Any AT&T / Yahoo email users not getting email notifications

J.T.

I have noted my problem in several different threads here within smugmug support discussions and was just wondering if any other AT&T / Yahoo / SBC Global users are having issues with not getting email notifications on your smugmug site or with dgrin.

It sounds like there is nothing that Smugmug can do or will do and it may just be an isolated issue with me and AT&T's email system. I have dealt with AT&T's upper levels email tech support and they feel that it is something that Smug/Dgrin is doing that prevents me from getting the notifications.

I used to get all notifications, comments made, thread discussions posted, etc., then suddenly I stopped receiving them all back around April and no one here knows why?

Thanks for reading.

Andy

J.T. wrote:

It sounds like there is nothing that Smugmug can do or will do

JT I'm really sorry but we've exhausted our efforts here, we have done a lot including contacting your provider as you suggested. I'm glad you are asking for others.

J.T.

problem appears to have been resolved

Andy wrote:

JT I'm really sorry but we've exhausted our efforts here, we have done a lot including contacting your provider as you suggested. I'm glad you are asking for others.

Well thanks to another Smug member with his simple test we were able to resolve the issue as it appears for now! Simply put I thought that your/Smugmug's answer to my problem to switch to a gmail account was rather weak! With all the tech gurus and huge knowledge base that Smug and Dgrin has and all you could come up with was "switch to a gmail account!" I was rather put off by the fact that, that was your final answer and I was simply to fend for myself basically.

Maybe this was just an isolated issue with me or a handful of AT&T ISP users, I don't know. The fact of the matter is that I simply couldn't just switch email providers as I use this single email address on all my business communication, i.e. email, business cards, web presence, etc. What a pain it would be to continually check multiple email addresses just to see when I get email/comments/notifications from smug and dgrin!

I guess I have to feel that you truly DID exhaust all of your efforts and DID put your best foot forward for my problem. Maybe if I had a larger presence in Smug and was not such a small time photographer then maybe Smug might be more willing to help me and do a little more for me. Hopefully that's not the case and ALL Smug users are treated the same regardless of their presence and revenue generated with using Smug!

I honestly have not been disappointed much with my experience with Smug over the last 2-3 years and it has mainly been positive. This has been a different story, especially when I had to continually ask to see what the status was and if you were even doing anything to research this problem. The user who asked that I simply switch to a gmail account, check to see if comments return, and then switch back to my original AT&T account if they work, well, that was pretty simple and fairly straightforward. I didn't even think about trying that, and whatever it did, maybe resolved some type of issue when Smug did an update back around May or so.

Nonetheless, I do appreciate the work you did and will continue to be a loyal Smugmug customer, I just need to vent my frustrations with the poor service and attention I received on this problem.

Thanks for listening!

Andy

J.T.

My suggestion to try a gmail account was to get you back in business. Not to cause you grief or put you off.

We exhausted lots of efforts and I personally worked on it 4x throughout, including contacting your provider tying to get help & understanding in trying to solve this problem. But nobody else had this problem, and we couldn't replicate it.

I'm very sorry that you think our (my) efforts were not complete.

I'm so very, very sorry you were put off by my suggestion, that was surely not my intention. I'm very sorry, I was trying to be as helpful as possible, J.T., I really was. I'm sorry you were offended.

I'm glad it's sorted.

EDIT: We don't treat ANY customers differently, J.T. That's not how we roll. I'm really sorry I failed to fix your problem. But I'm glad it's fixed.

jfriend

J.T. wrote:

Well thanks to another Smug member with his simple test we were able to resolve the issue as it appears for now!

What was the solution?

J.T.

can't explain this one

Andy wrote:

J.T.

My suggestion to try a gmail account was to get you back in business. Not to cause you grief or put you off.

We exhausted lots of efforts and I personally worked on it 4x throughout, including contacting your provider tying to get help & understanding in trying to solve this problem. But nobody else had this problem, and we couldn't replicate it.

I'm very sorry that you think our (my) efforts were not complete.

I'm so very, very sorry you were put off by my suggestion, that was surely not my intention. I'm very sorry, I was trying to be as helpful as possible, J.T., I really was. I'm sorry you were offended.

I'm glad it's sorted.

EDIT: We don't treat ANY customers differently, J.T. That's not how we roll. I'm really sorry I failed to fix your problem. But I'm glad it's fixed.

Andy I DO appreciate the efforts, thank you, sincerely I thank you! But, I guess I spoke too soon with the resolution to my problems!

It appeared after trying a couple test comments in my galleries that I did start to get the notifications to my sbcglobal email address on my account for Smugmug only.

However, it does NOT appear that I get the notifications for Dgrin and new posts/threads. When I tried the same thing in dgrin by simply re-entering my email address, that's when I was locked out of dgrin but you since resolved that problem. For whatever reason, I guess I am not able to fix the notifications from dgrin. Not sure what the deal is, anyways, thanks for all your help.

For now, I guess I can be satisfied that I receive the notifications from my smug account, dgrin I guess I can live with and just check it periodically when I post new threads.

In the meantime can you re-set or erase my password IN DGRIN on your end to maybe see if that will clear up the problem, it doesn't appear that I can reset it for whatever reason on my end and I tried 2 different computers?

J.T.

jfriend wrote:

What was the solution?

jfriend,

Basically I just changed my sbcglobal email address in my smugmug control panel to a gmail account and made a test comment in one of my galleries. I received the test comment so I then switched the email address back to my original sbcglobal email address and made another comment in a gallery and I received that comment notification as well. So it appears that it resolved the problem with my smug notifications.

But then I did the same thing in dgrin and that messed things up a bit and I still cannot receive notifications for dgrin alone. Andy was able to reset my password and for whatever reason, I cannot receive dgrin notifications.

Andy

J.T. wrote:

jfriend,

Basically I just changed my sbcglobal email address in my smugmug control panel to a gmail account and made a test comment in one of my galleries. I received the test comment so I then switched the email address back to my original sbcglobal email address and made another co

I suspect you had a bad character or something in the email on SmugMug. PM me your exact email address again please.

Andy

JT, Try now?
I just toggled your email settings on/off on Dgrin.

Try now? (Your pwd btw is the one I emailed you earlier today).

J.T.

Andy wrote:

I just toggled your email settings on/off on Dgrin.

Try now? (Your pwd btw is the one I emailed you earlier today).

Got it, looks like I was able to change the email address, although I was not prompted to verify the process with an email????

Do you still think it took?

Andy

J.T. wrote:

Got it, looks like I was able to change the email address, although I was not prompted to verify the process with an email????

Do you still think it took?

Did you get the thread reply notification?

J.T.

nope

Andy wrote:

Did you get the thread reply notification?

Nope ... nothing ... nada ... no.

No notification, no email, nothing.

Andy

J.T. wrote:

Nope ... nothing ... nada ... no.

No notification, no email, nothing.

JT, I'm stumped, I'm very sorry. I do not know what to say. Everyone else is getting the emails.

I'll ask our ops guys again if there's anything they can do or recommend.

J.T.

Andy wrote:

JT, I'm stumped, I'm very sorry. I do not know what to say. Everyone else is getting the emails.

I'll ask our ops guys again if there's anything they can do or recommend.

Okay, thanks. Let me know in this thread and I'll check it here and there since I'm not getting the notifications.

Andy

J.T. wrote:

Okay, thanks. Let me know in this thread and I'll check it here and there since I'm not getting the notifications.

Sure. I will only reply if they've got something to help with or add.

I'm sorry this is a real poser.

jm94085

FYI...I too have a sbcglobal.net email address with instant notification turned on and have never once receieved a notification?? Not a huge issue, but I had noticed it enough to do a search on "notification" issues and found this thread.

John

Andy

jm94085 wrote:

FYI...I too have a sbcglobal.net email address with instant notification turned on and have never once receieved a notification?? Not a huge issue, but I had noticed it enough to do a search on "notification" issues and found this thread.

John

Same geog. as J.T.
Odd. Can you contact your ISP and see what they say? See if they can tell you anything different than what they tell J.T.?

jm94085

Ok, first spooky...I just noticed that your eyes move in your avitar

I'll check with them...seems like if there was anything unusual, at worst case the emails would hit my spam folder? But I will check with them when I have a chance.

Cheers,
John

jm94085

Hey Andy...something to maybe check into? I'm reading some articles new and old about Yahoo randomly blocking email. Based on one article it is possible that dgrin is showing up erroneously in the Spamhaus black list?

Here's one article explaining the, ahem, "problem" as they experienced it with Yahoo and the Spamhaus black list.

http://blog.emaildirect.com/index/2009/06/yahoo-blocking-your-email-for-no-reason.html

Here you can enter your mail server IP address and see if it shows up on the list...

http://www.spamhaus.org/lookup.lasso



John

Andy

jm94085 wrote:

Hey Andy...something to maybe check into? I'm reading some articles new and old about Yahoo randomly blocking email. Based on one article it is possible that dgrin is showing up erroneously in the Spamhaus black list?

Here's one article explaining the, ahem, "problem" as they experienced it with Yahoo and the Spamhaus black list.

http://blog.emaildirect.com/index/2009/06/yahoo-blocking-your-email-for-no-reason.html

Here you can enter your mail server IP address and see if it shows up on the list...

http://www.spamhaus.org/lookup.lasso



John

http://www.spamhaus.org/query/bl?ip=208.79.45.23

http://www.spamhaus.org/query/bl?ip=208.79.45.83

jm94085

Andy I PM'd you...

John

Andy

jm94085 wrote:

Andy I PM'd you...

John

sure reply here again.

jm94085

Bump...

Andy can you post again...I tried something and want to see if it works.

Thanks,
John

J.T.

jm94085 wrote:

Ok, first spooky...I just noticed that your eyes move in your avitar

I'll check with them...seems like if there was anything unusual, at worst case the emails would hit my spam folder? But I will check with them when I have a chance.

Cheers,
John

John,

Thanks for your input into this issue. Yeah I was thinking the emails would at least go to my spam folder and they don't. I've checked my spam settings over and over and blocked addresses and nothing.

Weird that we're both in NCAL too?

Let us know if you find out anything from AT&T tech support. I will try dealing with them again when I get back from vacation next week and give them that info you found.

Thanks again.

jm94085

Hey Andy...not sure if there's anything to this but I did notice a small anomoly??

In the header information of the email notification you forwarded me there was the following information...

X-Originating-IP: [208.79.45.22]Received: from mx1.smugmug.net (mx3.smugmug.net [208.79.45.22])

I ran a diagnostic test at www.mxtoolbox.com and found the following:

mx1.smugmug.net (208.79.45.20) - test checks out fine.
mx2.smugmug.net (208.79.45.21) - test checks out fine.

mx3.smugmug.net (208.79.45.22) - test failed!

Here's what the response was:
A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond 208.79.45.22:25

John

jfriend

jm94085 wrote:

Hey Andy...not sure if there's anything to this but I did notice a small anomoly??

In the header information of the email notification you forwarded me there was the following information...

X-Originating-IP: [208.79.45.22]Received: from mx1.smugmug.net (mx3.smugmug.net [208.79.45.22])

I ran a diagnostic test at www.mxtoolbox.com and found the following:

mx1.smugmug.net (208.79.45.20) - test checks out fine.
mx2.smugmug.net (208.79.45.21) - test checks out fine.

mx3.smugmug.net (208.79.45.22) - test failed!

Here's what the response was:
A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond 208.79.45.22:25

John

Ooooh that looks important. Doesn't that mean the the reverse DNS lookup will fail that some mail hosts use to filter out spam from false domains? And, if these three IP addresses are set up in DNS rotation, it might fail 1/3 of the time?

jm94085

Yep that's what I was thinking...and I've done an MX record lookup at several sites for smugmug.com and only mx1 and mx2 are coming up...it's as if mx3 does not exist.

Andy

jm94085 wrote:

Hey Andy...not sure if there's anything to this but I did notice a small anomoly??

In the header information of the email notification you forwarded me there was the following information...

X-Originating-IP: [208.79.45.22]Received: from mx1.smugmug.net (mx3.smugmug.net [208.79.45.22])

I ran a diagnostic test at www.mxtoolbox.com and found the following:

mx1.smugmug.net (208.79.45.20) - test checks out fine.
mx2.smugmug.net (208.79.45.21) - test checks out fine.

mx3.smugmug.net (208.79.45.22) - test failed!

Here's what the response was:
A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond 208.79.45.22:25

John

Our ops guys say, 'how about now'?

jm94085

Nope...nothing - ran another test and got this back. It may take a while for MX records and/or DNS record updates to actually propogate?

smtp:mx3.smugmug.netsmtp [URL="javascript:ActionButtonPostBack();"][/URL]
A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond 208.79.45.22:25

Not an open relay.
0 seconds - Good on Connection time
0 seconds - Good on Transaction time
OK - 208.79.45.22 resolves to mx3.smugmug.net
Warning - Reverse DNS does not match SMTP Banner


p.s. I also added help@smugmug.com to my address book and created a specific filter to route email from that address to my Inbox which should effectively create a "white list". However if reverse dns lookup fails then I think ISP's generally just disregard the message.

jm94085

Some more diagnostics...

PORT SCAN of 208.79.45.22
scan:208.79.45.22scan [URL="javascript:ActionButtonPostBack();"][/URL] 0 open ports:


These ports were closed:

21ftp(Timeout 3058 ms)3058 ms 22ssh(Timeout 3058 ms)3058 ms 23telnet(Timeout 3058 ms)3058 ms 25smtp(Timeout 3058 ms)3058 ms 53dns(Timeout 3058 ms)3058 ms 80http(Timeout 3058 ms)3058 ms 110pop3(Timeout 3058 ms)3058 ms 143imap(Timeout 3058 ms)3058 ms 139netbios(Timeout 3058 ms)3058 ms 389ldap(Timeout 3058 ms)3058 ms 443https(Timeout 3058 ms)3058 ms 587msa-outlook(Timeout 3058 ms)3058 ms 1433sql server(Timeout 3058 ms)3058 ms 3306my sql(Timeout 3058 ms)3058 ms 3389remote desktop(Timeout 3058 ms)3058 ms 8080webcache(Timeout 3058 ms)3058 ms

J.T.

appreciation

jm94085 wrote:

Some more diagnostics...

PORT SCAN of 208.79.45.22
scan:208.79.45.22scan 0 open ports:


These ports were closed:

21ftp(Timeout 3058 ms)3058 ms 22ssh(Timeout 3058 ms)3058 ms 23telnet(Timeout 3058 ms)3058 ms 25smtp(Timeout 3058 ms)3058 ms 53dns(Timeout 3058 ms)3058 ms 80http(Timeout 3058 ms)3058 ms 110pop3(Timeout 3058 ms)3058 ms 143imap(Timeout 3058 ms)3058 ms 139netbios(Timeout 3058 ms)3058 ms 389ldap(Timeout 3058 ms)3058 ms 443https(Timeout 3058 ms)3058 ms 587msa-outlook(Timeout 3058 ms)3058 ms 1433sql server(Timeout 3058 ms)3058 ms 3306my sql(Timeout 3058 ms)3058 ms 3389remote desktop(Timeout 3058 ms)3058 ms 8080webcache(Timeout 3058 ms)3058 ms

I really appreciate the work John and Andy are doing with what appeared to be an isolated issue, but could be more of an issue with others.

Thanks for your time as well as jfriends input too.