The Song Fight Bulletin Board

Lately some of you may have noticed that the forum notification emails are being delayed. This seems to be an issue with Dreamhost’s outgoing mail queue; unfortunately we don’t get much visibility into that, and we have basically no control over it either.

I’m looking into options for hosting outgoing forum mail elsewhere. I might just add forum mails to my Mailgun plan if it doesn’t cost too much, but I need to investigate to see how many emails we send per month, and there may also be implications with other aspects of how the songfight.net domain is configured. Unfortunately, email as a whole is in a very sorry state these days and it’s become pretty neglected as far as fundamental internet protocols go.

Anyway, I just wanted to acknowledge that I am aware of the issue and looking into mitigations.

Thanks for keeping an eye on it, fluffy, and for the heads up. I didn't even know the forum was sending emails. What emails does it send?

If you subscribe to a thread or subforum then you get notifications when people post. I usually have it turned on during Nur Ein so I don't miss out on the results, although they tend to be announced while I'm asleep anyway so it doesn't really help.

More info, it looks like the issue is Dreamhost-wide and they're working on fixing it and they claim to have implemented a solution, but no ETA given for the actual resolution.

https://www.dreamhoststatus.com/pages/i ... 12f7728d2b

I'm looking into setting up Mailgun but hopefully this issue will be resolved soon, all the same.

Thanks for the updates, Fluffy. I honestly just thought it was me somehow (I've had a few email shenanigans going on lately).

Okay, I've set up songfight.net to use my mailgun account for now, and it's tested as working. Soon I'll find out just how many notification emails we send in a month!

Dreamhost still says that the fix is "being verified" but the outgoing mail queue is still growing faster than mails are going out, so I think we'll be using this for a while.

fluffy wrote: ↑

Thu Jun 16, 2022 10:34 pm

Okay, I've set up songfight.net to use my mailgun account for now, and it's tested as working. Soon I'll find out just how many notification emails we send in a month!

Dreamhost still says that the fix is "being verified" but the outgoing mail queue is still growing faster than mails are going out, so I think we'll be using this for a while.

Bless you.

Dreamhost's mail servers are operational again, so I've disabled Mailgun for now. Let me know via Slack or Discord if you notice any additional problems with email notifications.

I found a better mechanism for sending emails from Dreamhost, which will both be less likely to have issues like this in the future, and also enables DKIM signing, which makes spam filters happier. So if you've been having problems with Song Fight! forum emails going into your spam filter, hopefully this change will cut down on that. It's certainly made my spam filter happier, in any case.