-=PCTechTalk=- Re: email problems
- From: Gman <gman.pctt@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <pctechtalk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 9 Feb 2009 15:42:10 -0500
Don,
I believe you're seeing the effects of one or more of a couple of
things, none of which you can control.
For one, there was a major Spam server shut down by the authorities a
couple of months back. This temporarily put a lot of Spammers out of
business until they could figure out another way to get their junk through.
Well, most of them have joined the botnet craze and we're just about back to
where we were, Spam-wise, before the shutdown. Since these new Spams are
now coming from individual's PC's, ALL email servers are affected instead of
just the one that was shut down. Just about all ISPs' email servers are
severely strained under the extra source load.
Secondly, there has been the introduction of several new types of
multi-attack malware released into the wild over the last year+. Of course,
some of them are designed specifically to attack email servers. If you have
several email addresses with a single email server (ISP or otherwise),
chances are good that they are spread out across more than one physical
server. If a single ISP has a bank of 30 email servers and one of them
becomes infected, it will only affect the email of the accounts on that one
server. This one is a less likely scenario than the one above (someone's
job is on the line if an infection is allowed to persist for too long), but
it's still a consideration worth mentioning.
Finally, email servers store our messages on hard drives and all hard
drives eventually develop corruption issues that have to be handled. The
only way to handle them is to take them "offline" and run a Scandisk-type
program on them. All professional email server companies have duplicate
backup drives that are put into service just prior to the original being
removed fromt he system, but there IS a miniscule bump service during the
switch. There are also times when a drive in operation simply gives up the
ghost and the server automatically switches itself over to the second drive.
Those transistions take a little longer since the server software has to
first determine that the 'glitch' it's experiencing, is in fact, a faulty
drive. Again, I'm reaching a bit here but these are all things that happen
beind the scenes that can affect the delivery of our messages.
Peace,
Gman
http://www.bornagainamerican.org
"The only dumb questions are the ones we fail to ask"
----- Original Message -----
From: "dsw32952" <dsw32952@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <pctechtalk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, February 09, 2009 12:56 PM
Subject: -=PCTechTalk=- email problems
>I have been having nothing but problems with email since I left for
> vacation. I am now home and the problems remain for the most part. These
> problems range from unknown server errors to server timeouts to server
> terminated the connection for any of several reasons. These problems
> impact
> not only SMTP but also POP. Very frustrating. Add to it the frustration
> of
> trying to use the HP incarnation of Vista and I am about ready to chuck
> the
> computers into the dumpster. I've been home since Friday night and still
> have not unpacked or setup anything computer related except to plug in
> this
> laptop to login to Gmail and send a couple of messages to the group.
> The email problems span across all email servers, Yahoo, Yahoo Plus, Gmail
> and Roadrunner. What is really frustrating is it is typically only ONE
> email addy at each server at one time. Example: Don101 at RR, but not
> dwilcox or dwilcox3. don.32952 at gmail but not dsw32952
>
> I came home to Larry having email problems with his larryfowler.com email
> address. At least that one was easy to solve... the server timed out
> trying
> to deliver a 5.7MB email. I deleted it at the webmail interface and his
> account worked fine.
>
> With my accounts I have tried closing OE, deleting the inbox and then
> starting OE again to create a new inbox.dbx. This did not work, Coupled
> witht the fact that other email accounts deliver OK to the inbox suggests
> the problem is not a corrupt inbox.
>
> I have disbaled all inbound and outbound scanning of email to avoid the
> time
> delay for scanning larger emails to cause problems.
>
> I have tried setting up separate identities in OE with different accounts
> in
> each. Sometimes it helps and sometimes it doesn't.
>
> Sometimes I can login to webmail interfaces and delete all the spam and
> other unnecesaary email and it will download OK. Sometimes it doesn't.
>
> I tried using Thunderbird. A little help. But it has other problems.
> First the SMTP problem noted above and second, I am unable to configure
> the
> feature that automatically saves attachments. That is a MUST have ability
> since there is no 3rd party utility available that I know of to extract
> the
> attachments in bulk.
>
> The most frustrating part of it all is that it affects only ONE email
> account (the most heavily used) at each server. If ALL accounts were
> affected I would be more suspicious of Outlook Express.
>
> Anybody got any ideas? Using web based interface on a permanent basis is
> not an option.
>
> Don
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