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tchester

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  1. From this discussion, I realized that while Spamcop might be a great tool to block a spammer who always uses the same mail server, it is totally mismatched to blocking spam from places like yahoo with thousands of outgoing email servers. for email from yahoo, it ends up blocking as much, or more, legitimate email as it does spam email. when a spammer using yahoo mail hits a spamcop trap address, spamcop will block that particular outgoing email server used for that message for one day. but the next thousands of spam emails won't be blocked since they will likely use a different outgoing email server at yahoo. instead, all the legitimate yahoo email users who happen to then use the blocked yahoo email server will find their legitimate emails blocked! so what a terrible program! it rejects 1 out of 1,000 spam emails, but also rejects 1 out of 1,000 legitimate email messages from all yahoo users! since there can be many more legitimate users than spammers at yahoo (one hopes!), spamcop could be blocking many legitimate yahoo emails for every spam email it blocks. this is the complete opposite of the rejection ratio that a spam filter is supposed to have. unless spamcop can be configured to not block yahoo and gmail addresses, it is a terrible tool for any isp to use.
  2. I strongly support getting rid of spamcop if they won't stop blocking yahoo mail. it is ridiculous to bounce legitimate emails every time a yahoo user's computer gets hacked, especially since it is ineffective in bouncing the actual spam mail. i'm losing something like HALF of legitimate email from yahoo users. one user had an email to me bounced THREE times before it finally came through on the fourth try. the two people with yahoo email addresses who send me emails regularly estimate that something like half of their emails to me bounce. the spamcop setup doesn't work for yahoo email, or any other service that has a large bank of outgoing email servers, since each email goes randomly to a new server. so the computer sending spam still gets to send out a high percentage of the spam which won't be blocked, whereas legit users who get routed to the spamcop-blacklisted server have their emails rejected. what really burns me is that i am still getting around 500 spam emails a day, even with the use of spamcop, yet spamcop is blocking legitimate email. my bet is that won't go up much by turning off spamcop. and even if it does, the thunderbird bayesian filter catches most of them, and my own filters catch essentially all the rest. i would MUCH rather get an increase in spam than lose legitimate emails. bill, thanks for trying to solve this problem! you'd think spamcop would implement a solution that would allow isp's to customize it a bit, to allow yahoo emails, rather than lose a customer. the previous poster got it right: "I can't tell all my friends on Yahoo to change email addresses." instead, i, too, will have to move my email outside of totalchoicehosting if legitimate mail continues to be blocked at such a high rate.
  3. Alex, you're the best! no one else could ever figure out the source of this problem before. for others, what alex found was a "problem with the internal configuration of the firewall, port and exim", which caused an intermittent restart of the smtp mail program. i was very pleased to hear that, since it would make the mail service unavailable for some minutes while it was restarting, and possibly longer if it hung up before it (or a human) figured out it needed to be restarted. it's now been 24 hours, and i haven't had a single problem sending mail. and bruce, thank you very much, too, since i never would have even submitted a ticket, after my two previous unsuccessful tickets in years past, if you hadn't suggested something they could do to possibly resolve the problem. as we all know, intermittent problems are the very worst to try to track down, which again makes alex's sleuthing impressive. thanks, alex!
  4. ah, a possible solution! the next time this happens, i will submit a ticket and suggest that. thanks!
  5. hi, bruce! thanks for letting me know that i'm not alone in having this problem. any ideas what is causing this? i've opened tickets twice before with the help desk, to no avail. they just create a test mail account on my server, try it once or twice, don't see a problem, and then close the ticket.
  6. I'm currently experiencing an intermittent problem in which I can't send email through my SMTP mail server for my domain at totalchoice for periods of 1 to 5 minutes. before and after those periods, with no changes at my end,mail goes through normally. there is no problem in downloading mail. the intermittent message i get from thunderbird is: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The message could not be sent because connecting to SMTP server mail.tchester.org failed. The server may be unavailable or is refusing SMTP connections. Please verify that your SMTP server settings are correct and try again, or contact the server administrator ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- i can get this message ten times in a row, and then the eleventh time i try to send a message it goes through. sometimes, though, i have to wait five minutes or so before a successful send. for example, after having messages go out without problems for the last three hours, now at 11:10 p.m. PST 12/23/12 it failed ten times in a row. I waited one minute, and it failed another ten times in a row. I waited another minute and it failed another ten times in a row. finally, at 11:17 p.m., it sent. During the times it failed, my internet connection was fine, and I could download any emails received by my mail host at totalchoice, which points to the totalchoice outgoing mail server as the problem. this is the third time in the past ten years in which this has happened. one year it got so bad i gave up and switched to another outgoing mail server for a while. i've never experienced such problems in using any other outgoing mail server. years can go by and everything works fine, and then suddenly the problem recurs, as it did starting about a week ago now. it looks like the last time this occurred was July 2011 for a few weeks. at that time, i wondered if the mail server load was too high, but kris found that the load of my shared server was not high during those times. twice before i've opened a ticket, but the help desk people didn't experience the same problem since it is intermittent, so i couldn't get any resolution other than to blame a "temporary glitch" at my totalchoice mail server. ************************************************************************************* hence i'm posting to the forum to see if anyone else has experienced this, and if there is a resolution. ************************************************************************************** i found two webpages discussing what appears to be a similar problem: --------------------------------------------------- i occasionally (several times a week) have this same problem on dione. if i try resending once or twice, the message always eventually sends. https://docs.astro.columbia.edu/ticket/402 --------------------------------------------------- After years of working well, 3 days ago Thunderbird began to intermittently fail to connect to smtp server. Usually, after 3 or 4 attempts e-mail can be sent. http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=627156 ------------------------------------------------------ it seems like the main suspect is an intermittent server problem at totalchoice, but intermittent problems are very hard to track down.
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