Some outgoing emails fail; some don't

[farseek]

I've noticed this peculiarity on my X10 account for some time. Certain outgoing emails never seem to get sent (or at least received) though most do. I've tried resending and forwarding the failed emails to different recipients, including other emails of mine; the messages in question never get through.

It seems there's some sort of filter or block on outgoing emails, though I can't figure out any rhyme or reason to it. It doesn't seem to be based on objectionable content, recipients or message length. It could be just an arbitrary block on certain words or characters in emails. This is frustrating because I never know if an email gets through unless I copy another address of mine on every single message. Does anyone know how to fix this or at least figure out what exactly the email filter is blocking? Thanks in advance.

 

[essellar]

They're not going to give you the "secret sauce", since that's a recipe for generating spam that will get out. You may not want it for that, but other people will, and they'll use it. Unfortunately, the filters are and have to be almost unreasonably tight on Free Hosting; the servers used to be almost permanent fixtures on spam lists, and that affects everybody and takes an unholy amount of time to clear when it happens.

ASCII text with a moderate message length and both subject and body will usually work (if necessary, rely on the email client at the receiving end to convert URLs to clickable entities). "European" accented latin characters should work as well. (I can't vouch for non-latin alphabets, abjads, and so forth.) Test messages that identify themselves as test messages are normally blocked (you'd be surprised how many inexperienced developers/script users forget to create real messages after doing the unnecessary "testing, testing" test, and the recipients generally just hit the "mark as spam" button). Remember that spoofing the FROM header will automatically be blocked as well (not that you're doing that, but on the off, off, off chance that anybody searched the forum...).

Apart from that, if you have truly inoffensive boilerplate that can't get out, you will want to PM a staff member who can use it to train the filter.

 

[bdistler]

to add to what @essellar said above - x10hosting is now scanning incoming Email to your free-hosting account - so if your CMS - or script - or user needs to send you a Email at a address on your free-hosting account - if x10hosting thinks it is spam you will not receive it

 

[farseek]

Thanks for the explanations. It makes sense, though is still worrying that both incoming and outgoing messages may be going missing.

I am sending only short plain ASCII text messages, not in bulk (at most to maybe two recipients). Really innocuous stuff like "Hi Mom, the weather's starting to get better here..." And I never knew that didn't go through until my mother complained that I didn't respond to her.

One other thing - the server seems really slow at random times, usually at night. I've noticed this in both email and on webpages. If these are just things we have to put up with on free accounts, I'm not really assured that paying for an account would fix these things. I've tried other services though and apart from these things, I'm fairly happy. So I appreciate it if anyone has any further advice.

 

[Dead-i]

Hi,

I can't find a free hosting account linked to farseek. Please can you link your accounts by going to Support (in the top-right of cPanel) then Visit Forums? That way I can look up outgoing emails on your account to see if they were delivered properly.

 

[farseek]

Ok @Dead-i - I tried linking my accounts as you said (twice) but just got a generic error message on a blank page. I think my account is aliased as farseekx, at least in some places. Anyway, I know that of the last two emails I sent, one got through and one did not (at least to my copied address). Same content and recipient - I just cut some of the history after it didn't go through the first time, so I don't know if there is a length limit or what. Thanks for looking into it.