We are TURNING OFF email Notifications

[akrvbob]

As you know, we have had an ongoing problem with very late email notifications of new posts. We've been working on it with the webmaster and have not found any solutions. The webmaster can't find anything wrong with the system at the server level--it appears to be sending them out on time. If she can't find or fix it then we can't do anything about it.

It's reached the point we are forced to TURN OFF  all forum email notifications of new posts.

But that is merely an annoyance, we are also having a major problem with the email notifications that is an actual threat to the forum.

Sometimes, when a person gets tired of all the email notifications and can't figure out how to turn them off, he just reports them as spam to his email provider.  Obviously, that stops them from coming. 

And for some reason, sometimes an email provider just goes nuts and decides the forum is spam, we can't figure out why. This happens the most with Yahoo, but it happens with all of them. 

We get reports of who is reporting us as spam and when we get them I write them and ask them not to do that because it creates a problem for us. And nearly always the person insists they are not reporting us as spam but we know that for some reason it's happening. 

Why is all this important? Spam is an enormous problem and all the email providers are fighting it to the death. They all know who is being reported as spam and if we are reported as spam often enough we will be "gray-listed" which means all mail from the forum is marked as possible spam and needing special watching. That slows down the flow of our mail and it's possible that is why our mail is so slow.

If that goes on long enough, then the forum is "black-listed" and that means we are listed as a spammer and all our mail simply is not sent out, we stop existing. Including new member sign ups!

That's very, very bad. But it gets worse.

Not only the mail from the forum will be blacklisted, but the entire server IP address. That means that for the company that is hosting us none of the websites on that server can have their mail sent out. Of course, they can't allow that and so they will simply stop serving us rather than have that happen. The forum will be dead.

We've been harping away at anyone we find reporting us as spam and it seems to be working. But, it always continues eventually.

So as an act of self-defense, I'm going to have the webmaster shut off the email notification system and you will no longer be able to sign up to get notifications of new emails or receive them for ones you've already signed up for. 

Personally, I never use it and won't miss it at all, but I know many of you do and so I'm sorry we can't get it figured out, but that is just the reality of our situation.