Email bounces

[kevin]

For everyone:

The internet is not what it used to be. The increasing quantity of spam and virus email has reduced the reliability of internet email.

ISPs and mail forwarding providers tell me that they are blocking 70% to 80% of the email coming in to their servers. They tell me that total email traffic is far more than it used to be, and that (as you can see from these percentages), most of it is spam and viruses.

Your internet service provider, and mine, is desparate to do whatever they can do to block spam and virus email, just to prevent them having to invest further in infrastructure to carry it. So they have blocking programs that look for message content patterns that make a message look like spam to them. Have you noticed recently that spam message you receive have the text capitaliized and punctuated strangely, and that they have random words in the subject line and message body? This is the spammers trying to get around the ISP blocking software.

Where this becomes a problem for me (and you) is that sometimes ISPs (especially Comcast in my opinion) get too aggressive with their blocking software. And sometimes they (all, not just Comcast) identify web domains as spammers when they really are not. For example, the email forwarder that I used to use (enom) was identified by my ISP as a spammer. So ANY mail that came from enom was blocked. Since (at that time) nearly all my mail came through enom, it was a real problem.

But the problems can be much more erratic and intermittant than the above example. A recent anti-spam/virus technique is to test the domain name of the sender and see if it is valid. If it is not valid, then bounce the email. However, this causes valid email to get bounced sometimes. I had one recipient of email from me keep bouncing my email, saying my domain name was not valid. Well, it clearly was, but their system had tried it, and it failed, so for a while, it bounced email from me to my customer, no matter how I tried to send it. After a few hours, it cleared up, with no action on anybody's part.

So why am I writing all this? Because Rocket231 wrote in a message today that his "email to me bounced". I am really frustrated with this, but it seems there is nothing I can do about it. I have changed email forwarders, and continuously test all my domains, and they seem to work every time. (The previous email forwarder, enom, did have some problems that were delaying mail.) No ISP (mine, or the ISPs of people sending mail) is interested in trying to track down problems, because of the above, and because most problems just disappear after a few hours or days.

So, I can't think what else I can do to make email more reliable.

If you get an email bounce, please phone me. 503-590-2913. Please leave me a voice mail if I am not around.

Sometimes my phones don't work either (we live in a rural area, the tin cans rust), but my hope is they won't fail at the same time.

If you have a suggestion as to how I could improve this, I would love to hear it. I used to publish my FAX number, but that was a bad idea, it was almost immediately harvested for junk FAX use.

Blue skies,

Kevin
webmaster@337skymaster.com

[WebMaster]

We are faced with the same dilemma. In our case, the email server and web server reside inside the company, and our ISP only provides an internet connection.

My attempts to filter email have been fraught with endless problems, the end result being that we don't filter at all. We use anti-virus on every PC, but the junk is sometimes overwhelming. Because I am "Postmaster", "Admin", and a user, I get enormous amounts of junk mail. Unfortunately, 1 out of 1000 emails sent to postmaster or admin are useful, server diagnostic things, so I can't turn off those accounts.

As a result, I had 95 emails between Sat evening, and Sun morning. It's enough to drive a sane man to drink.

[kevin]

Yes, I get the same thing. So far, I don't have reason to go to the effort of running my own email server, so I can't decide not to block. But even with all the blocking, and using spam quarantine software on my client machine, I get about 8 spam emails a day that make it through every filter, and another 30 that make it through my ISP's filter, and get put in another folder for me to review each day. But then, about 5% of the quarantined stuff is quarantined by mistake. For example, any email I get from Peyton McCool is quarantined as spam, and I have no idea why.

I have already been driven to drink, but this is all good reason to continue drinking... ;-)

Kevin

[Dale Campbell]

I had the same thing. I recieved over 300 junk e-mails every day.
Try weeding out the good ones took me at least a hour every day.
I changed my e-mail address, now I only get mail from people I know. You have to send a message to every one on your mail list ,to inform them of the change. That is the only thing that works. Dale Campbell

[Don Hickman]

Dale,

Say it isn't so! Change email addresses? I've had the same email address since 1987. (I know, you think the internet wasn't around then. Long story.) You get 300 spam messages daily? Hah! I can't begin to count them!

I wish I had an answer for all this junk email. (other than change email addresses) I've considered changing my email, but after all these years, I just can't bring myself to give it up. Worse, my son hosts my domain (proslink.com) and we run our own email. Still the filters don't begin to get it all. Wastes a lot of time.

Of course, the filters also probably dump some real email into Junk and I never see it. There are some advantages! When clients complain that I never responded to their email, I always blame it on the spam filters!!

Don

[Dale Campbell]

We have sold and serviced computers for over 23 years. I was also reluctant to change my e-mail address. I could see know other way. You only need to change one letter or number to solve the problem. I did 6 mouths ago and my junk e-mail disappeared.