Very slow email (some 6 hours, one haven't seen after 18 hr)

[gourmet]

Keep in mind you shouldn't fake your address anymore for outgoing messages.

Who are you replying to? I have been using forged addresses as long as I have been using email, and that means over 17 yeras and I'm also going to do that in future too. Unless SPF prevents it. (Which in my opinion sucks) That's why I opposed using SPF with Spamgourmet.

[lwc]

SPF does prevent it...

[gourmet]

SPF does prevent it...

I know it, that's why I don't like SPF. But at least in case of SpamGourmet and most of other email services, it doesn't seem to be so absolute. Even is SPF fails, so what? If message isn't spam it should be accepted anyway. And that seems to be the case mostly. I personally hated SPF for that reason from the first day I did read the specification. Because in my country, it's very very common to forge email addresses. At least 25% of email is being sent using forged email address. And very often option to send email without forgin isn't even available.

And 100% of our corporate office email is being sent using forged email address. Because we have to use our service providers email server, but our domain is hosted by other service provider and our web pages by different provider and our incoming email by even different provider. So all of our sent email is "forged" and coming from IP address, without DNS name. It hasn't been problem this far. The server we're using to send email is relay server, which has nothing to do with our domain or our domain's MX or DNS servers.

P.S. This far I haven't seen any email server or service which would actually drop messages because SPF isn't being used.

[eriamjh]

Holy cow, I'm experiencing this too... some e-mails are taking up to 24 hours to get here.

I'm using the antichef and recursor domains a lot. Is anyone experiencing issues with these?

[gourmet]

Holy cow, I'm experiencing this too... some e-mails are taking up to 24 hours to get here.

It's not new news. Service is overloaded and has been for a long time. (AFAIK!) This is my personal opinion.

I'm using the antichef and recursor domains a lot. Is anyone experiencing issues with these?

Yes, with every domain. It doesn't make any difference which domains you use, because they all got same mx record which states gourmet.spamgourmet.com

[lwc]

Because in my country, it's very very common to forge email addresses. At least 25% of email is being sent using forged email address. And very often option to send email without forgin isn't even available.

Can't you just use outgoing servers that require authentication?

[gourmet]

Because in my country, it's very very common to forge email addresses. At least 25% of email is being sent using forged email address. And very often option to send email without forgin isn't even available.

Can't you just use outgoing servers that require authentication?

Nope. Here common procedure is that we have one open relay server which should be used for all out going email, without any authenticaton required. And also connections to other servers are blocked. So ISP can make sure that there won't be any spam originating from their network using any other smtp server than their own.

So I can't use any other smtp server than "local server". It means that when I business mail from home, I use forged address. If I send home mail from business I use forged address. Etc. And as I already mentioned, we are using forged address for all business email. Because we have internet connection from other service provider than our email services. And our ISP block all email traffic which isn't going out using their server. So I have to forge address to send any email at all. It isn't problem at all, unless something is blocking email with forged address. And in this country, 99% of ISPs block usage of other than their email servers. And it's recommended even by our national telecommunication officials. For botnet it's impossible to send crap using any other than "official" email server. Direct smtp sessions are always blocked.

[snwt]

Just took 5 hours for an email to arrive from spamgourmet. I've thought that I was seeing some spotty performance. A test email has yet to arrive after 4 hours. I hope that emails are not being lost as well. I have some very important emails going through spamgourmet and can't afford to risk loosing any. Arriving hours late is a nuisance. I think it might be time to quite using spamgourmet for important emails at least. In that it's a free service it has been an impressive service for the 5 years or so that I've been using it. I would pay for a solid reliable service like this.

[snwt]

Now I'm getting emails that were sent up to 7 days ago! Emails are not arriving in order. Some are only a few hours late while others are anywhere up to 7 days late. Well, I believe the forgotten robot of Spam Gourmet has finally come to it's knees. Can't handle the load or is getting some kind of DOS attack. No reply and no news, so no reason to think that this might be fixed and things will get back to normal. Well, thinks for the wonderful and free service for several years. I repeat, I would pay a service like this that was always fast and reliable, but no sign of this from Spam Gourmet. It's time for me for me to go.

[gourmet]

Now I'm getting emails that were sent up to 7 days ago!

Nothing new, I have been writing about these problems for years...

And yes, email is getting lost and yes, there aren't any backup servers.

Situation seems to be pretty bad once again. I'm totally unable to reach gourmet.spamgourmet.com smtp server. Let's see how long it'll take.

I think that issue is confirmed, and until situation is cleared users shouldn't use SG, even for "any mail". And really not use SG for important mails at all. Because this problem isn't new one.

[info]

we had what amounted to an outage over the last couple of days - - our service provider dropped the reverse lookup address for our main IP address, and other servers started rejecting connections from it, which led to a big queue backup and slowdown. They've put it back, and the queue has just been cleared.

[gourmet]

Which led to a big queue backup and slowdown. They've put it back, and the queue has just been cleared.

Thanks for the info.

Btw. Now it's verified that ingoing queue is over 12 hours. And it means very bad things. Because many servers drop messages after 24 hours. So it's quite sure that email is getting lost.

More than 12 hours on the queue!

But I still got some test messages sent two days ago. So, at least situation is getting better.

[josh]

Try it now - the queue is cleared.

[gourmet]

Try it now - the queue is cleared.

Thanks, seems to be working normally again... And I also got ton of messages that were lost. It depends from (SMTP server sending to spamgourmet) how much messages were lost. I mean if they got long or short retry period.

Messages sent from office, got lost (24h retry), but messages sent from home or cell phone came trough (7 day retry).

Unfortunately this is one more hit to reliability of this service. So it's working now, and service has long history. But users shouldn't trust this service too much.

And it seems that spamgourmet mail servers are underpowered, so it's barely handing email load. There isn't too much reserve power to handle possible outages quickly. This isn't nothing new either, same kind of problems often haunt newsgroup servers. If server is one day down, it'll take 7 days to catch up. Because there aren't enough server resources to do it more quickly.

To check if Spamgourmet SMTP server is reachable, simply send email to -@spamgourmet.com and check how long it takes to bounce. If everything is working as it should. You'll should get mail in less than minute. Altough this isn't perfect method, because queue could also build on output side.

[gourmet]

P.S. I still think that it's possible to get confused about spam and DDoS attack, because huge flood of spam looks like DDoS attack to SMTP port.

http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/20 ... -spam.html

194 spams / user account. And spamgourmet got really many accounts if every address used is being counted as account. I know, it's not right way anyway. But it can give some kind of picture how much connections are coming in.

And it's well known fact that SMTP servers take a lot of resources for major domains. And even major ISP's servers are sometimes "over powered" with flood of junk. Especially if some new email worm is spreading quickly.

Btw. How many messages / connections / day spamgourmet handles? And of many of those smtp sessions "are invalid" and doesn't lead to messages being delivered?

P.S. It would be still great to have a backup MX for spamgourmet and all domains (at least controlled by SG)... Really.