Just wanted to give everyone a heads up and status on some back-end things. If you’re not interested in this stuff, just skip this thread.
Server Migration
Our webhost for the main website did a migration to new hardware this past weekend. Not surprisingly, some things did not come over as smoothly as might be expected.
pixls.us
I had to trigger a new build and push of the main site from the github repo. We were down for a day or so before I got the build pushed back up.
wtf happened?
The webhost migrated to a new server and nuked my symlinks from public_html -> pixls_deploy/.
rawpedia
We’re hosting rawpedia.rawtherapee.com on this same server. rawpedia uses a MediaWiki to run, and for some reason I can’t resolve the host name at the moment. I’m working to see what on earth happened and to get things back up and running asap.
Email Spam
Not too long ago we also migrated out of the old Digital Ocean VPS we were using to a new openSUSE machine on Linode. Everything is up and running super-smooth (because @darix is a ninja), with the sole exception of email.
On migrating to our new home we first found ourselves on a couple of blacklists thanks to the previous IP owners. I cleared that up with the various blacklist hosts around. Then Google decided that the email configuration we had setup (identical to what we were running on the old host pretty much) was suspect, and began flagging many of our forum emails as spam.
I have since been hacking at the SPF to see why it’s triggering softfail’s (I still haven’t worked this part out all the way). I did make some other modifications, including setting up DKIM to sign our outgoing mails with a public key. I think this has helped us to get past the Google spam filters.
Please Help
I am not 100% sure we’re out of the spam woods yet, though. So if everyone could take a few moments at some point to check their junk/spam folders in their emails for stuff that comes from the forum. (Hint: all of our emails subjects are preceded with [pixls.us])
I got DKIM up and running this afternoon - so over the next few days just monitor your spam/junk foldres and see if our emails are still getting routed there since this afternoon. If you find something, feel free to PM me or just reply to this thread.
@patdavidSome but not all of the email notifications are coming through on my Gmail account. As usual I marked a few as not spam. However, based on past experience, this doesn’t always work.
Is this since I posted my initial post? I know prior to this post they were getting routed into spam. I’m more concerned about since around now going forward. (ie: keep an eye out for a day or two)
It has been more than a week: no email spam . All discuss mail now goes to the Updates folder in Gmail. Would prefer them to arrive in the Forums folder; but hey, problem solved!
Maybe you are doing something different or my account doesn’t have the latest update (if it is staggered; can’t think of the right term ATM). I am using the android Gmail app. FYI this reply went to Updates whereas your other one went to Promotions. I think the ratio is about 4:6.
I usually move the offending email to the right folder and that is supposed to train Gmail. At least, that was the promise; however, that hasn’t worked for me in the past 2 years. I will see if there is another way. Sigh, it is very annoying how the emails arrive haphazardly but they don’t enter Forum even once.
I use Google Inbox, and when I manually move an email to a specific folder, I get prompted to “always do this”. Otherwise, you can make a filter in GMail that keys off the subject line (all of our subjects are [PIXLS.US][Category] if it helps?).
Somehow I missed this post. As of July 13th, all of my [pixls.us] emails were getting sent to spam. I have since corrected the issue, but thought you might like to know.
Since July 13th all of the forum emails have been going to spam? What provider, and can you send me one of the emails that went to spam? (patdavid@gmail.com) thx!
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