[Alex Pepple]

Dear Eratosphereans,

Some or most of you might have noticed that for the past several days to weeks, Eratosphere notifications (e.g., for new PMs, reply alerts for threads you subscribed to, etc.) were no longer working. This turned out to be because Gmail, Yahoo, and several other mail services have drastically changed the way in which they validate and allow emails to reach their users, due to the unhinged amount of spam now circulating through the web. Hence, almost all the notification emails Erato was sending to those subscribed to them were not only being blocked by these services but, worse, tagged as spam and causing Erato and the associated server to be blacklisted throughout the web! Blacklisting is something no website wants to be slapped with as it not only means being essentially isolated from communicating with others, but also becoming an unpopular island with dwindling visitors!

Anyhow, I've been feverishly working on this problem for the past few days and—for the benefit of those of you with some technical knowledge in these matters—it had to do with more stringent configuration requirements for mail servers' DNS records to mitigate spam, address spoofing, and the hacking gone wild throughout the web. The records that Google, Yahoo, and the blacklisting services (Spamhaus, Barracuda, etc.) didn't like were the SPF and DKIM records. I was able to satisfy Yahoo after a day or so of white-hat hacking at server records, etc., but Google and Gmail were an absolute headache as they appear to be the fussiest of the bunch with what they want in those records (or rather, trying to figure out what they want, which they don't really clarify much).
Long story short, finally, today, I can say I've finally conquered the Google/Gmail blockade and successfully sent a test message from Eratosphere to Gmail (just as I'd done earlier for Yahoo mail, Hotmail, and a few such others).

So, my apologies to everyone for any and all missed communications. But we're back alongside those considered non-suspicious netizens and no longer considered one of the "bad actors"! In fact, I've also successfully campaigned to get us removed from the records of the blacklisting services and as far as I know, we're now in the clear with all of them!

So, post/reply/PM as before as we're past this saga... and long live Eratosphere!

Cheers,
...Alex

[Jayne Osborn]

Thank you for all your hard work, Alex. You're a hero!

Jayne

[Alex Pepple]

Thanks, Jayne!

One thing I forgot to mention in the post--which might seem a nice-to-do tweak without it, is that we were also under a blackout threat from the ISP for our servers--they wanted it fixed and the server's blacklisting removed within 48 hours or else it would have been poof and we'd have disappeared from the web! (They don't like to have their servers blacklisted as that turns customers and their own service providers away!). Anyhow, that's one deadly bullet we did dodge by my figuring a fix for this new and disruptive requirement for server emails.

Cheers,
...Alex

[Mark Blaeuer]

Thanks yet again, Alex, for your truly valiant work.

[Michael Tyldesley]

Ah, this explains why I didn't get any automatic emails about joining last week.

Thanks again Alex for getting in touch and sorting my registration out manually. You're clearly working very hard to keep everything up and running and your efforts are much appreciated.

I must admit, the idea of this place being a "bad actor" does make me chuckle. I shudder to think of what the dark web version of Eratosphere might look like.

[Matt Q]

Many thanks for doing all this Alex.

Although I'd been getting PM alert emails (and inbox full and Happy Birthday emails), the last time I got an actual thread reply alert email was back in Dec 2018. Here's hoping that what you've done means I'll start getting them again.

Matt

[Shaun J. Russell]

Originally Posted by Michael Tyldesley

I shudder to think of what the dark web version of Eratosphere might look like.

Doggerel. The unintentional kind.

[Michael Tyldesley]

E. Shaun Russell, I've just checked out the dark web version of Eratosphere and all the poems are written in prose. They appear to be requests for money, drugs and other illicit activities. You can get banned for not laundering enough dirty doggerel for the moderation team.

So, to quote Pink Floyd, I think I can tell: heaven from hell.

[Jim Moonan]

.
What a mess!
Thanks for the "white hat" hacking and the boring down on the problem to fix it. This is why we Eratospheans owe you big time for the service you provide us to spill our blood for the love of poetry. You are a poet's knight in shining armor. A genie in a bottle.

.

[Matt Q]

Originally Posted by Matt Q

Although I'd been getting PM alert emails (and inbox full and Happy Birthday emails), the last time I got an actual thread reply alert email was back in Dec 2018. Here's hoping that what you've done means I'll start getting them again.

Ah, well, looks like I still don't thread reply emails.