Posts Tagged “web hosting”

Yesterday, wearing my web hosting service provider hat I sent out an email to the main contact for each hosting client. My attempt was to update each client regarding a change in policy regarding invoicing and  payments. The policy change really would only affect 2% of all clients. But I thought it fair to inform everyone. I also felt I needed to put the policy in to context by explaining why I felt the step necessary (it had to do with actually implementing an already state policy of suspending delinquent account after a rather long grace period). Unfortunately, I think because I personalized the message by letting the email software insert each client’s first name in the salutation, I had many clients believe I was addressing them personally, setting off a bit of a panic. I had to respond to a fistful of worried email messages and phone calls. Eventually, I felt I had to send out a follow up message apologizing for the confusion.

The thing is, I spent days crafting and thinking about that dang emai (except for the first sentence which I injected at the last minute and so contained TWO TYPOS!! I thought it was clear and thorough, so I was really taken aback by the response. Usually, email goes to one or maybe two people (unless you’re in the habit of forwarding jokes and rumours to your address book). So, when you make an error in your message and it goes out a whole host (pun intended) of people, the reaction can be rather, uh, disconcerting.

I think I have learned some lessons: 1) You can’t be too careful when crafting an email to a big list of people, especially clients; 2) No matter how careful you think you are being, don’t have a stroke when a bunch of people make it clear that what you thought you were saying was really something else; 3) Keep smiling!

Technorati Tags: communication, confusion, emai, web hosting

Running a web hosting service can be frustrating, especially where email service comes in. A web server with a bunch of shared virtual domains can mean hundreds of mail users passing email through the server throughout the day. On top of that, the server has to deal with 10s of thousands of spam messages per day. When I bother to look at the statistics about 80%-85% of the mail that hits the server is spam and the overall amount seems to grow weekly. Controlling spam takes a huge amount of resources from servers.

Some mail services have started taking extraordinary steps in an attempt to handle the spam issue. Apparently, one of them is Yahoo Mail. Unfortunately, for their users (anyone with one of those free yahoo.com accounts - I have one) their policies mean that email may be delivered only after long delays or sometimes, not at all.

It’s difficult to explain exactly what they are doing, and I only became aware it recently when a couple of my customers started complaining about lost or long delayed email going to yahoo.com through our mail server. I started looking at our mail queue and tracing what was happening to email addressed to people at yahoo.com.

Time and again certain messages going to certain addresses were getting delayed error responses from yahoo.com.  This has been going on for quite some time as I discovered at this forum thread. A casual Google search finds this is a widespread issue.

What’s really frustrating is that it seems totally capricious. Some yahoo.com messages get delivered immediately. Others get delayed. If I force a particular message that is stuck in our mail queue, it may get delivered, or it may get delayed. But sometimes if I do it a second time it will go through. What kind of a system is this? Repeated attempts to get through to Yahoo support have ended only in canned responses and no resolution.

If email continues to get delayed, eventually it will get deleted from server mail queues. So, unfortunately, yahoo.com mail users may not even know how much email they are missing.

As a result of this, I recommend no one rely on yahoo.com accounts for anything critical. Switch to gmail on hotmail or something else. Given this situation, not ISP or web host can guarantee delivery of yahoo.com email.

Technorati Tags: email, web hosting, yahoo