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Still no newsletter


Nosynel

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The last 2 weeks myself and several other people have not been receiving a newsletter.

 

It is not in a spam folder. I have checked

 

I can see the newsletter via website but you don't receive notifications of Megas, local events and new caches in your area on that newsletter.

 

I am sorry that I have posted this in lots of places. I have had no response from geocaching.com... This was suggested by someone else as the place to post this problem. :anicute::unsure:

 

Nellie

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The last 2 weeks myself and several other people have not been receiving a newsletter.

 

It is not in a spam folder. I have checked

 

I can see the newsletter via website but you don't receive notifications of Megas, local events and new caches in your area on that newsletter.

 

I am sorry that I have posted this in lots of places. I have had no response from geocaching.com... This was suggested by someone else as the place to post this problem. :anicute::unsure:

 

Nellie

 

I've checked and there's not been a question submitted to our Help Center from anyone with your email address. (No one else from New Zealand has emailed us about the newsletter either.) I wish I could help directly here, but I'm not involved with the newsletter.

 

If you've submitted the question, and I missed it, you should have a ticket number. PM it to me and I'll check to see what's going on with it.

 

If you've not submitted the question yet, go here and categorize your question as 01. My Account.

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The last 2 weeks myself and several other people have not been receiving a newsletter.

 

It is not in a spam folder. I have checked

 

I can see the newsletter via website but you don't receive notifications of Megas, local events and new caches in your area on that newsletter.

 

I am sorry that I have posted this in lots of places. I have had no response from geocaching.com... This was suggested by someone else as the place to post this problem. :anicute::unsure:

 

Nellie

 

I've checked and there's not been a question submitted to our Help Center from anyone with your email address. (No one else from New Zealand has emailed us about the newsletter either.) I wish I could help directly here, but I'm not involved with the newsletter.

 

If you've submitted the question, and I missed it, you should have a ticket number. PM it to me and I'll check to see what's going on with it.

 

If you've not submitted the question yet, go here and categorize your question as 01. My Account.

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The last 2 weeks myself and several other people have not been receiving a newsletter.

 

It is not in a spam folder. I have checked

 

I can see the newsletter via website but you don't receive notifications of Megas, local events and new caches in your area on that newsletter.

 

I am sorry that I have posted this in lots of places. I have had no response from geocaching.com... This was suggested by someone else as the place to post this problem. :anicute::unsure:

 

Nellie

 

I've checked and there's not been a question submitted to our Help Center from anyone with your email address. (No one else from New Zealand has emailed us about the newsletter either.) I wish I could help directly here, but I'm not involved with the newsletter.

 

If you've submitted the question, and I missed it, you should have a ticket number. PM it to me and I'll check to see what's going on with it.

 

If you've not submitted the question yet, go here and categorize your question as 01. My Account.

 

Hi there Rock Chalk and thank you for looking into this.

I submitted a Help Centre query yesterday as I have not had a newsletter since 9 June. It's obviously still well within response timescales, but I will post here any information that the query generates which may help others.

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For what it's worth, I haven't seen a newsletter in several (2 or 3) weeks. Last time this happened, your email server's reputation with Comcast was so bad that they were throttling the heck out of your mail with only a few squeaking through every hour, and most expiring as a result. You switched mail servers for the newsletter so as to produce a new IP address to Comcast, but in the end, it appears that this band-aid approach may have reached the end of its usefulness. The reputation problem was being caused by far too many messages to invalid email accounts. May well have been a 550 error -- it's been a while and I would need to search for the original thread where I took the time to contact Comcast's security folks to determine the problem from my end (why gc.com wasn't able to do so is still a mystery to me).

 

Again, if you can't get your mailing list cleaned up, I would suggest that SOMEONE write a simple script that can be run nightly to review your server logs so that you can know when an ISP is refusing your mail, and perhaps respond to the problem early enough to come to terms with Comcast. As was the case before, Comcast is providing a clear flag in its return messaging indicating to you why it's refusing your mail.

 

Better yet, clean up the list so that this isn't an ongoing problem.

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As an aside, runs at another ISP with a ton of invalid addresses appear as a 'directory harvest attack', which is why the sender's reputation is automatically lowered.

 

To make a point for the umpteenth time, not periodically (or ever) verifying email addresses at the outset has more than one negative consequence. Though that topic has been beaten to death in threads identifying other problems that it creates for users of this system, this is just one more example. Your new "Message Board" isn't going to help with this one.

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For what it's worth, I haven't seen a newsletter in several (2 or 3) weeks. Last time this happened, your email server's reputation with Comcast was so bad that they were throttling the heck out of your mail with only a few squeaking through every hour, and most expiring as a result. You switched mail servers for the newsletter so as to produce a new IP address to Comcast, but in the end, it appears that this band-aid approach may have reached the end of its usefulness. The reputation problem was being caused by far too many messages to invalid email accounts. May well have been a 550 error -- it's been a while and I would need to search for the original thread where I took the time to contact Comcast's security folks to determine the problem from my end (why gc.com wasn't able to do so is still a mystery to me).

 

Again, if you can't get your mailing list cleaned up, I would suggest that SOMEONE write a simple script that can be run nightly to review your server logs so that you can know when an ISP is refusing your mail, and perhaps respond to the problem early enough to come to terms with Comcast. As was the case before, Comcast is providing a clear flag in its return messaging indicating to you why it's refusing your mail.

 

Better yet, clean up the list so that this isn't an ongoing problem.

 

This is not exclusively a Comcast issue. Last time this happened I opened a Gmail account just for geocaching and no longer use my Comcast address as my primary. I am not getting the newsletters at my Gmail address.

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For what it's worth, I haven't seen a newsletter in several (2 or 3) weeks. Last time this happened, your email server's reputation with Comcast was so bad that they were throttling the heck out of your mail with only a few squeaking through every hour, and most expiring as a result. You switched mail servers for the newsletter so as to produce a new IP address to Comcast, but in the end, it appears that this band-aid approach may have reached the end of its usefulness. The reputation problem was being caused by far too many messages to invalid email accounts. May well have been a 550 error -- it's been a while and I would need to search for the original thread where I took the time to contact Comcast's security folks to determine the problem from my end (why gc.com wasn't able to do so is still a mystery to me).

 

Again, if you can't get your mailing list cleaned up, I would suggest that SOMEONE write a simple script that can be run nightly to review your server logs so that you can know when an ISP is refusing your mail, and perhaps respond to the problem early enough to come to terms with Comcast. As was the case before, Comcast is providing a clear flag in its return messaging indicating to you why it's refusing your mail.

 

Better yet, clean up the list so that this isn't an ongoing problem.

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I have the same exact issue with two gmail accounts not getting the newsletters for 3+ weeks. Have contacted Groundspeak and wanted me to do my troubleshooting again. Am getting all notifications and other Groundspeak communications.

 

>>>>

Thanks for reaching out to Geocaching HQ. You are subscribed to the newsletter so something in your email settings is blocking the emails from coming through.

 

There are a few reasons why this may be happening.

 

Since our community is so large we send a lot of emails every day. Some email providers will occasionally throttle or blacklist Geocaching.com's emails because they do not distinguish between solicited and unsolicited bulk email. If this happens you can contact your email provider about this issue. Sometimes they will want our email server's IP address: 66.150.167.157, 66.150.167.158, 66.150.167.160, and 66.150.167.161 These are the originating IPs for all mail from Geocaching.com.

 

Please also create a filter in your Inbox settings which allows all emails from "noreply@geocaching.com".

 

In addition, email providers sometimes update their own sites, such that emails received in the past start filtering into the Spam folder, I recommend that you check the Spam folder for these missing emails.

 

I hope this helps, but, if neither of these suggestions helps you to resolve this issue, please reply. I will troubleshoot further for you.

 

All the best,

 

<<<<<

 

Jim

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Since our community is so large we send a lot of emails every day. Some email providers will occasionally throttle or blacklist Geocaching.com's emails because they do not distinguish between solicited and unsolicited bulk email.

Actually, the bigger problem is that Groundspeak continually sends email to bogus addresses, and does not clean up their lists in response to bounces. Blaming the "email providers" for blacklisting what is indistinguishable from a spam attack is disingenuous, Groundspeak....

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For what it's worth, I haven't seen a newsletter in several (2 or 3) weeks. Last time this happened, your email server's reputation with Comcast was so bad that they were throttling the heck out of your mail with only a few squeaking through every hour, and most expiring as a result. You switched mail servers for the newsletter so as to produce a new IP address to Comcast, but in the end, it appears that this band-aid approach may have reached the end of its usefulness. The reputation problem was being caused by far too many messages to invalid email accounts. May well have been a 550 error -- it's been a while and I would need to search for the original thread where I took the time to contact Comcast's security folks to determine the problem from my end (why gc.com wasn't able to do so is still a mystery to me).

 

Again, if you can't get your mailing list cleaned up, I would suggest that SOMEONE write a simple script that can be run nightly to review your server logs so that you can know when an ISP is refusing your mail, and perhaps respond to the problem early enough to come to terms with Comcast. As was the case before, Comcast is providing a clear flag in its return messaging indicating to you why it's refusing your mail.

 

Better yet, clean up the list so that this isn't an ongoing problem.

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I have not received the newsletter for the last two weeks (weeks of June 22 and 29), and I have yet to receive one this week. I'm also on Gmail, so it does seem like Gmail is blocking the Geocaching.com newsletters. They are not in my spam folder, so they have not been delivered to my mailbox at all. All other emails from noreply@geocaching.com are arriving as expected. I think it's time for Groundspeak to contact Google to sort things out.

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Seems wrong that they're burdening you with the task of informing them - seems it should work the other way around. They're the folks who 'own' the server logs that contain all of the warning flags that will have been thrown by Comcast.

 

Thanks in advance for your persistence. If the root cause is the same as before, I hope that rather than applying another band-aid solution (switching to a server whose reputation hasn't yet been ruined by the mailing list), the quality of the list itself is finally addressed in a more robust fashion. However, until periodic email verification is put into place (something I know from recent posts actually has become a topic of interest there), cleaning it up is going to be a tedious task unless the bounces can somehow be used to automate the process. While many here have argued for email verification, the real need for it goes deeper than may be obvious.

Edited by ecanderson
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Seems wrong that they're burdening you with the task of informing them - seems it should work the other way around. They're the folks who 'own' the server logs that contain all of the warning flags that will have been thrown by Comcast.

 

Thanks in advance for your persistence. If the root cause is the same as before, I hope that rather than applying another band-aid solution (switching to a server whose reputation hasn't yet been ruined by the mailing list), the quality of the list itself is finally addressed in a more robust fashion. However, until periodic email verification is put into place (something I know from recent posts actually has become a topic of interest there), cleaning it up is going to be a tedious task unless the bounces can somehow be used to automate the process. While many here have argued for email verification, the real need for it goes deeper than may be obvious.

Maybe the solution is to quit emailing the newsletter but instead send them via the message center. Then you don't have to worry about comcast.

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Ugh. IT tells me that after we contacted Comcast and had the block removed for our newsletter mail server, about 1500 emails were successfully delivered before they then started bouncing them again for the same reason as before. We've set up a redirect so next week these will go out through our other mail server that doesn't seem to have these problems.

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And I assume that the reason that the mail keeps being blocked by Comcast is for the same reason that I identified in my conversations with Comcast when this happened earlier? Too many bad addresses?

 

Moun10Bike -

 

Please understand that it sounds as though the solution that got us back into this ditch again is about to be employed a 2nd time. Playing musical servers so as to keep presenting IP addresses that haven't been previously 'soiled' by a lot of bad email really isn't a proper solution. To clarify: Last time around, there were so many emails being bounced for bad addresses that your server had finally triggered an algorithm at Comcast that is designed to protect against 'directory harvest attacks'. Believe me, their threshold is pretty generous, and it's indicative of the poor quality of the newsletter mailing list that Groundspeak's server(s) is(are) able to exceed it.

 

Although I'm sure they have already put 2 and 2 together, it won't hurt to poke IT one more time and remind them that user email verification serves several good purposes, not always just the more obvious ones. Comcast isn't the first ISP to blacklist Groundspeak servers, and as you can see from the traffic here, it's not the first time it's been an issue with Comcast. In the meanwhile, it's not right that you should have to bring these things to their attention. As noted before, your server logs will have already contained the information as to the reason that mail was being throttled. A daily parsing of those logs for issues of this sort can be completely automated and provide good red flag warnings to the admins that something is amiss so that THEY can deal with these things proactively, and not wait until they are brought to their attention by users.

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