A reminder to keep your emails up to date

[codenaught]

Dear members, recently a large number of bounced emails have been generated from personal message notifications, release announcements, and topic notifications because many members here have either deleted their email account or have an invalid email account being used on this forum in their profile.

The Simple Machines Team would like to ask every member of this community to make sure you always keep your email account used for this forum up to date. If you no longer have the email account that you registered with for this forum, please supply a valid email address that you can use, by accessing your profile and editing the email field under Account Settings.

For those of you that do change your email address, you will receive a new validation email to confirm your new email address.

As an early warning, action may be taken for members here that have invalid email addresses that choose not to update their email accounts in the upcoming future, so it is strongly advised to check to make sure your email address is a valid one and if it is not, update it with a valid email address. Note that such action could include account deletion!

It is also highly recommended to keep an up to date email address for convenience. Without one you cannot get notified of new posts in boards and topics you subscribe to. Also you wouldn't get alerted about an SMF release, and some of you, especially the ones that don't visit this forum often, like to be notified when they get new personal messages, which is also not possible with an invalid email account.

An additional note goes out for those who have boxtrappers (human verification) setup with the email address they use here. Simple Machines does not reply to these verification emails and you will need to either add simplemachines.org to your whitelist or use another email account that does not have such a trapper setup.

Thanks goes out to those who use valid emails to make our life much easier.

Regards,
The Simple Machines Team

[forumnoob]

"Note that such action could include account deletion!"

Why not simple ad the bounced target email address to a DO-NOT-EMAIL list??

Why difference does it make if they cant, or wont (or dont want to) receive SMF emails?

Of course, the mailing list is much more valuable if it contains only valid emails, but if you dont plan to sell it our otherwise exploit it commercially,  I fail to see why it would be worth "bugging your eyes" about?

[metallica48423]

the mailing list won't be sold.   period.

[forumnoob]

the mailing list won't be sold.   period.

^ Well, I feel a little better! (tho I notice you say that with a grin ) I hope this also means that it wont be leased, rented or assigned either

[SleePy]

The was a joke on spelling out the word period judging by it being after the comment.

[forumnoob]

must be the start of a trend.

My girlfriend always spelling out HER periods too!

[metallica48423]

Well, we could always outsource it!

Nah. its not going to be sold, rented, or otherwise taken for use outside of membership and announcements here

[Oldiesmann]

Why not simple ad the bounced target email address to a DO-NOT-EMAIL list??

Because it would take a really long time to do that.

We send the emails through the forum (even the announcement emails), so to put email addresses on a do-not-mail list, we'd have to do the following:

Make a list of all the addresses that are bouncing
Go through the list and look up each address to find out which member it belongs to
Edit that member's account to add them to a "do not mail" group, disable PM notifications and un-subscribe them from any topics they're subscribed to (or set it to not email them).

[forumnoob]

Why not simple ad the bounced target email address to a DO-NOT-EMAIL list??

Because it would take a really long time to do that.

We send the emails through the forum (even the announcement emails), so to put email addresses on a do-not-mail list, we'd have to do the following:

Make a list of all the addresses that are bouncing
Go through the list and look up each address to find out which member it belongs to
Edit that member's account to add them to a "do not mail" group, disable PM notifications and un-subscribe them from any topics they're subscribed to (or set it to not email them).

c'mon, that would be at most, 40 lines of code, lol*

why, oh why would you even think of doing it manually??


*most of it would be pulling the 'bounce list' out of your email system

[Oldiesmann]

We would do it manually because SMF is a forum system, not mailing list software.

[perplexed]

the mailing list won't be sold.   period.

^ Well, I feel a little better! (tho I notice you say that with a grin ) I hope this also means that it wont be leased, rented or assigned either

I changed my email address a few months back to a brand new one for here, and now I get loads of spam, weird since only SMF has it.   Not to get off topic or anything, but I changed it because someone complained my old one was bouncing.  Now I get regular viagra spam along with my SMF notices

[青山 素子]

I changed my email address a few months back to a brand new one for here, and now I get loads of spam, weird since only SMF has it.   Not to get off topic or anything, but I changed it because someone complained my old one was bouncing.  Now I get regular viagra spam along with my SMF notices

Hotmail isn't known for their anti-spam capabilities. I've seen tons of dictionary spam directed at it, down to just plain letter rotation and the like. If you are only using the account for SMF stuff, just add the SMF announcement addresses to your address book and set things so you only get mail to that account.

[opheliagrimm]

I am a little saddened that such greats like Oldiesman haven't found a solution to this problem.

Facing this on our own forum and contemplating making an export of the userlist for use in a mailing program that can automagically disable accounts that bounce because of the insane number of invalid email addresses in our database. The forum has been around for a decade, so a lot of old email addresses in there that aren't working anymore.

Dealing with it by hand is very tedious. The worse part is that using the "announcement" feature or newsletter feature of the smf forum is impossible without generating a wave of bounces. ISP and Host won't like that at all. No sir.

Any bright ideas? If not, any good recommendations for a newsletter mail managing program that can handle bounces automatically?

Thanks in advance.

[Alenônimo]

Are SimpleMachines.org having problems with Yahoo e-mails too? If that's the case, maybe the users aren't to blame.

I received so much bounced mails from yahoo.com and yahoo.com.br lately that I have banned (no posts and no registration) all accounts using it and asked to all users with Yahoo e-mails to change it to someone else.

Not only that, but Yahoo have the nerve to tell me that the users are actually complaining about my forum notifications! I tried to contact Yahoo but I've never received any answer.

[forumnoob]

Are SimpleMachines.org having problems with Yahoo e-mails too? If that's the case, maybe the users aren't to blame.

I received so much bounced mails from yahoo.com and yahoo.com.br lately that I have banned (no posts and no registration) all accounts using it and asked to all users with Yahoo e-mails to change it to someone else.

Not only that, but Yahoo have the nerve to tell me that the users are actually complaining about my forum notifications! I tried to contact Yahoo but I've never received any answer.

It's called 'DOMAIN DEFAMATION' and its a one facet of a multi pronged method of attacking your forum (actually any site, really)

For details and ways to protect your forum, PM. For obvious reasons, this shouldnt really be discussed too publicly :|

[Raevn]

If I understand correctly, this is our main email address used to setup our accounts, correct?  If not, I truly need simple directions on the email path needed to input my SMF email address which I have not used since I signed up for the account.

I've been looking for directions on the email setup for my forums, but have yet to find this.

Thank you for your support and caring!  SMF takes a wee bit of a learning curve for someone such as myself who has only learned their computer knowledge/skills via hands on, but I do LOVE SMF and look forward to learning more as time progresses.

[青山 素子]

It's called 'DOMAIN DEFAMATION' and its a one facet of a multi pronged method of attacking your forum (actually any site, really)

For details and ways to protect your forum, PM. For obvious reasons, this shouldnt really be discussed too publicly :|

My career is in the whole web environment and I've never heard of this, so I call bull.

As for Yahoo!, some members might indeed be complaining. I've seen multiple times (I'm postmaster of a server with a few thousand domains hosted) where someone will sign up for notifications but when they get them, they want that site banned because of "spam". Of course, they refuse to do the whole unsubscribe thing because "my time is worth too much to do that".

Your best option is to contact Yahoo! again and explain the situation to them, letting them know you'd be more than happy to remove those people who complained, but they never contacted you asking for removal, and you need to know who they are to remove their accounts. Honestly, it might work, but big providers rarely spend any time on helping the little guys because they want to appear tough on spam.

One other thing is to make a post asking members to check their e-mail addresses, and then remove those members who haven't signed on lately from getting any kind of e-mail announcement.

[forumnoob]

you can call bull all you want.

With the rise of automated flagging systems, it is easy for somebody to script YOUR site to have it send out volumes of email, then automatically or manually, flag them as SPAM.
As a matter of fact, it wouldnt take more than a few hours of work to have your domain placed on a blacklist

"My career is in the whole web environment and I've never heard of this, so I call bull."

Whole Web environment....you kidding me right?? LOL

example 2:

Joe's  site has a "contact me"  feature -
it also, helpfully, has a provision for YOU to be CC'd on the contact email.
But the website user places YOUR email in the CC field so that YOU get the email that he sent to the site admin!
It comes to you, you see the invitation to get cheap Viagra and you flag it as SPAM.

Hotmail notices that AND FLAGS Joe's DOMAIN blocking ALL mail from Joe

thats just a rough example.

What Joe has to do is one or all of the following..
1. CAPTHA the mail system
2. Use mailto links instead of a webform (which may be a pain)
3. Drop the 'CC' function so that the mail only goes to him.
4. Limit the  "CONTACT US" mail function to one email /IP per week or some period, perform limited regex pattern matching on the post body -- (too much URLS or keywords indicating spam,etc

If he really wants to "contact yahoo" his ONLY OPTION is to send certified mail, return receipt requested, to their LEGAL DEPARTMENT.

He MUST ASSERT damages, loss of income, loss to reputation etc.

[青山 素子]

"My career is in the whole web environment and I've never heard of this, so I call bull."

Whole Web environment....you kidding me right?? LOL

Bad phrasing, I admit. I couldn't think of any better way to say it quickly. I've been working on web sites since 1994 and have been working at a professional web development and hosting company for several years. I have never once read or hear the phrase you used.

If he really wants to "contact yahoo" his ONLY OPTION is to send certified mail, return receipt requested, to their LEGAL DEPARTMENT.

He MUST ASSERT damages, loss of income, loss to reputation etc.

Yes, let's make legal threats because that always works and never backfires. Honestly, there are better ways to deal with situations to resolve them before turning to legal bullying.

For example, since this topic has gone out of hand and you are trolling, I can simply lock the topic and put you on a warning. See? No legal threats needed!