The server hardware, that operates our mail service “mail.daffodilusa.org” was taken down in preparation for moving to a San Francisco data-center on Saturday, March 8, 10am PDT. The server move was accomplished by Monday evening, March 10, 6pm, PDT. Other requirements such as updating name servers meant the earliest you should have seen reliable email from the domain or the mailing lists was by mid-week. The server hardware was down these past two days due to a hardware failure.
The move of the mail server function has been the most difficult part of the server hardware move and is still ongoing. The mailing lists, Daffnet and BodNet, depend on reliable mail server operation. Because of the tremendous amount of Spam in the USA and Europe, the large email sites, such as AOL and Yahoo, can set some of their own email rules.
Fortunately AOL has a formal process to certify a mail server, which I completed, and now AOL is accepting our mail.
I did not realize how comprehensive Yahoo services were until I started tracking email errors to non-Yahoo sites, then realized their mail was routed through Yahoo. I submitted last week and again today applications to certify our mail to yahoo sites. Unfortunately, Yahoo responds they have a problem which will require a week to even look at the applications. They are accepting our email though, just delaying by 10-15 minutes.
The “AT&T” owned email servers which cover pacbell.net, sbc.net, sbcglobal.net, prodigy.net, and probably others, offers no way to certify mail to them. They are now accepting mail, but delaying the messages several minutes.
I need more days of log files to be completely sure if all Daffnet and BodNet messages are going through. You might think that it’s not that big of a deal to have mail delayed 15 minutes. The problem however is they also cause many errors to be logged for the mail server. It may also cause someone to flag us as a spam site, and makes it difficult for us to see when there is a real problem with our server.
If anyone on a Pacbell, sbc, sbcglobal, or prodigy email server has the knowledge about how to add “mail.daffodilusa.org” to their Spam “whitelist”, or to the company’s Spam “whitelist”, please do so. Even a call to your ISP technical support asking for us to be placed on their “whitelist” will help.
My goal is to have the mail be delivered with no delays. I believe all mail is now going through, but some is delayed.
Thanks to everyone for your patience.
Regards,
Ben
All Categories
A discussion forum for daffodil enthusiasts around the world.