Elias

You were one of the accounts erroneously invalidated. I manually revalidated your account for you. Elias

How about this - in the course of researching this, I found that I invalidated one of Jeremy's Gmail accounts too.... Elias

I did run my email invalidator tool yesterday as bounces have been getting out of control lately, and there are always a few false-positives that get caught. However, I was very surprised by the Gmail reports in this thread as I don't think I've ever seen a delivery issue to Gmail. I checked and can confirm this is a Groundspeak problem. One of the machines that sends out notifications is generating very strange and erroneous bounces when it tries to pass the email off to our main mail server. In any case, I'll work to track this down and fix it as its a larger and more serious issue than just invalidating a few extra accounts. But I do apologize to those Gmail users whose accounts were erroneously invalidated. Elias

You're right, we should have handled this better. It had been so long since we had touched the Mobipocket SDK, we just didn't anticipate this problem. Thanks for letting people know that SmartGPX worked for you. I know there are others here in the forums with Symbian-based smartphones that are also looking for a solution. Elias

This is partially true but isn't the whole story. As I posted above, the tool they now offer just isn't suitable for how we create PQs. Elias

No, I wouldn't do this. They discontinued support for their SDK a long time ago and aren't going to bring it back. Elias

Oops! The wallpaper has been corrected and updated versions are now available from the goodies page. Elias

It is certainly possible, but would take a significant amount of work to convert our code from using the native SDK to the Mobigen tool. Mobigen is also a seperate application, so that alone takes a lot more work to integrate with and test to make sure we properly trap any errors it reports. Using it instead of the SDK is less efficient and would add several seconds to the generation of each PQ, which given the number of PQs we process each day, would be detrimental to the performance of the PQ Generator. Mobigen wants a series of HTML files that it "compiles" into an ebook. Many of the tools already developed by the community convert our PQs into HTML files, so this work has mostly been done. That's why as I mentioned, I wouldn't be surprised to see someone take GPS Babel and Mobigen and create a tool to do this. I'm guessing, but I bet that's how the GSAK macro works. Elias

I've spoken with Mobipocket and they have officially confirmed that the SDK we were using has been discontinued. Unfortunately, the tools they currently offer are in no way similar to the tool we've been relying on for the last 5+ years so there's no reasonable way for us to continue to support the Mobipocket ebook format. We know many in the community have been enjoying and relying on the Mobipocket ebooks for their paperless caching experience and this news is disappointing. It is for us too; and frankly we've been lucky that we've been able to use an unsupported SDK from 2001 for this long. The good news is that the Geocaching developer community has produced a number of great tools over the years which can convert the contents of a GPX file into something that can be used on nearly any device. As you can see from the many posts in this thread, people are finding that using tools such as GPX Spinner, Cachemate, GPX Sonar, GPX View, etc... are finding that those tools provide a better solution than the Mobipocket ebook format. Just in the last few days, stipman has created a macro to create Mobipocket ebooks directly from GSAK, and it probably won't be long until someone combines GPSBabel and Mobipocket's Mobigen tool to create a new application that converts our GPX files directly to Mobipocket ebook format in one shot. These workarounds may not be as convenient as our emailed ebooks were, but there's just no reasonable way for us to continue to support the Mobipocket ebooks without an up-to-date and fully supported SDK. Elias

All of your emails are being successfully delivered to your email provider. I'll send you a PM with the log entries so you can follow up with them on this issue. Elias

I can't speak for this particular bug, but this isn't correct. We do regularly fix TBs and Geocoins in the database when the number on the bug/coin doesn't match the number on the activation sticker. This occurs because the process to imprint the numbers on the physical bug or coin is manual; some person at the manufacturing facility is hand typing the number we've assigned into the machine that etches the coin. Not surprisingly, errors due to type-o's do occur. We will fix these inconsistencies where we can, but we need both the number on the bug or coin and the correct number as printed on the activation sticker. If we're given both, we'll correct the entry in the database to reflect the number on the physical bug itself. I'm guessing that's what happened in this particular case. Elias

Thanks for reporting this issue. I'll take the server down this evening and run some diagnostics on the database. Elias

Our notification service stopped working for some reason and had to be restarted. All outstanding notification emails have already been sent and should have been delivered by now. Elias

Your PQs are sitting on our mail server because your mail server is not accepting connections from us. This problem isn't limited to you either, we have a couple hundred messages in queue for other users with the same domain. I'll send you a PM with the log entries for today's PQs so you can forward them on to your mail provider. Elias

We have a batch process that goes through all the new and edited cache pages and replaces the Tiger maps with the nicer looking maps. Its a very slow process, but your cache should be updated with the new maps in a little while. Elias

Replication to one of our DB servers stopped for some reason. Its been restarted and all data should be updated in an hour or two. Elias

Starting sometime yesterday, an email in queue on our mail server became corrupted and caused mail delivery to slow to a crawl. This created a large backlog of email and affected all mail destinations. Early this morning I found and deleted the corrupted message and mail began flowing again. Most mail for highly performing destinations such Gmail should already have been delivered. Mail to Yahoo and other domins which either throttle us or have slower delivery rates may take a few more hours to receive all their backlogged email. At this time, I do not know what caused the corrupted email, but I'm continuing to investigate. Elias

Nope, you PQ was successfully delivered to Gmail within a few seconds of being generated: Feb 28 11:01:45 signal postfix/smtp[11084]: 532479F6EA: to=<x>, relay=gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[72.14.253.27], delay=1, status=sent (250 2.0.0 OK 1172689305 y11si1997631pod) Elias

Elias can correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think this has to do with greylisting. The one-hour time frame is simply the frequency that Groundspeak's servers retry a connection. This one email happened to go through on the first retry, but like Keystone mentions, sometimes it may not go through until the 2nd, 3rd, or 8th retry. Lil Devil is right. Our server uses an exponential back-off algorithm for delayed mail and it backs-off very quickly. If after the first attempt the message is deferred for any reason, the retry interval is 30 minutes, but then it doubles after every unsuccessful attempt thereafter. So if the first attempt fails, the next will happen approximately 30 minutes later, then 60 minutes later, then 2 hours, then 4 hours, and finally 8 hours. After 8 hours it stops doubling and the retry interval stays fixed at 8 hours. I don't believe Yahoo is greylisting even though I suspected that a couple of months ago. I think they're just limiting the delivery rate; once we go over it, they start throwing errors to force our server to requeue the message. Standard greylisting implementations shouldn't be affected by this too much. Each recipient will have their first email delayed by 30 minutes, but each email after that should come through just fine. Elias

Your PQs are sitting on our mail server waiting for Yahoo to accept them. For weeks, Yahoo has been throttling our email and mail to Yahoo has been taking hours, sometimes days, to deliver. Your best chance to receive PQs and other emails from Groundspeak in a timely manner would be to switch email providers. I'd suggest Gmail as it seems to be the most reliable. Elias

Go to Settings and double check your Filters and Labels to make sure they're not doing something funny. Also, are you forwarding your Gmail account somewhere else? Beyond that, I'm not sure what else to check. I'm only a casual Gmail user, so maybe someone else here with more experience might have some suggestions. Elias

I don't have an easy way to see the history of all your PQs, but I can see that we sent at least one on the 21st, one on the 22nd, and one so far today. All of them were delivered within a few seconds of being generated. I'll send you a PM with the log entries. In general, unless there's an issue with an ISP's mail server (for example, Yahoo throttling us), PQ emails are usually delivered within a minute or two of being generated. So if on your PQ page it shows that a PQ has been generated, then you should have received the email no more than just a few minutes after the Last Generated time. Elias

Unfortunately, both StarBrand and Keystone are correct. Yahoo did delay your email. The cache was published around 18:27 Pacific time. Due to the backlog of email for Yahoo as a result of their throttling, our server wasn't able to attempt its first delivery until 18:35, and when it did, Yahoo refused to accept the message. Our server tried again an hour later at 19:35, and the email finally went through. I've tried contacting Yahoo by email, I've filled out their whitelist request forms, but they're not responding. There's really nothing more I can do to address this issue. I'll send you the logs for this particular email in a PM in case you'd like to try contacting them yourself. I wish I had a better answer for you, but unfortunately, this just isn't a Groundspeak issue. Elias

Your 3 queries yesterday were generated around 7 AM Pacific time and all were sucessfully delivered to your ISP's mail server. Your 3 queries for today also generated around 7 AM and those too were successfully delivered to your ISP's mail server. If you didn't receive them, let me know and I'll be happy to send you a PM of the delivery logs in case you'd like to follow up with your ISP. Elias

All 5 of your PQs were generated a little after 4 PM Pacific time and all were sucessfully delivered to your email address. Please let me know if you didn't receive them. Elias