

[harry chickpea]

Yeah, went though all the possible scenarios with the chat tech. The problem was absolutely with earthlink's (undocumented) black-holing, even with spam filter off or in minimal configuration. It has since been corrected, but I'm strongly consider dropping them anyway, since the primary reason was a continuation of an old email address that now gets minimal mail (perhaps because of OTHER black hole over-extensions?). Nice way to kill accounts, earthlink.

The chances of my using the maximally intrusive gmail or laughably insecure yahoo mail for anything other than saying "I sent you an email" are slim to none.

It isn't just email. With online bill pay, some websites have become literally unusable, browser issues with "updated" browsers more of a problem, and the whole website development taken over by unthinking techno-weenies who design ONLY for people with the fastest connections and latest browsers. In a lot of ways, the internet is self-destructing while attempting to move forward. I'm actually finding myself going back to snail mail bill payments for some companies.

[maus]

Unfortunately, this is a very common problem online as there are so many areas online with spam and other forms of internet fraud. Earthlink or most any other Internet service provider aggressively blocks IPs they deem as either being sources of spam or some sort of other type of internet abuse. Sometimes they may let you know and sometimes they don't at all. Sometimes when you get email returned back to you by the provider, you can get an idea from the error messages, but you obviously have less to work with here.

Checking on Spamhaus is the right idea, but you may need to dig deeper. You could check your website's mail IP to see if it appears relatively "clean" and spam-free online and not being blocked. Go to Email Blacklist Check - See if your server is blacklisted and put in your mail server's IP address. If it shows being blocked somewhere, Earthlink may see it (and a larger range of neighboring IPs) as a source of possible trouble. Your webhosting/email service provider could have issues that you are not aware of with other customers, especially if your assigned IP address is "shared" with other clients.

[harry chickpea]

Thanks for the link - bookmarked. The site showed no indication of any problem that way. I did note that earthlink had been having system-wide email issues that were supposedly "resolved" according to the status log.