Elias

Starting around noon today Pacific Time (GMT -8), Yahoo started throttling our mail again. They're only accepting about 25% of the email we're generating and the backlog is growing fast. I've filled out yet another whitelist request with Yahoo, but I don't expect that to help. Note that this affects all domains for which Yahoo handles email, including all the international ones (yahoo.ca, yahoo.de, etc...), rogers.com, btinternet.com, and many others. Elias

Charter is still having issues. I've called Charter a dozen times and left many messages with their Email & Web Operations team and have never received a callback. At this point, there's nothing else we can do about Charter. Unfortunately, you'll have to use another email service if you want to reliably receive email from us. Elias

Already fixed. We're pretty close to a 24-hour shop. Elias

The web servers ran low on disk space for temporary files. I've cleared up the disk and the site should be running normally again. Elias

The web servers ran low on disk space for temporary files. I've cleared up the disk and the site should be running normally again. Elias

Due to the large backlog of Yahoo email and a mistake I made when fiddling with the mail queue , outbound emails from the site became stuck in queue. I've corrected the issue and all email is flowing normally again (with the exception of the large Yahoo backlog still waiting to go out and our continued issues with Charter). Elias

It appears Yahoo has stopped throttling us and mail is being delivered without delay. There is still a fairly large backlog of email, so it will likely take several more hours for all Yahoo email to be delivered. Elias

Starting sometime yesterday, Yahoo began throttling all mail we send to them. This has caused an enormous backlog of email, and most email being sent to Yahoo is not currently being delivered successfully. When this has happened previously, Groundspeak's attempts to contact Yahoo to report or resolve the problem have been unsuccessful. If you have a Yahoo Mail account and are affected by this issue, please contact Yahoo Mail support and report this issue to them. I'll post updates here when I have more information. Elias

The forums sent you two emails today, both of which were successfully delivered. Did you not receive those or were you expecting to get more? Elias

Charter is either throttling us or they're having server problems. There's a small backlog of email for Charter and they're only accepting around 30 to 50 emails per hour from us which is a bit less than the amount of email we generate for Charter customers each hour. It appears this started around 24 hours ago. You'll need to contact Charter's support department to see if they're having server trouble or if they're intentionally throttling our mail. Elias

Try the new Google Custom Search we've added at the top of the Geocaching.com home page. It'll search for text on all the Geocaching.com pages Google has indexed. Elias

Starting sometime in the last week, Yahoo has implemented some sort of greylisting for its Yahoo Mail service. Unlike normal greylisting implementations which usually only greylists an IP address once, Yahoo appears to be greylisting every single email that is sent to them. Unfortunately, with the volume of email we send to Yahoo everyday (and especially on Thursdays with the new cache notification emailer), when our mail server retries to send all the deferred email, we're being hit with Yahoo's rate controls which are delaying all those messages further. So while normal greylisting should only cause email delays of ~15 minutes or so, we currently have an enormous queue of email that's been delayed for over 8 hours. I'll attempt to contact Yahoo to see if they have some sort of whitelist we can be added to. But based on reports from other mail administrators around the net, I'm not anticipating much help from Yahoo and I don't expect this problem to be solved soon. I'll post an update here when more information becomes available. Elias

Your 3 PQs that were generated around 9 AM this morning were delivered to your Yahoo account within seconds of being generated. I'll send you a PM with the log entries so you can follow up with Yahoo on this issue. Elias

I think Verizon is having other issues this morning. It appears that sometime yesterday, Verizon did whitelist us as all of the backlogged email was delivered. This morning, there are only 50 emails in queue for Verizon and their servers are giving us a "server too busy" message. I suspect they have a minor server problem and they'll clear it up shortly. Elias

Your mail provider's server has been having disk space issues, so much of your email has been delayed. However, it does look like it was all eventually delivered. I'll send you the log entries via a PM so you can follow up with them on this issue. Elias

Dino - Sorry for the delay getting back to you, I was just forwarded this thread. Every email we've sent to your domain was sucessfully delivered. I'll send you a PM with the log entries so you can follow up with your mail provider. Elias

Looks like one of the three scheduled for today was archived, so it won't run. The other one ran yesterday afternoon, so it's toward the end of the queue, but should run shortly. Elias

Hotmail, Yahoo, and Charter are all experiencing mail issues. Mail to these destinations is being queued on our server and will be delivered as soon as those issues are resolved. Elias

Our notification engine died again. I've restarted it and all the queued notifications will go out shortly. Elias

The AOL issue has been resolved for now, so I'm going to close out this thread. I would like to acknowledge and thank our German AOL users for their assistance in getting this resolved with AOL. I never did get to speak with someone on AOL's US Postmaster team that actually knew what was going on, but the German Postmaster team proactively contacted me in response to complaints by our German AOL users. They were extremely helpful and after just a couple of emails, they added us to AOL's main whitelist. Elias

WOW do we send you a lot of email! Whew! Unfortunately, the bad news is that of the 668 emails we sent to you yesterday, every single one of them was successfully delivered to Hotmail. Every one. Sorry. I'll send you a PM with the log entries showing delivery of your email. You'll have to contact Hotmail to figure this one out. Elias

AOL never stopped blocking us but the backlog did clear up a couple of days ago. But first thing Thursday morning, we sent out the weekly new cache notification emailer and the backlog is, well, back. Given the weekend email activity, I suspect it will take almost 4 days for the backlog to clear. Elias

AOL Update: AOL is still throttling us, but the mail backlog has been reduced to an insignificant amount. The oldest message in queue is less than 1 hour old. It'll be interesting to see what happens on Thursday with the emailer. AOL did finally set up our Feedback Loop yesterday, and I have to admit its rather insightful as to what people are marking as spam. Insightful is too nice, its actually rather appalling. People who have been members for some time are marking as spam every email they receive as a result of the multiple caches they've added to their watchlist. Even more disturbing is that roughly 25% of the complaints are cache owners marking log notifications (found, not found, etc...) to their own caches as spam. The top of the email reads, "You are receiving this email because you are the owner of this listing." What part of that isn't clear? So somehow AOL has trained their customers into thinking that marking emails as spam magically makes things go away. This irresponsible behavior is even less appropriate when it comes from cache owners who have physical containers hidden in the real world. And I consider those who are too lazy to click on the remove link at the bottom of the watchlist emails to be engaging in a denial-of-service attack against the site. We'll be talking internally over the next few days how to address this situation. I fully expect that we'll be taking a very hard stance towards those who choose to behave this way. Elias

Not necessarily. While for the most part our mail server retries email in the order it received them, AOL is not accepting them in any order. AOL only releases the block for short periods of time, so the only mail that gets through is just what our server happens to be trying at that time. So there's no particular order in which the backlogged emails get delivered. Its certainly possible that your PQ is still in queue. There are still a ton of emails in queue for AOL. With all the new mail being added to the queue, the total backlog of email to AOL has only decreased by about 25% in the last week. Elias

Unfortunately, that won't help. The mail is being blocked before AOL even looks at it. Elias