Not receiving e-mail notifications

Post Reply New Topic

and I haven't had a custom rank for quite a while. . . but my avatar is cool.

I'm using hotmail and it worked fine for the year that I've been on this site. But then earlier this week it just stopped working. It's quite annoying because it's a lot of trouble to go back through my posts to see if someone might have posted after me. Even this thread, I have to keep reminding myself to come back to check to see if anyone's posted any helpful information. I really hope there's a way to fix this (other than switching to gmail, I'd rather not).

Same problem here - it worked fine till 14 March 2010 16:52:01 on Hotmail. That was the last topic reply notification I received.

It's a common problem on forums. One piece of advice I heard was to delete all cookies, but it didn't work for me. And I don't see how my cookies can have anything to do with it - surely when I click "watch topic for replies," the website itself stores this preference and just automatically sends emails? After all, if I use a different computer to access my emails, those cookies would be different anyway, yet

I hope they fix it soon. I've tried everything I know to put it right from my end. I've become heavily dependent on TRNs and it sucks when they stop working. Everybody will think I'm ignoring them deliberately.

I also had it too when I used it for several of my threads. Now I don't use it anymore.

Which "this" am I mistaken about? The message you quoted from has two:
http://www.wrongplanet.net/postp2682863.html#2682863

Is it the first "this", which I have reported repeatedly to you, and explained at length, many times to members, whereby the "watch" link on all but the first page of threads does not do what it says it does, because of a bug. I would still be investigating how to fix this one, as I know exactly what is wrong, but you don't want me to do anything about it any more.

Or is it the "this" that I reported, around Christmas, whereby I receive thread notifications, but for some reason PM notifications do not get through (except for a single one, in February). As this is selective (my thread notification emails get through, but not PM notifications), it should provide a good clue.

So far as the theme of this thread of ScottF's is concerned, there is no "this", so I don't understand why you have edited my post in the fashion you have. Did you not read it? I did not say you were not looking into email servers that discard all emails coming from WrongPlanet. However, it has been over a year since email servers started doing this sort of thing, as Merle says, and which I did inform ScottF about.

=========

The annoying part, with email servers doing this, is that they send you (Alex) a (single?) bounce email, indicating that you (Alex) have to do something to stop them bouncing the emails. I would presume that, as bounce emails probably come thick and fast (because of invaliid/disacontinued email addresses), that these more important bounce messages get lost.

Last time I tried to "look into this", for another (my own) forum, I found it to be pretty impossible to do anything about it, from the email sender's end. It has to be done by the email recipient - and even then, some email servers "forget" what a user has requested. Comcast is such an ISP - they never seem to be able to remember what sources a customer has told them to accept emails from.

Also in here are those people who get conned into using a service that "filters" all email other than those specific people they state as trusted senders. To my mind, such services are plain rip-offs. When I receive a bounce message that says something like: "The recipient has paid us to throw away their email. If you want to pay us, we'll throw away all your email too." - I throw it away. Although spam is a problem, this is no way to handle it. It's the same as paying AV companies to protect you from your OS manufacturer's bad coding practices.

I have a better way than paying a third party to do that - I just set up my own filters to send everything except emails from my trusted senders straight to the junk folder. The junk doesn't automatically get deleted for a few days, so I get a decent chance to fish out those rare unknown-but-wanted emails. The downside is that my trusted senders list can only hold about 12 addresses - but Aspies don't often have many friends anyway, so it's not really a problem. I wouldn't know what to do with >12 friends.

Judging by the huge amount of spam in the junk folder of this (@hotmail.com) account, it seems pretty unlikely that the service provider is itself deflecting anything.

Strangely, my more recently-acquired "@live.co.uk" account has had no spam at all so far - I don't use any filters on that one, and it's been running since April 2009. AFAIK no genuine email has ever failed to get through. It's as if I had a guardian angel.

Hehehe!.... I didn't say that all this insane attempts to filter out spam, by people between the sender and the recipient, had the slightest impact on the amount of spam you receive.

I've used the same email address for many years. I get a fair amount of spam. My SeaMonkey spam folder gets a couple of dozen spam messages, per day. Most get Bayesian filtered straight into my spam folder, where I glance at them before deleting them all.

Occasionally, a genuine email finds itself in my spam folder (like today, when an http://www.morgancomputers.co.uk newsletter ended up there). I usually notice those (because my brain is even a better filter than SeaMonkey), and tell the filter it got it wrong.


... and there's the problem: how can you know that "no genuine email has ever failed to get through"?

It's not as if the sender can send you an email, to tell you that the prior email didn't get through. And that would assume that the sender had been given a bounce message to start with... and even if they had, that they had done anything about it.

That sounds like the real world


I don't know for sure....I guess the only way to be certain would be to get everybody in the whole world to send me an email. My belief that my "@live.co.uk" email account doesn't trash any incoming mail is based on the fact that when I've joined a Website or otherwise asked for or expected an email, I've always received it. Every time.

Basically I don't want any unsolicited emails - it's a little draconian of me but I can't think of many instances where they would do me any good.....similarly I don't normally open my door to callers I don't recognise, or co-operate with telephone callers I don't know. It'll be a shame if I've got a long-lost brother who's desperately trying to get in touch with me, but somehow I doubt such a person exists. Rather like the ruling class, I'm very difficult to find unless I want to be found.

I absolutely agree!

I know that I get them... and I'm perfectly able to employ local filtering, and my own brain, to throw them away. I may even occasionally lose a genuine email, by accident... which would be my fault.

I do not want any third party to do the discarding for me.

I object hugely to my own ISP preventing me from sending email - which I have recently discovered they are doing. They require me to verify my return address - but that is impossible, in general, because I own the whole domain. I can't verify every possible string that I might want to use before the "@".

I certainly object to them managing to stop me sending MYSELF emails - without any indication that the email has been discarded, which they also are doing. I've had no luck getting them to understand this. It has been going on since I changed provider, to BT, who use Yahoo! to provide email service - which I now know is a bad option. BT don't understand email, and Yahoo! say I'm not their customer?

============

Once upon a time, a long time ago, the email system was slightly flaky, and I have known of the odd email "going AWOL" en route. It was a rarity, but it did happen.

Then, for a long while, it seemed that every email found its way to its destination.. sometimes more than a single copy, indeed! Heaven!

Nowadays, sending an email has become a lottery. Your own ISP can block you from sending (if they don't like the perfectly valid return address you have given, this time, say). The recipient's ISP may discard your email, with no more justification than that they think some generic filter is "good for the average customer". Any of the intermediate email servers may happen to take exception to your email, for no particular reason. And so on.

============

So... what to do? I'm contemplating switching my email server to gmail - except that they are going to data mine my emails to... send me "unsolicited emails"... which takes me full circle, I guess. Maybe I'll be (temporarily?) more confident that emails reliably get in and out of my local mailboxes - at the price of a little more spam, which I will filter out.

Expect some emails to go missing if you do. As I mentioned in another thread I send out registration emails to people who buy a licence for my shareware software. Over the last few months several people have complained to me that their registration email never arrived. Not in their inbox, spam folder, trash folder etc - and all of these people had given me gmail email addresses for contact! I've not had any complaints from people who use any other email provider.

I just thought about something that works(ish). Search your name, then click on "find all posts from _________". You can go through what you've posted on to check for responses. It's not perfect but you will be able to see stuff, if you're like me and forget the name of what you've posted in (but not the subject).

That's what I'm doing too....as you say, it's not perfect - e.g. if a reply is posted to a topic you posted on some time ago, then you're unlikely to notice it, as the entry in your "find all posts" list will probably be on page 2 or 3, or worse. And I keep forgetting which ones I've already looked at - but it's better than nothing. Please, Mr. Repair Man, fix this problem soon. The workaround is turning me into even more of a partner-ignoring computer merd than I was before.

Ive been doing this too for the last several days.
This can take 'forever' if the server is busy though.

I'm having the same problem. I was getting notifications until last week, and now they have stopped. Please can it be fixed, as I don't want to miss posts!

Please keep in mind, if you have Hotmail or Yahoo, or some other email programs I don't even know about, it might not be wrongplanet.net that is the issue, but the email program itself.

When it happened to me, about a year ago, other people that had Hotmail (I say that because that was my email program that suddenly stopped receiving email notifications from WP, I mentioned it and others had the same problem. There was nothing in my 'spam' box, nothing in my personal preferences that could change the issue.

THIS MAY BE WHAT IS HAPPENING NOW TO YOU.

I went to Google Mail and haven't had the same problems, since.

Merle