cblaisd

IB might want to consult with, say, HowardForums or city-data.com . They never have these recurring problems.

It's very handy to have PM notifications come via email, but I've pretty much given up the expectation that it will ever happen here with any consistency or reliability

Pat89339

No emails again...

IBsteph

Please be patient while this is being worked on. I understand it must be frustrating but please, no need to report any further. I promise to keep you guys posted as much as I can.

And SORRY for the inconvenience this is causing...

Fredd

I think I'm missing some notifications for a number of my subscribed threads but most seem to be coming through promptly.

However, I've just had seven e-mail notifications for the People Association thread in OMNI vomit into my inbox a few minutes ago, dating back to as long ago as July 17.

Respectfully, what gives?

Update: Now my inbox has gone crazy with e-mails. This isn't the first time, folks. When it arrives like this it's dangerously close to SPAM, something I never thought I'd say in conjunction with FT.

SGJazz

Same here. 20 in 2 minutes.

Fredd

Pat89339 - what forces you've unleased with your OP.

gof

I just got three (old) emails about 20 minutes ago. Nothing new. "newest" one was 4-5 days ago.

Pat89339

No kidding. I received a few hundred in the same timespan. I couldn't keep ahead of the stream. Wherever these were stuck the logjam was broken. I also received a dozen or so PMs over the period 7/17-8/4.

IBsteph

This issue should be resolved now. You should be receiving emails as expected now.Sorry for the inconvenience caused.

Thanks

tasnam

IBSteph,

Can you check again or look into my settings....Not getting any email updates of posts for about three days or so.


Tasnam

IB-Dick

HowardForums is actually smaller then FT with 13,708,041 posts, and city-data.com is just a little bit larger with 14,970,534 posts. (Flyertalk has 14,303,477 posts)

Now, let's think of Flyertalk in the context of our network. Flyertalk is the 5th or 6th largest forum we have here at the company. The largest being with http://www.honda-tech.com/ with 40,757,139 posts and http://www.corvetteforum.com/ with 34,056,868 posts. In total, we own over 100 forum sites of various sizes.

All of these forums send out a lot of emails, and when you send this many emails, there are a lot of problems that arise. One issue is simply processing that many emails. One larger problem is ISP's and email services noticing this large volume coming from our network. We occasionally get red-flagged by places like gmail for potentially sending out spam. This is simply due to the volume that we send.

When an issue arises, it can often be difficult to find the problem. It can be an issue with one of the servers, like it was the other day. It can be an issue with our network, which by necessity has its architecture modified continuously. It can be a problem with one of our dedicated outgoing mail servers. It can also be be a problem with ISP's temporary blocking us. Usually, it's a combination of two or more of these. For example, the other day VM1 couldn't send emails and 50k emails entered the delivery queue. When this was fixed, all of those emails were sent very quickly. This might have put a clog in one of the outgoing email servers. Maybe it didn't. I don't know. What I do know is that either the flood of emails from FT or a flood of emails from that mail server caused by the clog from FT caused a couple of ISP's to put a block on us. All of the emails that were blocked come back to us as failed and enter our differed queue. These sit in the queue and are periodically retried for a period of 72 hours (or something like that). This slowed the already clogged email server and caused additional issues.

From my understanding, the above issue was resolved shortly after the VM1 returned to sending emails. Also, from my understanding, another site of ours had a similar hiccup recently, which may or may not have affected FT.

I'm not completely sure if the current problems are because of this stuff, or because of a configuration change that was made on the servers to fix a different non-user facing email issue. Either way, it's apparent that there is still an issue, and we're addressing that issue.

MKE-MR

Thanks for the update. I'm sure it's not a lot of fun to troubleshoot.
The problem last month seemed to be queuing, since I received three days' worth of emails at once when it unjammed. I suppose this time around will likely be the same...dead for the last two days once again.

I will say that it's a great, time saving feature when it works.

Firewind

No email alerts since Sunday, 15 August.

Still wondering, since I first began receiving the strange emails last week directing me first to the mobile device path, secondarily to the usual PC one (which included a lot of vertical spacing); then I received a plethora of emails at around the same time; then this... Is IB trying to introduce a new mobile-device-preference alerting system and it false started?

Firewind

I know from long experience in my own company that IS/IT people detest announcing "pandemic" problems, but a change in corporate culture would sure be appreciated from this end, and as I've always maintained, must be consistent with business interest, because such problems gum up the works -- e.g., here, all those lost click-ins and -outs. No?

Pat89339

No email alerts again.