Post Reply Notification Test

[Davidk]

Well, I've checked, several things.
The email address in the profile is correct: I did think with the server issues it might have been 'erased', but it's still there
There's been no forum notification emails in the in-box, or the junk/spam folder. And if they haven't bounced (getting the wife to clean the trash more regularly on her stuff helped the previous problem) and they've been sent, I have no idea where they went: certainly, not to me. System delays do occur, but much more than few minutes in these days of global connections is pretty unusual. But I'm still getting emails from centrecode to the same address; examples:
- your first post re 0508 was sent by you on Apr11 @ 3.58am, received by me at 8.37pm AEST
- your latest post re 0508 sent by you on 11Apr @ 4.26am, received by me at 9.05pm AEST (GMT+10)

[Davidk]

Easter Sunday, early (0930) morning here in eastern oz. And despite the time lag overnight, no notifications (that may have been lagging thru the international email infrastructure) from the forum.
So, a further test, since Ken said the forum's mail notification package via gmail had been restored:
- I have a smart phone running Android and by factory configuration, it has a gmail account, which I have used previously.
- using the phone, I logged to that gmail account and composed a test message to my email address, as defined to my forum profile
- sent the message.
- it appeared in my Australian (landline connected) mail account in-box within 10 seconds.

The forum logs may say that notification mail is being sent to this address, but it isn't arriving. However, mail from an alternate source sent thru those same Gmail servers gets here quickly. Other mail (including that addressed from a different source - don't know which mail servers it uses - both Trevor and Ken have access to) to the same email address continues to arrive.

I would suggest that the forum mail package really needs looking in to. I cannot be the only user affected by this.

[RobertOZ]

Hi David,
Whilst I am suffering from some missing notifications, I did receive 9 overnight, which appears to be all of them, so it seems to be a hit and miss affair

[Ken Berry]

However, mail from an alternate source sent thru those same Gmail servers gets here quickly.

I assume, David, that you are referring to your Centercode emails. Those are of course sent by servers elsewhere, though ultimately through the gmail servers. So I take your point that something is obviously going wrong in relation to your email from the Ulead/Corel server.

But why just you? While we have the occasional report from users like Robert who get their notifications late, and from others who have not turned on the notification feature when they register, it will be difficult to get the Corel tech to chase this up unless we have a number of other users not receiving their notifications at all. That will especially be the case when he is otherwise engaged in trying to migrate the whole OS...

I'm not saying this is unimportant,but I get the impression he may be the sole Corel employee looking after the servers in Taiwan...

[Davidk]

Ken just sent me a test message from the corelwebboard (the forum) using the "alternate" outlook.com account: the admins obviously can do that. He sent it at 10.35am my time, and I opened my thunderbird mail package at 10.40am and (incoming mail chime) there it was. I've responded to him.

Consistently, there should have been a notification mails to me after Ken's and Robert's last posts above, but nada, nothing received. However, if Robert is aware of the "Starts at 60" platform, I got an email from them at the same time as Ken's test email arrived.

[Ken Berry]

And I also sent you another message using the gmail server account of contactcorelwebboard five minutes after the other one. Apparently that never came through, David, as you have not replied to it ... or it is still coming!

EDIT: And of course another notification was sent to you for this message, at 3:10 pm my time or 1:10 your time...

[Davidk]

Since Ken's last post, he's apparently sent me 2 emails via the board gmail account, which I've not received. But in the same time generally he's also sent me several via the board outlook account, which I received and responded to. My last response to him attached a screenshot of my morning's mail account in-box: his emails, and several others from various sources, which included the one from my mobile phone (see prior post) using the gmail account it's attached to.
So it seems pretty conclusive now that the boards' gmail account is doing this (burying any board notification mails to my address). How, or why, I have no idea.

[lata]

Hi David
Centercode will be a different server to that used by the User to User forum
Yesterday I sent a mass e-mail, a feature we use on the forum, to all admin and yourself
All have been delivered except the one to you.

If your server is rejecting the mails from the forum as being suspicious then that would cause the problem.

E-mails sent to you from any other source that includes Contactcorelwebboard@corel.com will be delivered as they are sent through our own server / email editors or externally to the forum.
It is only automatic mails sent from the forum that are suffering.

I cannot believe that sending a mass e-mail would cause a problem with you and not the other admins. I can only conclude that the blockage is at your end.

Do you have another e-mail address you can try for the forum, G-mail, Hotmail etc, different to your @iprimus.com.au

I will also send this as a e-mail to you

Post updated
I will double check the messages send via contactcorelwebboard outside the forums

[RobertOZ]

Here we go again, no longer receiving any notifications of new posts or reply notification, noticed 2 days ago

[Ken Berry]

Yes. Something has gone haywire again and Trevor and I have sought urgent advice and fixing. It apparently affects everyone, not just a select few...

[Davidk]

After a lot of back-channel to-and-fro with Ken and Trevor, over time and formal complaints to ISP's, on 3 June I identified what was happening to my notification mails as a reaction by the ISP's SPAM monitor; removing that monitor from the account, and the notify mails began arriving again. Ken and Trevor were updated at the time.
And 3 weeks later, last Tuesday - as near as I can figure - they stopped again. And that just coincided with the date of my ISP's monthly account roll-over point. More mails to the ISP on friday when this was noticed.
But maybe - given the remarks made by Ken today (28th) - not their fault this time. We'll see . . . . .

[Ken Berry]

No, it is to do with what lies beneath contactcorelwebboard@corel.com. The address, though it uses corel.com, was in fact based on gmail.com. In the changeover of servers from Taiwan to the US which occurred a little while ago, the address was transferred to outlook.com rather than gmail, while retaining the notional corel.com ending. However for still unidentified reasons, this did not seem to work for the notification emails which stopped at the time for everyone. So after a short while we reverted to gmail and they worked again for everyone (including, a little more recently even for DavidK! ) But the techs have again tried to move the notification emails away from gmail, and again they do not work. That's where we are right now. We have asked that this be fixed as quickly as possible, but nothing more has happened as yet.

[Davidk]

Why would a spam monitor do this??
First, what is spam? Basically the sending of email to many recipients. Mostly it's unwanted but that's not in the general definition. Back in the dark ages of ARPANET (1978) the original one was one originator to 600 recipients. Preventing it is a case of user terms of agreement that can be flouted easily, and recently using software tools at the ISP level to do this. Some security suites also advertise that sort of facility via a blacklist.

If a spam filter is in operation what it does is just drop the mail, does not deliver it, no info sent on that action. So trying to trace it (hard recent personal experience with this, see earlier posts in this topic) can be bloody hard. And it works both ways: an identified sender can be blocked as much as an identified recipient. [[Some years ago, a major server zero-day malware called heartbeat came on the scene, was really when hackers transitioned from individuals to servers: why be satisfied with one victim at at time when you can steal data wholesale?? and using heartbeat hackers got into facebook, linkedIn, Yahoo and others to the tune of hundreds of thousands of user cases. A lot of press about that. Mail servers in particular were targeted. And my ISP mail servers were part of that target: I started getting bounce messages that were spam purporting to be sent by me. I only found out because some of the addresses had changed and the bounce came to me rather than the spammer. So I complained and the ISP put that spam filter in place: no more such events, but 2 years later - in Mar 2020 - it came back to bite me in the form filtering the incoming notify mails from the forum, and took literally weeks of effort to get resolved]]

Why the forum: topic response notify emails could readily be seen as fitting a description of spam - one source, many recipients. Maybe not hundreds, but certainly in the double digits of recipients.

In my case eventually I stopped arguing with the ISP about the details and just instructed the ISP to delete the Spam filter from the account: whatever settings it might have had for me went away with it. And that worked. Until this last event . . .

[lata]

David
It has nothing to do with Spam

The mail issue is with Corel tech changing the server settings and getting it wrong, human error.
We as admin have access to the forums e-mail server and as such were able to see all incoming and outgoing mails, this included automatic mails sent from the forum, Post Notifications, Activation mails, etc. basically we can see what the forum is doing.

At the moment we can only see any private mails delivered to contactcorelwebboard@corel.com in the in-box and any outgoing mails sent by us as a reply, so that part works just like your e-mails.

As of 23rd June the G-mail account was disabled, It is the automatic mails sent from the forum that is the issue.

We also have a problem with IP addresses that again is a recent change since the server moved to the USA

For us it is like working with a blind fold on.

[Davidk]

Trevor,
Those topic response mails go firstly from the forum server to a mail account with a 'distributor' service provider which on-forwards them in accordance with international protocols (rules). It was Gmail, but is now Outlook. <updated>OTOH, whilst there seems to be general consensus that handling spam is a task that mail service providers should do, there is no protocol or even guidance as to how that should be done. Consequently, what if anything is done about spam is up to the service provider.
My point is that the new account with Outlook.com could be treating the incoming (from the forum) topic response mails as spam. Clearly, that wasn't case with gmail. But the Outlook.com mailserver isn't necessarily doing the same things.
Unless forum logs show that the response mails are not being sent, that account with Outlook is the very first place I would be looking to identify what/why it is happening.