DH mail servers

(At this time I am waiting for another non-responsive response from DH, it has only been 8 days since the support request was entered and about 3 months of problems in this area.)

Does anyone else have a problem with Dreamhost incoming mail servers bouncing your legitimate incoming email? You most likely you don't know you have the problem ;-)

I know of the problem ONLY because I subscribe to many discussion lists from Yahoo Groups (I dislike Yahoo, but that is a different matter) -- I get probably 30 to 50 list messages a day. Suddenly I don't get any, like someone turning off the faucet. I check with my groups page on Yahoo, and they have suspended sending messages to me due to "hard bounces" to my mailbox (on my Dreamhost hosted domain, you know, one of those m-numbered things). I then go thru the procedure of reinstating service. All is fine for maybe 3-4 weeks usually, then same thing repeats.

Fortunately, Yahoo (bless their heart on this at least) saves and gives you the "hard bounce" message. Here's the proof: (altered slightly to disguise my real email address and mailbox m number)...

> ** Delivery Status **
> Reporting-MTA: dns; spunkymail-mx3.dreamhost.com
> X-Postfix-Queue-ID: ABBC58D9B4
> X-Postfix-Sender: rfc822;
sentto-16110173-7062-1163033350-nid=aeek.com@returns.groups.yahoo.com
> Arrival-Date: Wed, 8 Nov 2006 16:49:11 -0800 (PST)
>
> Final-Recipient: rfc822; m9953885@spunkymail-mx3.dreamhost.com
> Original-Recipient: rfc822; nid@aeek.com
> Action: failed
> Status: 5.0.0
> Diagnostic-Code: X-Postfix; unknown user: "m9953885"

The m9953885 mailbox above is doctored from the real number, but the one actually in the message is an established mailbox with dreamhost for over a year.

Of course, most mail gets thru, but who knows how many get bounced like that? Dreamhost so far just checks the operation of my mailbox, finds it works, and does nothing more. Anyone else have this problem or would even know about it? (I do not make use of any DH spam filters, etc.)

Don

In reply to:

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Does anyone else have a problem with Dreamhost incoming mail servers bouncing your legitimate incoming email? You most likely you don't know you have the problem ;-)

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While I have not personally experienced that problem, I'll be the first to admit that, given the volume of mail I receive, I might very well not know if I was having the same thing happen.

OTOH, much of my email is "client driven", which makes it likely, I think, that if it their mail to me was bouncing I'd be getting a phone call or two about it!

Your post had a lot of good info included, and the bounce message makes it pretty clear that the DH server didn't recognize your valid user. In my mind, this makes me think it is not an matter of DH somehow "rejecting" a large influx of mail from Yahoo Groups (just a thought there).

Just out of curiosity, have you determined any mail other than that from Yahoo groups as getting bounced?

--rlparker

Thanks, rlparker, for the reply. Judging from the bounce message that the Dreamhost server is returning, it does not appear to just be a blocking of Yahoo messages (by DH).

I have not been able to determine if any other email is getting bounced -- I did have someone mention it once quite a few months ago that their email to me got returned but didn't get any further details.

This problem is a very intermittent thing with their server(s) and even though I don't know the details of how things work, I suspect that whenever my incoming email comes into the server, it must do a database lookup of my mailbox -- and it appears that once in a great while it does not find it.

I got one other suggestion via private email that I change mailboxes to see if that would help, and if not, would then have further proof to send to non-responding Dreamhost (still waiting over 8 days now, and over 7 hours for a phone callback).

Don

In reply to:

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it does not appear to just be a blocking of Yahoo messages (by DH).

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I'm thinking the same thing (see my earlier post), and I agree that, for whatever the reason, the Dreamhost system might not be "finding" your user on every occasion.

I'm very interested to see what else you can learn when/if you get your callback, or another support response. Thanks for sharing your experience here.

--rlparker

A short time ago, at 10 days 0 hours since support request entered, I finally got a telephone callback from DH tech support (as a result of requesting the callback on another support request entered Wednesday (2-1/2 days ago). The original request still stands in their system.

Seems orig request was routed to one of their support people who was (and apparently still is) on vacation! The one who did this routing failed to notify me of that fact. Apologies were offered and accepted.

Now to the problem of DH incoming mail servers bouncing email with user not found... tech support indicated I am not alone and they have had maybe 100 other reports of this happening. They are aware of the problem and seeking a solution. He indicated, just as I thought, their mysql lookup of users is sometimes failing to find a legitimate user.

This means that I'm not the only one experiencing this problem. Anyone could be. As far as DH knows, only those who get email from Yahoo Groups would really know about it, since Yahoo Groups is the only one who saves and displays the bounce notification from Dreamhost (and takes the drastic action of cutting off all your email from them). Mailman run lists are usually much more forgiving (admin. setting, but default is 5 bounces within a week or so), so I'd never see this happening on the rest of the lists I subscribe to.

I am glad to find DH is aware of the problem and supposedly working on resolving it. I can sympathize with them in trying to find an elusive problem such as this. It would have been much nicer, however, for them to be up front about the problem earlier in our correspondence -- it has taken about two months and three reports.

I was promised further contact from tech support by next Wednesday, to report on progress on the problem resolution. I did receive a nice email from the support person giving me his personal email address to use in the future if I feel I've been neglected ;-)

We'll see ... and I'll report back any final resolution.

Don

Don,

Thanks for the update, and confirming the nature of the problem. I guess I've just been lucky so far in that if I have had the problem, it has not been with anything critical.

That said, it's a bad situation; I can imagine several bad effects of bounces that I don't even realize happened. I'm thinking particularly of a couple of domains that are *not* in registrar locked status - I'd hate to have them hijacked, thanks to the newer ICANN rules, because I never received the notification of a transfer and didn't object within the mandatory 5 days.

Again, thanks for sharing your experience and I'd love the know the results of your tech support follow-up.

--rlparker

I've actually had this problem too, and only found out about it thanks to an EZMLM bounce warning which subsequently got pasted at DH. Glad to see I'm not the only one.

Yes, I have an opinion.

Get a minimum 50% off with the "haveadreamyday" promo code, and... have a dreamy day. Original, no?

In reply to:

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I'd hate to have them hijacked, thanks to the newer ICANN rules, because I never received the notification of a transfer and didn't object within the mandatory 5 days.

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Don't all (or at least .com & .net) require auth codes now, like .org?

Or is it something that's still being phased in? I haven't been doing a lot of transfers lately, but I know I needed .com & .net auth codes on a recent transfer away from a Directi account.

I too have gotten these Yahoo Groups bounce messages and have reported it a couple of times. The response I have gotten is that it should not be happening since the user is known. I am glad they are looking into it. Please update this thread if you hear any resolution to this issue. Thanks!

In reply to:

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Don't all (or at least .com & .net) require auth codes now, like .org?

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That's a good point, and you may be completely correct about that. They also may be in the process of being "phased in" as I've *just* begun to see them at one of my registrars where they were *not* required in the past (even after the ICANN change to the authorization for transfer process.)

Those codes are, I think, very important under the new ICANN rules, particularly in light of what we were just talking about.

--rlparker

I have been in phone and email contact with the technical support "chief" and as of today he advised me concerning the incoming email bounces:

"We think we have everything taken care of, so we can only wait
for yahoo to tell us of any problems. We haven't seen any just yet."

He indicated in an earlier exchange that it apparently was an mySQL problem as I suspected. I would suggest that anyone experiencing this problem in the future to send the bounce notification to Dreamhost -- especially those who are on "yahoogroups" as they save the bounce message for you.

Let's hope they really did find the trouble and have corrected it. Thanks for all the replies on this forum.

Don

FWIW, It is probably not a coincidence that similar problems are being reported with incoming Hotmail emails:

http://discussion.dreamhost.com/showflat.pl?Cat=&Board=forum_troubleshooting&Number=61263

I have just had the same issues yesterday from yahoo groups.

So whatever they thought they had done has not fixed the problems.
Richard