Gmail Forwarding slowness (RESOLVED! 12/6)
Right now we are experiencing some slowdowns sending emails to Google’s GMail service. This only appears to be affecting mail being forwarded through our systems, and not sending directly through an email client using our mail servers. We believe the slowdown to be on Google’s end, however we are actively investigating the situation to see if there’s something wrong on our end causing the slowdown.
Again, email sent directly from an email client such as Thunderbird, Mac Mail, or Outlook should make it to GMail in a timely fashion, it is only mail being forwarded through our servers (forwarding-only addresses in the web panel) that is currently being affected.
Update: The mail queues are back down to normal now, and things appear to be running smoothly again!
Update: (11/28/2007 10:15 PST) Unfortunately it looks like this problem is back. Our admins are working to resolve it now. Messages are flowing, but the queue is quite backed up at the moment so it’s going to take some time.
Update: (11/29/2007 3:00 PST) We’ve moved all outgoing gmail forwards to their own server so that they’ll have dedicated processing time without affecting the rest of outgoing mail. The outgoing mail queue is still pretty full, but it’s steadily decreasing. We’re in contact with a Google support representative to get this resolved permanently. Mail to Gmail forwards are being delayed, but they are going through. A temporary workaround is to point your email forwards to a non-Gmail address or local DreamHost mailbox, as those are not affected by the delay. We’re sorry for the problems this causes you, and we’re doing all that we can to resolve this.
Update: (12/02/2007 1:00 PST) At the request of many of our customers, we are updating this page to let you know that we do not have any further information regarding this issue. We’re already in contact with Googles support team to resolve this issue, there isn’t much else we can do at this point. As far as we can tell, mail is still queued and not lost. Please try and refrain from contacting support about this for the time being, as they do not have any additional information that isn’t already posted here. As soon as we have ANY updates, we’ll be sure to post it here.
Update: (12/04/2007 9:43 PST) At the request of many of our customers, we are updating this page to let you know that we believe mail is now getting processed at a faster rate than during the weekend. The situation is not completely resolved yet as delays still exist, but there is no more problems apparent to cause further delays. We’re now waiting to catch up with the current mail flow. Again, sorry about all the inconvenience this is causing.
Update (12/05/2007 09:46 AM Pacific) Latest and greatest update! Gmail finally got back to us has whitelisted all of our outbound MX servers, plus one or two others we were using to hold the email that was being delayed by them. We cannot guarantee this will last forever, however, but for now, we’re able to send them forwarded email. We are incrementally having more of our mail servers start sending directly to gmail, instead of via our holding server. The holding server we setup has 1.4 million emails on it, and is sending them just as fast as it can/gmail will take them.
What this means to you:
1. Newly sent email to your DreamHost account that is forwarded to gmail should go through with relative speed. I am watching logs on a handful of servers and they are all sending just fine.
2. Email sent over the course of last week is sending out very quickly, and we hope will catch up today or tomorrow. 1.4 million emails is a lot of email, as you can imagine. We setup a brand new custom mail server with faster hard drives and a raid card to handle it.
We’re very sorry about how long this has taken. We have been working with gmail to get this resolved, however we are ultimately at the mercy of their servers accepting our email.
UPDATE 12/06/2007 9:07 AM Pacific:
It looks like our deferred mail server really cranked out the email yesterday, and is up to date. The only ones left in its mail queue for gmail are receiving this message back:
(host gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[209.85.147.114] said: 450-4.2.1 The Gmail user you are trying to contact is receiving 450-4.2.1 mail at a rate that prevents additional messages from 450-4.2.1 being delivered. Please resend your message at a later 450-4.2.1 time; if the user is able to receive mail at that time, 450 4.2.1 your message will be delivered. (in reply to RCPT TO command))
Unfortunately, there is nothing we can do to prevent that. Remember, you can always have your email delivered to DreamHost for use with any IMAP/POP3 client for easy access. We have received word from them that we are whitelisted, as previously stated, and all of our inbound mail servers are successfully relaying (forwarding) their email to gmail.
.
November 17th, 2007 at 2:52 pm
Strange - were is the delay? Delivering the mail to Dreamhost oder delivering it from Dreamhost to GMail?
November 17th, 2007 at 3:53 pm
Did you read their posting?
November 17th, 2007 at 4:12 pm
I’ve had a couple of undelivered emails from my phpBB forum to a Gmail address - “delivery temporarily suspended: unknown mail transport error”. Doesn’t happen very often, but it’s a bit weird. I’m guessing this is connected to the issue above…
November 17th, 2007 at 4:14 pm
@Ross: unlikely. If you get any more, please write into support and ask them to put you in touch with me.
@Retrolum: the delay is from our machines to gmail’s machines. Mail is coming into our machines just fine, it’s just piling up in our mail queues waiting to go out to gmail.
November 17th, 2007 at 8:49 pm
i was having trouble with my gmail account running very slowly earlier today. went on for quite a while. absolutely nothing to do with dreamhost as i just connect directly to gmail.
the gmail chaps do seem to have sorted out the problem now though.
November 17th, 2007 at 9:16 pm
Ya we should cut the Gmail folks some slack since they don’t have enough cash available to set up their backend systems!!!
November 17th, 2007 at 10:04 pm
Fuck Gmail anyways. Anyone who uses that is willingly allowing themselves to be used like a cheap whore. When will you people stop giving in to all the free dangling carrots? You might as well just go ahead and fill out one of those Dianetics questionnaires and mail it on into Google, along with your bank acct info, medical history, and then thank them for their awesome email. Then later on when all the plans they are working on come to fruition using the data they have mined from you, you’ll at least be able to brag about having used them since back in the day when invites were being begged for and then people will know you are a King Sheep rather than just one of them little bitch ones… course, a King Sheep is still a fuckin sheep.
November 17th, 2007 at 11:10 pm
BTW, same goes for MySpace and Facebook users.
November 18th, 2007 at 7:04 am
Any idea why the slowdown occurred? What are the chances of this happening in the future?
November 18th, 2007 at 11:16 am
Why bother with all of that when you can just send them your DNA?
Check out 23andme.com - In the about us/directors section, you’ll see “Anne Wojcicki, Co-Founder.”
Yeah, I’ll assume that Google gets nothing for it’s $3.9M investment in Sergey Brin’s wife’s company!
November 19th, 2007 at 4:21 am
good forwarding.
thanks
November 19th, 2007 at 8:10 pm
I have been noticing a problem with Google’s SMTP servers of late. They seem to be timing out frequently.
November 20th, 2007 at 2:14 pm
Thanks dreamhost for alerting us - It’s been kinda quirky of late
Since switching over to google aps-I’ve always had a bad feeling that mail wasn’t being forwarded from dreamhost dns…the spam filter is so damn good -if dreamhost would upgrade debian a notch we probably would see it too.
Who cares if they mine the data and serve me ads -who cares. Get real its done anyway on more than one level.
If you’re information is so critical -you’ll have encryption,public keys, digital signing etc…and someone- if they are interested -will still capture the data and throw a cluster or 2 at it.
Its useful and pretty reliable - capture more of my data and tell me how to make more money!
November 21st, 2007 at 2:23 pm
Dear Lord,
Please give us another Dreamhost outage soon as this blog is getting way to slow and as You know I need it for a little daily relief. You know that there are many shitty sites that you’d like to punish… at least smite a few of those lazy un XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant heathen a little more often?
Your faithful,
Voice Of One
November 21st, 2007 at 8:24 pm
I concur… no outages in 4 days? something is wrong…
November 22nd, 2007 at 7:05 am
i wonder where this blog is hosted because its always online.
November 22nd, 2007 at 11:05 am
@myspace proxy - I am truly humbled by your creative genius. (P.S. Dreamhost has already publicly stated where this is hosted, you can trace the DNS to find out where it is also. No need to wonder)
November 22nd, 2007 at 12:53 pm
“you can trace the DNS to find out where it is also. No need to wonder”
Sure, but then he wouldn’t have had an excuse to spam his link here. May The Lord cast his ass into a swine and drive him into the sea, and may his days be filled with error 500s.
November 23rd, 2007 at 10:15 am
It’s really boring, no issues lately.
November 23rd, 2007 at 9:51 pm
Well, their panel was not available yesterday. And I just stnt in a support ticket regarding the announcement lists. When someone subscribes, it does not send you an automated email informing you about that. I have had 46 subscriptions to my list and I only got two confirmation emails. But maybe it is too unimportant to blog about that on here.
November 24th, 2007 at 12:23 am
Update: OK Sorry, I think the Announcement List Issue was indeed not their, but my fault. And who knows - maybe the internet lines between HI and CA were down yesterday afternoon, so that coulda been not them as well. So I guess you are right: It is boring, and there is nothing happening
November 24th, 2007 at 5:25 am
“So I guess you are right: It is boring, and there is nothing happening”
Yes, and if something doesn’t start fuckin up soon I’m going to start lookin for a new host…
November 24th, 2007 at 11:53 am
Rene - Thanks for following up on that. But you know if you hadn’t posted the message saying it was broken, Murphy wouldn’t have given you the answer to fix it! Murphy’s a bastard.
I’d love to know why we haven’t had any new top level posts in almost a week. (three hours short I think). That’s gotta be some kind of record.
November 25th, 2007 at 7:11 am
Thanks for working this out..
morten
http://www.calculatepaypal.com
November 25th, 2007 at 8:25 am
What an asshole.
Trademark violation report sent to abuse@paypal.com.
Spam complaint sent to abuse@dreamhost.com.
Spam & fake account complaint sent to abuse@digg.com.
November 25th, 2007 at 11:07 am
I think there will be an update tomorrow, it just seems like the Dreamhost staff have had a weeks vacation!
November 25th, 2007 at 12:36 pm
Pepto Bismol wants their color back.
November 25th, 2007 at 5:50 pm
Slightly different shade! lol
November 25th, 2007 at 6:06 pm
Wow $100Website, have you had anyone sign up? If so, can I have their contact details - I would like to sell them the Brooklyn Bridge. I’ll even give you a cut. No, really.
November 25th, 2007 at 6:39 pm
… But only on your birthday!
November 25th, 2007 at 7:31 pm
Wow bridgesales, do you have an issue with me?
Tell me what your issue is? I’m providing a service to those that don’t want to learn how to put together a website, but just want an affordable all in one package.
$100 for a domain, hosting, and a website setup for them which they can then just update, is in my opinion fairly good value for money! They don’t have to learn anything and they can earn money from their site aswell, which makes it different from the likes of Geocities etc.
If you don’t want to buy, then don’t, but there are plenty that do, and yes, there have been people signup, and the site is brand new. No, you can’t have their contact details! :p They don’t want bridges, they just wanted a cheap website.
November 25th, 2007 at 8:23 pm
fine..spam your $100 website…i will show any one who has wordpress (or any other installer via one click at dreamhost) how to do it for free! and i don’t even claim i talk or walk with god…
but anyone can set up a website at dreamhost and do a oneclick install..and after that show their 1000 buddies how to do it…and it costs all of them less than what you are charding…lol
November 25th, 2007 at 9:02 pm
You ask Joe Bloggs how a website works, they won’t know that they even need domain and hosting, let alone what they mean. Hosting alone costs $110 a year without a promo code, and another $10 for a domain, these are both included in the price, therefore by my reckoning, they are actually saving money! All hassle free, they just fill in a form and wait for their site to be installed.
November 26th, 2007 at 5:17 am
Many people simply aren’t capable of doing it for themselves. Now snarfing their ad revenue is a bit low…
November 26th, 2007 at 11:55 am
For some reason, starting earlier today, I stopped getting email. I’m using the double-pass spamfiltering technique described in the WIki (since the DH spamfilter is not too hot). Now I’m getting looping bounce messages from secureserver.net saying that relaying isn’t supported. Is anyone else seeing this?
November 26th, 2007 at 6:15 pm
Apparently not based on the lack of response - but many of us aren’t double bouncing.
November 27th, 2007 at 7:12 am
Hey $100 Website
keep doing what you are doing. You are right. There are lots of people that want to have their own website and have no idea how to go about it. I get requests all the time and I only do it for fun.
November 27th, 2007 at 9:10 am
this might shed some light as to why google has been soooo slow latley!
http://www.spymac.com/details/?2308382
November 27th, 2007 at 6:38 pm
Allen’s link is a spam link - IGNORE IGNORE IGNORE.
November 28th, 2007 at 2:29 am
forwarding to gmail is STILL slow!
November 28th, 2007 at 2:34 am
Still waiting for e-mails received at Dreamhost over 4 hours ago to forward to Gmail.
No, they have not been caught in the junk filter of either service.
November 28th, 2007 at 2:50 am
I am also experiencing extreme slowness, I just received a message sent out 8 hours ago and many others still have to come.
November 28th, 2007 at 3:36 am
Automatic forwarding to Gmail is still slow.
Please fix, Dreamhost!
November 28th, 2007 at 3:39 am
At the moment,
sender -> b@mydreamhostdomain.com -> gmail ——- WORKS
But if a@mydreamhostdomain.com is forwarded to b@mydreamhostdomain.com with Control Panel
sender -> a@mydreamhostdomain.com -> gmail —— DOES NOT WORK
Mail arrives at a@mydreamhostdomain.com mailbox, but does not get forwarded to the gmail account.
This forwarding arrangement has previously worked fine. I hope they’ll fix it soon. I’ve contacted support about this.
November 28th, 2007 at 3:45 am
Ahem, forget it.. sender -> b@mydreamhostdomain.com -> gmail forwarding doesn’t work either at the moment.
November 28th, 2007 at 3:56 am
I’ve also contacted support.
Have been getting no emails at all - well they have been coming in - 8-10 hours behind… and now I am in big trouble with my lecturer as I didn’t realise she had emailed me. ARGH!
November 28th, 2007 at 4:41 am
im also not receiving messages over my forwarding address right now, that couldnt be true…
November 28th, 2007 at 5:23 am
I am getting my emails on gmail 6-12 hours later. They are being held up by randy.mail.dreamhost.com and pants.dreamhost.com. I just missed an email from an important client about a big project!
November 28th, 2007 at 8:12 am
Hey, there: Our email forwarding through Gmail hasn’t been working for over 12 hours. Only seems to be happening with certain emails.
November 28th, 2007 at 8:47 am
We’re running into problems with our dreamhost account emails forwarding to gmail as well. very frustrating. very dreamhost.