Email SMS Notification reception delayed

[+TorqueMaster]

I currently have notifications set to send Newly Published alerts via email to my cellphone's SMS email address.  (For Cricket users its your cell phone number + @mms.cricketwireless.net).  The problem is that the new cache notifications rarely arrive in a timely manner -- usually 30-60 minutes later than ones sent to an actual (Gmail) address.  

 

It appears that the body of the outgoing message is altered for the SMS recipient as compared to the email recipient.  Pretty sure this has to be happening before it leaves Groundspeak, since it isn't just the same information, but truncated.  It has much less information,  just a link to the cache page.  Annoying, but tolerable.

 

As a test I sent myself an email from my computer to my cellphone's SMS address.  It arrived almost instantly.  It seems likely the delay is with Groundspeak, not my wireless provider, and reformatting the message is probably part of it. 

 

Is Groundspeak the bottleneck?  What can be done to get these "emails" to SMS out faster?  30-60 minutes of delay is way too much in a FTF situation. 

 

Thanks...

[+arisoft]

13 minutes ago, TorqueMaster said:

As a test I sent myself an email from my computer to my cellphone's SMS address.  It arrived almost instantly.  It seems likely the delay is with Groundspeak, not my wireless provider, and reformatting the message is probably part of it. 

 

I suspect that the operator is using a technique called greylisting. It adds intentional delay to some messages depending on the sender.

[+NYPaddleCacher]

21 hours ago, arisoft said:

 

I suspect that the operator is using a technique called greylisting. It adds intentional delay to some messages depending on the sender.

 

I haven't heard the term greylisting used.  Adding an intentional delay is often called throttling and is a technique to used to limit the amount of network bandwidth based upon exceeding a threshhold.  

[+on4bam]

I've seen greylisting in the deliverylogs of my mailserver. It happens most of the time when sending to one certain recipient but not to others who have the same ISP. Sometimes the message is delivered a few seconds later, other times it takes hours or not at all. The problem is that, unlike mails that are refused or can't be delivered there's no "deliverable" mail or other error. I tracked the greylisted problems to one mailserver of the ISP, the other never throws greylisting messages.

 

[+niraD]

13 minutes ago, NYPaddleCacher said:

21 hours ago, arisoft said:

I suspect that the operator is using a technique called greylisting. It adds intentional delay to some messages depending on the sender.

 

I haven't heard the term greylisting used.  Adding an intentional delay is often called throttling and is a technique to used to limit the amount of network bandwidth based upon exceeding a threshhold.  

 

Yeah, when I've heard the term "greylisting" used, it has been for email sources that are considered suspect enough that the email shouldn't go in the regular inbox, but not so suspect that the email should be rejected.

 

In contrast, "blacklisting" blocks an email source entirely, and "whitelisting" forces email from a source to go into the regular inbox automatically (regardless of how suspect the content might appear).

[+arisoft]

2 hours ago, NYPaddleCacher said:

I haven't heard the term greylisting used.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greylisting

 

Now you have

[+hzoi]

On 5/20/2019 at 9:21 PM, TorqueMaster said:

I currently have notifications set to send Newly Published alerts via email to my cellphone's SMS email address.  (For Cricket users its your cell phone number + @mms.cricketwireless.net).  The problem is that the new cache notifications rarely arrive in a timely manner -- usually 30-60 minutes later than ones sent to an actual (Gmail) address.  

 

It appears that the body of the outgoing message is altered for the SMS recipient as compared to the email recipient.  Pretty sure this has to be happening before it leaves Groundspeak, since it isn't just the same information, but truncated.  It has much less information,  just a link to the cache page.  Annoying, but tolerable.

 

As a test I sent myself an email from my computer to my cellphone's SMS address.  It arrived almost instantly.  It seems likely the delay is with Groundspeak, not my wireless provider, and reformatting the message is probably part of it. 

 

Is Groundspeak the bottleneck?  What can be done to get these "emails" to SMS out faster?  30-60 minutes of delay is way too much in a FTF situation. 

 

Thanks...

 

I do not believe Groundspeak sends different emails depending on your particular email client.  Rather, I believe the issue could be that Groundspeak emails are all in HTML, not plain text, and your phone carrier is stripping out HTML content to reduce those emails to an SMS.  That potentially accounts for both the delay and for the less than optimal content you receive.  My money is on this, and not on any greylisting.

 

If you're using a smart phone, a better solution might be to use an email app to your phone to check the address to which Groundspeak sends your notification emails.

 

If you prefer the SMS option, this thread discusses a script that strips down Groundspeak emails, which could help.  I can't speak to its utility, as I don't use it - I only recall seeing the discussion.

 

Other discussions on SMS and email are available by searching through old forum threads.  Here's the search I used.

 

Hope this helps.

[+TorqueMaster]

Hrmrmrh...

If it is greylisting, really nothing I can do.  I am relying on gmail address (android phone already forces me to the have app and account) to get alerts when they actually happen.  I have since setup forwarding from gmail to my sms address, we'll see what happens there...

 

The reason I believe Groundspeak is altering the body of the message sent directly to sms is because of the language used:

 

"Subject: New Multi-cache: cache title (GCxxxxx) x.xxmi E (xx.xxkm E)

Go find GCxxxxx: http://coord.info/GCxxxxx"

 

The link seems to be a shortcut to the cache page.

 

In the Gmail email, the exact same subject is used.  The body appears to be completely different.  No where does it use the text "Go find GCxxxxx: http://coord.info/GCxxxxx"

not even in the "original message" unless it's encoded in to the base64 part.  The text "Go find CGxxxxx:" is coming from Groundspeak, not a 3rd party stripping things out.  Can they encode the same message such that if it's going to SMS one part is sent/visible, and if it's going to email, a different part is sent/visible?

 

Anyway, the point is to figure out why the alerts sent directly to SMS are so delayed.  If Cricket is greylisting Groundspeak (why?) that's that I'll not pursue further.  If the delay is something Groundspeak can fix, or pressure Cricket to fix, that'd be great!

 

Thanks for everyone's input.

[+barefootjeff]

1 hour ago, TorqueMaster said:

The reason I believe Groundspeak is altering the body of the message sent directly to sms is because of the language used:

 

"Subject: New Multi-cache: cache title (GCxxxxx) x.xxmi E (xx.xxkm E)

Go find GCxxxxx: http://coord.info/GCxxxxx"

 

The link seems to be a shortcut to the cache page.

 

In the Gmail email, the exact same subject is used.  The body appears to be completely different.  No where does it use the text "Go find GCxxxxx: http://coord.info/GCxxxxx"

not even in the "original message" unless it's encoded in to the base64 part.  The text "Go find CGxxxxx:" is coming from Groundspeak, not a 3rd party stripping things out.  Can they encode the same message such that if it's going to SMS one part is sent/visible, and if it's going to email, a different part is sent/visible?

 

No, it's not a different email. I just looked at the source for the notification email I got for my recent multi. It contains two parts, one with "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8" and the other "Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8", both encoded as base-64. The text/html part is what I see in my email client:

 

 

whereas the text/plain section, when I put the base-64 content into an online decoder, contains this:

 

 

That's the bit that's being forwarded to your SMS.

 

It's the same email coming out of Groundspeak regardless of its destination, it's just the recipient that's deciding which bit of it to display. Your delays are happening within your email to SMS provider.

 

[+TorqueMaster]

Thanks barefootjeff, you nailed it.

 

I did not see the tiny encoded text/plain section when I looked through the email, but sure enough, it is there.

 

Since my cell provider seems to be the problem, it will be interesting to see if the email forwarded from my Gmail to my SMS address will be delayed the same as the email from Groundspeak to my SMS address...  Still waiting for the next new cache alert.

[+TorqueMaster]

Following up -- 2 new cache alerts. 

 

For the first one, all three notifications -- Groundspeak email to Gmail, Gmail forward to Cell SMS, and Groundspeak "email" to cell SMS arrived immediately.

On the second one,  Groundspeak email to Gmail, Gmail forward to Cell SMS arrived immediately, but Groundspeak "email" to cell SMS lagged by 30 minutes.