Not getting ANY emails on my protected address

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Not getting ANY emails on my protected address

Postby BlueTrailer2 » Wed Sep 27, 2017 7:33 pm

I'm posting this to try and help other people suffering the same issue.

My protected address stopped receiving emails from SpamGourmet a while back, I don't really know when, as I don't use SG regularly, and, anyway, the whole point is to stop spurious emails arriving! It definitely did used to work, though.

I tried to change the protected address to a different ISP but I'm not sure it did actually change, as you have to confirm the change, and I never received the email to do that.

I tried to post a request for help on the BBS, but you need to respond to the confirmation email to create an account - so no-go, also.

I tried creating a new SG account, but again, you have to confirm it, and I never received the email.

Based on other postings about simuilar issues, I checked spam filters on both the ISPs I tried - it was turned off. The SG emails weren't going into spam or trash folders.

On the ISP that provided the feature, SpamGourmet.com was whitelisted.

Emails to the disposable, SG email addresses were being received by SG, as I could see the counts changing. I could reset the counts successfully.

Soooo, what was wrong, and how did I get on this BBS?!

I resolved the issue by changing my protected address to a GMail one. That did receive emails from SG, so I was back in business.

So it would seem both the ISPs I tried block the SpamGourmet domain, but don't tell you that they are. It was even blocked when I disabled spam filtering. Rather sneaky. I'd better not name names! One is UK based, where I am, the other USA.
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Re: Not getting ANY emails on my protected address

Postby josh » Thu Sep 28, 2017 1:57 pm

If you PM me the provider names, I can check directly.

That's a weak spot for us - if our users' own mail service providers are not accepting mail from us, it's bad for our users and for us (because we're building up mail and/or bouncing internally - I believe we've stopped a previous problem where the bounce would go all the way back to the sender - *exposing* the user's email address which is exactly what we're trying to avoid, although if the user's mail provider bounces directly to the sender, we can't even control that (not sure that happens).

On top of that, there's not a great way to communicate with us because email isn't working -- twitter? Maybe.

On top of that, we provide this service for free with no ads or any source of revenue other than donations. We absolutely don't have time to chase down and plead our case to a bunch of providers who think we're spammers. Seemed like most major providers knew who we were at some point, but that seems to be eroding -- perhaps a changing of the technical guard at some places with the next generation of admins. Also, some new providers.

Always - our users tend to do a much better job of explaining the situation to their own providers than we do (when we have time to try) - because the ignorant admins are looking at us through a guilty-until-proven-innocent lens.


I can tell you, after 17 or so years of this, the only thing that ever makes me think of shutting down and moving on are these 'friendly fire' scenarios - maddening :) But don't worry - still no serious thoughts of that.



(PS - there was a period where we had ads on the website - it seemed like a good idea at the time, but then the revenue dropped quite a bit (to probably something realistic - seems like it was inflated at first) and we also realized how tracky-spooky the ad systems are)
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