No Longer Receiving Forum Postings

[John Bullock]

About May 29 I stopped receiving the postings to the Forums to which I am subscribed. I am a paid member and have made no changes to my forum memberships or my computer. I believe that there was some change to the mailing system about that time. When I log into the system I can review my forums and I do show that I am registered for the forums and have the option to unsubscribe from the forums. What is happening??

[Keith Outten]

John,

I checked your account settings and can't find a problem with your setup but I will ask our server admin to see if he can find the problsm.

[Aaron Koehl]

About May 29 I stopped receiving the postings to the Forums to which I am subscribed. I am a paid member and have made no changes to my forum memberships or my computer. I believe that there was some change to the mailing system about that time. When I log into the system I can review my forums and I do show that I am registered for the forums and have the option to unsubscribe from the forums. What is happening??

John,

Checking the logs, it looks like our server delivered messages both yesterday and today, which were accepted by your mailbox.

[John Bullock]

I verified that I have not received anything after 5/30/17. I searched both locally in gmail and on the server. I can browse the site and see current postings. I did receive your acknowledgement of this problem, but nothing else. All of my other e-mail is arriving normally from other subscriptions to other sites. I am only having this problem with the Sawmill Creek website. I would respectfully suggest that you may not have found the problem on your system. I am a retired director of information systems in large health care facility and do not make these statements casually having supported a wide variety of end user applications for over 25 years in that role. I fully believe that you may be overlooking some system problem.

I appreciate the work you have done already, but believe that there is still a problem on your end.

[Jim Becker]

John, please be sure that your email system hasn't suddenly considered the SMC email address to be "spam". Arron, who is an IT professional, appears to be saying that the SMTP logs show acceptance at your end.

[John Bullock]

Hi Ken and Jim,
I appreciate your looking at this problem.

I did review my setting on Gmail and can not find any indications of receiving these mailings after 4/25/17. For a few days after that I received boat building forum news, but that was all.

I checked my trash and spam filters and can not find anything blocked and their is nothing in the trash settings. I checked blocked sites and there was nothing set as being blocked. I contacted the folks with usa.net and was able to review their input logs on-line. I can not find any evidence that they have received e-mails other than what I can in my gmail account. It looks like they are not receiving any e-mails other than what I have responded to. My e-mail address is ****. Their logs show all blocked e-mails and trash e-mails along with their disposition. Is it possible that I have an incorrect e-mail address on some of these forums?
Thanks,
John Bullock

[Aaron Koehl]

John,

I see you changed your email address yesterday. Our SMTP server logs show that messages are also being accepted for delivery at your new address. Can you confirm that you are indeed receiving messages from noreply@sawmillcreek.org at this new address?

[John Bullock]

John,

I see you changed your email address yesterday. Our SMTP server logs show that messages are also being accepted for delivery at your new address. Can you confirm that you are indeed receiving messages from noreply@sawmillcreek.org at this new address?


Rather than forwarding my messages from *** to ***, I am now directing my e-mails directly to my gmail account. Previously I had filtered messages from my inbox to a separate directory strictly for all sawmill creek messages. I am now leaving the messages in the inbox to prevent any potential problems in gmail. I am not blocking any senders and do not have either a white list or black list setup.

The only messages I am currently receiving are to the tech support forum. The change occurred on May 25 and at that time I received a few messages for the Boat Building Forum and a couple for the Metalworking Forum. Since the address change to gmail I have seen no change in what I have received. Once again, I can log onto the site and see new activity, but none of it is being sent directly to me. I have added a few more forums, but have not received anything from them either. The Mystery continues. I appreciate anything you can do, but so far I can't see anything wrong and can only act as eyes for you in trying to discern anything unusual, but so far everything looks good on my side, EXCEPT I am not receiving any e-mails from Sawmill Creek other than the ones for Tech Support.

I supervised an installation of over 60 servers at Valley Presbyterian Hospital with over 800 users, but this problem has me stymied. the usa.net people followed through and I was able to look at their server logs and everything looked good there. On the off chance that there was a forwarding problem, I did change to receiving the e-mails directly in gmail. I am using the gmail client and have the same problem on both XP and Windows 10 machines with both Chrome and Thunderbird. So I have eliminated operating system issues, browser issues and e-mail service issues.

I don't have any filtering or blocking with either e-mail service. I am using Eset Nod32 as my anti-virus and am seeing no problems in that log. I have reviewed the mail logs and can find no entries of any kind indicating anything was rejected. It is clean and nothing is isolated or quarantined.
Thanks,
John Bullock
home ****
Cell ****

[John K Jordan]

John,

You say the logs on usa.net looked good - do you mean they show the missing emails were passed to you?

I haven't studied all the messages so you may have tried this - brute force isolation, changing everything at once then working backwards.

Perhaps create a new temporary account from a different email client, one you don't use now. Access it from a different (borrowed?) computer, preferably with a different OS/browser and from a different location and through a different broadband provider (for example at a friends house who uses AT&T, Comcast, etc.). For a clean break, perhaps even create a new and temporary account on SMC. It may not be practical to change all these but the more the better for debugging. Temporarily switch SMC to that email.

If this it works, debugging should be straight forward by the process of elimination, switching things back towards your current configuration one at a time. At some point it should stop working again which may provide a clue of where in the chain the emails are being eaten.

Disclosure: I don't use the email feature in SMC but my experience is with general debugging. The brute force method is time-consuming but usually pretty effective.

JKJ

[Jim Becker]

John, please be aware that this forum area is open to the world...including the phone numbers and email addresses you've posted... ;)

Jim
Forum Moderator

[Ken Ketcham]

I also have stopped receiving subscription updates. The last ones I received came on May 26th. Nothing shows up in spam. I've made no changes to my email.

Ken

[Dwyane Ward]

Same, I also have stopped receiving subscription updates as of 5/25/17

[Don Emmerling]

Same, I also have stopped receiving subscription updates as of 5/25/17
I write to this forum with my problem and I get no response. I even contribute to this forum and no help. This is testing my patience, sorely. Some technical person please help. Mail is not going to spam or anything else.
Regards,
Don

[Jim Becker]

Don, the forum site administrators are working on a solution for the various issues that have cropped up with the current forum software. You'll note that you are not the only one with challenges as there are various threads here in the Forum Help area. The solution that is being pursued is a conversion of SMC from the current, older vBulletin software to a different...and current...forum software that will actually enhance capabilities for community members. This is especially true for those who access via mobile devices as the new environment supports them natively. This conversion, however, entails a lot of work because of the size and complexity of the SMC community. Please be patient.

In the mean time and as an alternative to waiting for emails to let you know that someone has posted in a thread you are subscribed to, daily or at whatever interval you prefer, access SMC and click on the "settings" button in the upper right hand side of the page. That will bring you to a list of subscribed threads that have new postings in them.

Jim
Forum Moderator

[Aaron Koehl]

John,

I am interested to know if you start receiving mail again, starting today.

[John Bullock]

Hi Aaron,
I am still not receiving daily e-mail updates for forum activity. I can't seem to see anything wrong. I can go in and view forum activity, but am not receiving e-mail updates.
Thanks,
John

[Don Emmerling]

Hi Folks,
I still have not been receiving any email content from subscriptions. I wish someone in control of the issue would please give us updates on any progress in solving this issue. I am feeling so isolated in never hearing anything other than it is new software, some software.

Don

[Jim Becker]

I am feeling so isolated in never hearing anything other than it is new software, some software.



That is the answer to your question...SMC is going to migrate to new software which will solve that problem and a number of others. The task isn't trivial and care is being taken to insure it gets done in such a way that there are minimal technical issues when the site cuts over to Xenforo. It's understandable that the problem you are experiencing is frustrating for sure. My suggestion to you is to check in on a regular cadence and click on the "settings" link on the very top of the page to the right to get to the list of threads you are currently subscribed to that have changes. When you are done visiting the forum, click on "forum actions", just below the donate button near the top-center of the page and select "mark forums read" to keep things clean. Yes, it's a pain, but it works and will help you keep up with what you're interested in while the forum administrators deal with the migration task.

Jim
Forum Moderator

[Don Emmerling]

That is the answer to your question...SMC is going to migrate to new software which will solve that problem and a number of others. The task isn't trivial and care is being taken to insure it gets done in such a way that there are minimal technical issues when the site cuts over to Xenforo. It's understandable that the problem you are experiencing is frustrating for sure. My suggestion to you is to check in on a regular cadence and click on the "settings" link on the very top of the page to the right to get to the list of threads you are currently subscribed to that have changes. When you are done visiting the forum, click on "forum actions", just below the donate button near the top-center of the page and select "mark forums read" to keep things clean. Yes, it's a pain, but it works and will help you keep up with what you're interested in while the forum administrators deal with the migration task.

Jim
Forum Moderator

Thanks Jim, that is something at least. Hope things get better.
Don

[Keith Outten]

Don,

We are between a rock and a hard place concerning the latest problems we are experiencing from the last vBulletin upgrade. It appears that vBulletin may not be providing another Version 4 upgrade that will fix all of the problems the last one caused so we don't have a choice whether we will move to another software package. I should note that we purchased the new upgrade to vBulletin version 5 and it was a nightmare so that path is not an option for us.

If our Server Administrator spent the time to correct all of the problems and we continue using vBulletin we will be responsible to provide all programming changes in the future which is financially impossible. What he has done is to correct what he could in the short time span since the last upgrade and continue concentrating on the things he has to do to support our conversion to Xenforo. First on his list is the creation of a new banner advertising and management program, from there we have a lot of tech support threads that will need to be updated and the list of things to do goes on and on.....

We have been using vBulletin for almost fifteen years, you can imagine how many things we will need to address to move to a totally different software package.

[Aaron Koehl]

Thanks Jim, that is something at least. Hope things get better.
Don

Don,

You should now start receiving Digest/Notification emails again. I have tracked down the problem in the vBulletin software and made a fix. Enjoy!

[Don Emmerling]

Don, the forum site administrators are working on a solution for the various issues that have cropped up with the current forum software. You'll note that you are not the only one with challenges as there are various threads here in the Forum Help area. The solution that is being pursued is a conversion of SMC from the current, older vBulletin software to a different...and current...forum software that will actually enhance capabilities for community members. This is especially true for those who access via mobile devices as the new environment supports them natively. This conversion, however, entails a lot of work because of the size and complexity of the SMC community. Please be patient.

In the mean time and as an alternative to waiting for emails to let you know that someone has posted in a thread you are subscribed to, daily or at whatever interval you prefer, access SMC and click on the "settings" button in the upper right hand side of the page. That will bring you to a list of subscribed threads that have new postings in them.

Jim
Forum Moderator


They got it fixed!!!!

[John Bullock]

I have reviewed my settings once again in order to verify that things have not changed with respect to the new software. Unfortunately, I am still not receiving e-mail notifications of new postings in my subscribed forums as of this date. Are you sure that the problem has been fixed? Are we on the new software or was the old software patched? If you are aware that we still have a problem, do we have an estimate yet of when this problem might be totally resolved? It is a lot easier to be patient, if we have some sort of best estimate of when this problem may be totally resolved. Thank you for any information that you can provide.

[Keith Outten]

John,

Aaron reported that the problem was fixed and several people have confirmed.
Are you sure that the problem isn't on your computer?

[Aaron Koehl]

John,

mail.com has aggressive spam filtering. Fortunately, they have a whitelist feature.
Try adding noreply@sawmillcreek.org to your whitelist.

Alternatively, you can use your gmail account, which now works.

For those with an AT&T mail provider, the problem is different.
You can read more about it here:
https://forums.att.com/t5/AT-T-Internet-Email-Security/Blacklist-removal/td-p/5205136

It affects anyone with email addresses ending in:


att.net
bellsouth.net
flash.net

nvbell.net
pacbell.net
prodigy.net
sbcglobal.net

snet.net
swbell.net
wans.net


Unfortunately, they have not yet responded to our requests, and seem to have removed their blacklist management application without providing a replacement.


John,

Aaron reported that the problem was fixed and several people have confirmed.
Are you sure that the problem isn't on your computer?

[Rob Matarazzo]

For the record, I am having this issue as well. I checked my email server; the messages are not there at all and not going into the spam folder either.