Gmail Forwarding slowness (RESOLVED! 12/6)
Posted (November 17th, 2007 at 2:17 pm PST) by kitchenRight 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.
398 Responses to “Gmail Forwarding slowness (RESOLVED! 12/6)”
Did you read their posting?
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…
@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.
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.
Ya we should cut the Gmail folks some slack since they don’t have enough cash available to set up their backend systems!!!
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.
BTW, same goes for MySpace and Facebook users.
Any idea why the slowdown occurred? What are the chances of this happening in the future?
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
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!
good forwarding.
thanks
I have been noticing a problem with Google’s SMTP servers of late. They seem to be timing out frequently.
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!
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
I concur… no outages in 4 days? something is wrong…
i wonder where this blog is hosted because its always online. 
@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)
“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.
It’s really boring, no issues lately.
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.
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 
“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…
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.
Thanks for working this out..
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.
I think there will be an update tomorrow, it just seems like the Dreamhost staff have had a weeks vacation!
Pepto Bismol wants their color back.
Slightly different shade! lol
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.
… But only on your birthday!
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.
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
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.
Many people simply aren’t capable of doing it for themselves. Now snarfing their ad revenue is a bit low…
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?
Apparently not based on the lack of response - but many of us aren’t double bouncing.
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.
this might shed some light as to why google has been soooo slow latley!
http://www.spymac.com/details/?2308382
Allen’s link is a spam link - IGNORE IGNORE IGNORE.
forwarding to gmail is STILL slow!
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.
I am also experiencing extreme slowness, I just received a message sent out 8 hours ago and many others still have to come.
Automatic forwarding to Gmail is still slow.
Please fix, Dreamhost!
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.
Ahem, forget it.. sender -> b@mydreamhostdomain.com -> gmail forwarding doesn’t work either at the moment.
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!
im also not receiving messages over my forwarding address right now, that couldnt be true…
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!
Hey, there: Our email forwarding through Gmail hasn’t been working for over 12 hours. Only seems to be happening with certain emails.
We’re running into problems with our dreamhost account emails forwarding to gmail as well. very frustrating. very dreamhost.
My email is also not forwarding to Gmail — this seems to have started at about 3 p.m. yesterday.
Over the past 5 to 6 months, my forwarded e-mail to my g-mail has been making it there faster than my regular mail client. This is unusual.
Perhaps The Lord is trying to tell you people that you shouldn’t be rolling yourselves over to the megacorps who do nothing but rape you for your info and habit profiles, only to sell or give them to Devil knows who later?
Anytime something is given freely from a company who’s main goal is to make tons of money for their shareholders, you can count on Spock raising his brow in an angular fashion.
it pretty much boils down to the fact that dreamhost just sucks
WORKAROUND: This problem only affects “Forward only email” addresses, but not “real” addresses. Even if the real addresses have a forward to a gmail.com account, that forward will work well.
In other words, a relatively good workaround for this problem is:
1. Go to https://panel.dreamhost.com/index.cgi?tree=mail.addresses
2. For each of the addresses that forward to gmail.com in “Forwarding-only email” section:
2.1 Click Edit
2.2 Fill in the “Fully Hosted Email” section. Note that it is mostly filled in already, in particular, it will still forwarding (a copy) to your selected gmail address.
2.3 You may want to tick the box “Even remove unread messages” (third from bottom)
2.4 Click “Save changes”
3 Try sending email now
At least for me currently with this setup the email arrives at gmail quite swiftly.
(Ironically, I subscribed to a DreamHost account today for the sole purpose of forwarding mail to GMail. Talk about bad first impressions!)
but you have to take into account, that the setup change could take up to an hour. ive done some hours ago and for some time emails were even rejected with unkown receipend, so I would wait till tonight…
Contrary to the “workaround” note, my “real” dreamhost email accounts which also forward to Gmail are hours behind….
are emails being forwarded to gmail through dreamhost’s servers which have not arrived in the last 24 hours permanently lost? do they remain on the dreamhost server? i just signed up for squirrelmail access but that only allows me to get new messages from this point forward. how do i access what gmail has failed to delvier in the meantime?
Hmmm. This is starting to sound more and more like a Dreamhost problem, rather than a Gmail problem.
DH strikes again!
Same here - this is my ‘real’ accounts no just talking about fwd to gmail.
*sobs*
I have Henrik Ingo’s workaround - have had it for months. However I’m still having problems.
A few emails are getting through. Some take about 2 hours, and some I’ve yet to get (10-12 hours and waiting…) - though I can see them in the dreamhost webmail.
Very frustrating.
Dreamhost response:
Hello Ben,
Sorry about the inconvenience. Gmail has greylisted some of our servers.
We are currently in the process of moving the mail queue to a new server.
This process can and is causing delays in the mail getting processed.
Everything should be back to normal soon. We apologize for any
inconvenience this has caused you, let us know if you have any other
questions
Thanks!
George
i just read the reply from dreamhost to ben above…… so does this mean that emails thus far delayed will eventually arrive?
i just received an email from maybe three hours ago, but not a whole grouping sent almost 6 hours ago.
is there any other way to access emails that were forwarded to gmail (but not yet received)- do they remain on the dreamhost server?
why is this considered:
Severity: Low
???
Because it only applies to people that 1. Forward through gmail (meaning two systems need to be working for email to be reliable) and 2. It’s not actually a “broken” DH system.
It’s more of a pissing match. So, find the SOB that got the mail server marked as questionable and kick him the twig and berries and post it on Break.com and Youtube.com.
(While you’re at it, wait for your mail to be forwarded.)
Thanks dreamhost! No email since noon today. You guys are doing a bang up job!
If it’s that important, turn off forwarding through gmail for a bit.
it’s not just forwarding that’s effected. mail I send from my dreamhost account is also delayed. I’ve had delays sending mail to yahoo addresses, in fact, and DH told me it was because the servers were so backed up due to the gmail problem.
I had no idea anything was going on until I received some e-mails tonight that had a timestamp from 12 hours ago. I have all of my mail forwarding to Gmail and then back to DH so I can use their spam filter. I started looking through messages from the last few days comparing received time with sent time and several messages are off by 10-15 minutes and some are off by 4-10 hours. So, something weird has been going on for at least the past week.
Edit your forwarding addresses and send them to a non-Gmail address for now until this problem is resolved. Better than nothing…
ok … so granted we might not see some email forwarded from dhost domains for many hours. *fine*
but *at least* you could tell me that my email is not being forwarded.
if you can’t figure out a way to do that automatically … at least put your support team in touch with your status alert team and get me the damn message. hell you can call my phone for all i care.
if i’m forced to go to a website to see that emails sent to my domain are not being forwarded to my gmail, i’m not going to know until i miss some important piece of information. like a meeting notice. that i just got word of. after the meeting was *over*.
damnit do i have to set up a cron job for myself on another domain to test this? you guys are supposed to be IT experts! if you know that your servers are greylisted, tell people for f*’s sake!
Would this be why I can’t get to my webmail hosted by Google apps/Gmail?
Wow. I just got some mail from my dH domain in my gmail account, dated 18 hours ago. Sigh.
could gmail-slowdown have anything to do with their installation of SPF?
My record so far - 28 hours later and one just showed up.
it seems like the size of the message is also important. ive received yesterday text only messages with a delay from 4-6 hours, however a 10 mb message i just got is about 24 hours late.
Two paragraphs, text only, 22 hours late - so I don’t think size is an issue.
Yup. I’m receiving emails now with ‘only’ a 12 hour delay.
Sigh.
Reason enough to leave dreamhost.
I really hope this is resolved soon. I have an online business and getting important emails from customers 24 hours later doesn’t really work….
Hi again
I wrote yesterday about a workaround that changing forwards to real email addresses would help, but as other commenters have mentioned, this was wrong. It worked for me for a short while, but now things are slow again.
(Of course there is the benefit that I can access my mail now on webmail.mydomain.com)
Please fix this ASAP.
I initially started using GMail because Dreamhost couldn’t deal with my mailing lists volume and would routinely get me bounced from lists.
So I just left my personal mail on Dreamhost. Actually it just routes to my GMail account. Except when Dreamhost can’t get its act together.
Looks like it’s time to check out having Google take over all the mail for my domain and just leave the hosting to Dreamhost.
@VOO - GMail has the best system for dealing with a high volume of mail. Collapsing quoted text alone is a huge boon. Starting new threads when someone changes the subject line ought to be a required feature of any mail client which is allowed to email a mailing list (for all those people too damn lazy to create their own compose window)
please please to fix
I changed my email address to a full account and now I have gmail download the mail using POP3. Forwarding to gmail is VERY broken. But POP3 fetching seems to be okay.
I changed my various forwards that go to gmail to go to that one dh account. Then gmail picks it all up there from that one box. The frequency of fetching is dynamic. By having all my mail come from that one box, I expect the fetch frequency to increase.
When you click “Report Spam” in gmail, it’s likely that gmail detects that the mail was forwarded via DH. And since all your mail is forwarded by DH, all your spam is too. Gmail is great at detecting spam, but here we are getting our real mail greylisted. POP3 fetching is a decent workaround.
While we are well warned that these comments aren’t read by DH, we ARE told the main articles are updated regularly. The DH “Status” website is a great idea but someone has to keep it up. And they don’t.
DH is pretty cool… when it works.
For the time being, I have stopped forwarding my mail to Gmail. I am getting mail now as soon as it it send, so hopefully I will not miss any more messages. I just got one from 24 hours ago. It is strange because this message was sent before other messages that I got last night and it is from the same person. Why would messages be delivered out of sending order? It would seem it the queue is just backed up that messages would at least go out in the order in which they were sent.
It seems to be something else….
I forward my catchall to gmail because I get *excellent* spam filtering. (We’re talking orders of magnitude higher than what I’ve ever dealt with).
I haven’t gotten any email all morning, so I thought I’d see if everything was working. I sent 4 e-mails, 2 from my dream host account and 2 from my work account. I sent 1 to a random address (which is caught by the catchall) and one to my user (which is directly forwarded to gmail).
The e-mails I sent from work haven’t come through (after 30 minutes). The e-mails I sent from dream host have.
So there seems not to be a problem if it goes Dreamhost-> Gmail -> Dreamost. There is a problem if it goes Work -> Dreamhost -> Gmail -> Dreamhost.
Dreamhost, please fix this. People here are losing real dollars due to not receiving their emails properly. I had a handful of messages that came in today with a timestamp of 24 hours ago. A full day delay to simply forward a message??? This is getting a bit out of hand. Do you need additional servers? New hardware? Why are even the yahoo forwarded messages so backed up?
Is there any way to look at the emails while they are in the queue?
It would seem it the queue is just backed up that messages would at least go out in the order in which they were sent.
Ordinarily you’d be correct. However, mail servers often will send older messages less often, so they’re not clogging up the queue for the newer messages to go through quickly, in the event there’s a problem connecting to a specific mail server/relay. I’m not sure what the exact formula is for Postfix (it’s in the config files somewhere I just don’t want to look for it), but for every failed send, the mail server will wait x amount of time longer before sending the message again than it did the time previous, to give the receiving server a chance to come back up. This waiting is limited only by how long the individual instalations are configured to continue to try to send the backed up emails. That’s also why you’re seeing emails as far back as 24 hours. Also, though I don’t know if DH has this feature enabled, Postfix can send a notification email back to the original sender, notifying them that their email hasn’t yet been delivered but will continue to be held with attempts being made until y, where y is the hold time limit specified by DH. Not that it’s an excuse for the slowness, just providing what I hope is an explanation that makes sense.
@ Alek.
Something I just enabled was I converted a forward only into a store. It’ll move e-mail messages out of the inbox every 30 days AND it forwards to gmail.
It’s not a prefect fix, but if ever the DH->Gmail link goes down (like now) I can at least still login to the storage e-mail and get the messages as they’re received by DH. Set a 1024 MB limit on it and have it delete old messages. It’ll at least keep the last 1GB of messages.
This appears to still be happening…any updates? Or any word on a way to view messages in the queue for forward-only addresses?
Come on Dreamhost. What’s going on here? My email is getting delivered LATE! Where is the holdup occurring?
Frustrating…
Waiting…
:/
Please Please Please fix this.
The workaround by Rich G seems to be pretty good: change forwarding account to full account, then setup Google to fetch the mail with pop3.
Thanks Rich for the tip. I didn’t think of it myself cause when I started using GMail it did not have this option, I didn’t know it had been added.
Now, if I could only get back all the mail that’s been queued up somewhere during yesterday…
I concur with DS - it’s a fairly mundane work around, but it remedies the problem until DH fixes it.
I’ll just stay logged in to squirrel mail until this gets resolved with forwarding only turned off.
Are there any alternative ways to get at the email thats sitting in the queue behind you fwd’ing address? I’d love to be able to go in some backdoor and see the email that isn’t getting to our gmail accts. Myself and my business partners have been sitting on our hands all day because of this. Very uncool.
Hi there, we are just now receiving email that is up to 18 hours old!! Problem is it seems to be random, some emails come in in 3 or 4 hours, but some are taking way longer. Nothing is coming in in a timely manner. This is jeopardizing our business! Please upgrade this to something besides a low severity problem. For us, this is a disaster!!!!
@PZ:
Nope. Unless you have it set to store. I would suggest changing over your account ASAP. So far this afternoon I’ve gotten 20 e-mails that haven’t shown up in my Gmail account but DreamHost has received.
-
I think the problem is bigger than they have let on to believe and I think that gmail forwarding is just part of it.
I think e-mails originating from inside DH must have 1st priority to being forwarded. I’ve sent myself 3-4 e-mails from my own account. They came trough to google ASAP. 0 Delay. I sent myself another few e-mails from an external address (my work address). Those are still stuffed in the queue. A few of them haven’t even shown up in my store account.
Does the greylisting have anything to do with the couple of spam messages my GMail account got this week from what looks to be a Dreamhost server? I’m guessing so…
Messages sent this morning still aren’t going through.
I agree with Pattie. This is hardly low severity. If we had some idea what was in the queue it would be fine. However, god knows what we’ve missed today, and when it does come through we are going to have some explaining to do to our clients for the delay. I’m sure upgrading the status will make no difference in how quickly it is resolved, but for piece of mind it sure would be nice.
Dreamhost: Please manage your customers expectations! We have no idea whether what steps you are taking, or when we can expect to have email back. If its tonight, I can wait. If its Monday or later, I need you to tell me what to do to work around the problem. This is causing major damage for a number of time sensitive communications! Can you please post a suggested workaround, with easy to understand steps?
Please Dreamhost, help us help you not piss off your customers! Just communicate with us and let us know what is happening, the mystery is just making us furious and frustrated.
@blake:
Comments posted here may not be viewed by DreamHost staff at all. This is not a way to contact DreamHost.
I just opened a ticket asking when it’d be solved. Maybe if a few more people did…
Just as an FYI, this is also affecting mail sent from the web servers, and not just to gmail.
I put in a ticket this morning, but basically if I use the local MTA on my machine (Bourbon), email will take hours to reach its destination. If I use the remote MTA (mail.domainname.com) I would normally use from my desktop at home, it isn’t delayed.
This has been happening for 3 days now.
- Roach
FWIW, I am under the impression Gmail’s TOS preclude using the free account for commercial purposes. Everyone does it, but I’m just saying.
I am pretty sure the TOS here allows commercial use
I’m sorry for the problems you’re having with this. Gmail has
greylisted some of our servers that normally send out mail to them. As a
result, we had to move all messages outbound to Gmail to another server
that isn’t being blocked. Because of this, that servers mail queue is
still backlogged and is pumping out mail as quickly as it can. It is
still processing mail, so it’s just being delayed and not lost. We’re in
contact with Gmails support to try and resolve this issue and hope to
have it back to normal shortly. We’re sorry for the inconvenience this
causes you.
Thanks!
Dan
The priority of this should be higher than low. All my emails are taking forever to arrive!
I also have have had problems sending email through DH to yahoo as well (through gmail), and of course my fwds to gmail.
DH’s rep is taking a beating!
Email should always be of highest priority
I have gmail service with my own domain which is hosted on Dreamhost. And I found that people with Hotmail email addresses can’t send me an email. They always get Postmaster Error. Does it have anything to do with this?
in the meantime you can use http://mail.yourdomain.com and check your email there. it’s a pain, and full of spam (thanks to gmail for filtering).
@Martin
That is ONLY if you have store turned on. Which is what my hint was above. If you have forward only, then all the e-mail is stuck in the buffer.
Still having issues 11/29 3:04 PST.
forwarding to gmail is not working, emailing directly to gmail is.
DH please set this priority to high.
I am getting emails directed to my gmail just fine. It’s only the one’s being forwarded from DH. For those of you who depend on your email for financial reasons you may want to send an email to all your clients letting them know what is going on and ask them to contact you via gmail, phone or any other means.
I have a collection of sites and email addresses, but they all forward to one of two mail Dreamhost accounts - say A@Dreamhost and B@Dreamhost.
A@Dreamhost forwards mail to gmail. That stuff is backed up by about 12+ hours.
B@Dreamhost is a fully hosted account and forwards nothing. However, I have gmail set to hit it with POP3 and *pull* the messages into gmail. No delays there.
So, I just set A@dreamhost to be the same configuration but it is too soon to know if it is working.
Sharing in case it might work for others too…
If the problem is now solved as you mention above, and it is a matter of the server pushing out the backed up mail queue, is there anyway you could provide an ETA on when things will be back to normal. In short, I need to know if this is going to be going on for another day or not. Thanks.
The problem seems to have gotten worse. I was not affected by it until today; now I’m not receiving any email that’s been forwarded to gmail. It just goes into a black hole. I presume (hope!) it will arrive eventually. I sent in a support ticket.
Dreamhost’s combination of capacity, features and pricing is phenomenal. It’s that deal that brought me to DH years ago and which keeps me with DH and it’s why I’ve brought many others to DH, either within my account, or in accounts of their own.
I have experienced two primary downsides to doing business with DH however: 1. the unreliability of its mail service - it seems like one of its mail servers or another is blacklisted at any given time, and 2. the absence of an effective spam filter.
About a year ago I started sending mail to Gmail, Google’s spam filter being second to none. That’s been pretty smooth until now. I am one of thousands of DH customers who clutter up the internet airways with unnecessary traffic, because DH can’t be bothered to implement a simple effective spam filter.
Whenever mail problems occur, I end up having to explain, defend, and feel badly about the situation. It has a serious business impact for me and for the others whom I have brought to DH.
DH is a little like Colombia or Afghanistan. A lot of peasants like me live here trying to get through each day. Taxes are low. But the country is run by guys who don’t give a $#!+ what happens, as long as the dough keeps rolling in. The buck may stop at DH, but the spam sure doesn’t. So, we live in a country that has no police, no rules, no capacity to clean up the streets. If you don’t like it, move to Canada. But the taxes will be a lot higher.
It’s not like DH doesn’t have the financial wherewithal to buy or develop a spam filter - one which is easy to use and which works effectively. It’s not like DH couldn’t reduce the amount of spam leaving its servers within weeks if it wanted to. That would cut down on the blacklisting and the gmail traffic almost immediately.
Does anyone know of another web hosting service that matches DH for capacity, features and price, without the mail headaches?
Is there an organized DH user group?
I guess I’ll also volunteer the observation that the uncivil and irrelevant comments that seem to predominate postings here, undermine any value the feature might have to give a credible message to DH or to enable a serious forum for discussion about issues.
How is this a medium priority?
It’s not like DH couldn’t reduce the amount of spam leaving its servers within weeks if it wanted to. That would cut down on the blacklisting and the gmail traffic almost immediately.
This is true, to a point. However, it should be pointed out that since it’s only effecting forwarding addresses from DH, the issue isn’t people *sending* spam from DH’s servers to gmail. The issue is spam being sent *to* DH hosted domains, and being handled by their incoming mail servers. The incoming mail servers do have spam filtering in place, but if something slips by that and gets forwarded *from* the incoming mail servers on to gmail, there is the possibility it may get flagged by their spam system. It may be that DH’s incoming spam filtering is too lax (call it a disadvantage of user configureable spam settings per mailbox), at which point forwarders being moved to their own server is a *good* thing, as now DH has an opportunity to tighten that one up good, since all that’ll serve to be is a relay to another mail host.
For the record, this has happened before, the grey/blacklisting issues (Earthlink/Comcast, anyone?), so DH knows where the problem is. They… just haven’t completely fixed it yet.
UGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Getting email 24 hours after it has been sent is getting INCREDIBLY annoying and frustrating!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I know some people may have already mentioned this but I went in to my Dreamhost account and removed the forwarding to gmail. I am able to see all my emails from the past day under the webmail.
I have changed all my settings so my email accounts, instead of forwarding, are now hosted and I have Gmail picking up my mail through POP3. But, I have a question:
Since I changed the “forwarding” option, will the email that is currently lost in the buffer still be delivered to my Gmail? Or will it be lost?
dear peoples,
you do not need to choose whether to forward or use webmail. if the online interface doesn’t allow both, you can do so manually. just put the following lines in a file called .procmailrc in your home directory:
DEFAULT=$HOME/Maildir/
MAILDIR=$HOME/Maildir
PMDIR=$HOME/.procmail
LOGFILE=$PMDIR/log
VERBOSE=off
SHELL=/bin/sh
:0 c
* !^TO_you@yourdomain.com
! yourgmailusername@gmail.com
and then also this line in a file called .forward.postfix:
“|/usr/bin/procmail -t”
procmail can also be used for filtering/sorting email. see this tutorial for configuring procmail on dreamhost accounts:
http://wiki.dreamhost.com/index.php/KB_/_Email#Can_I_use_procmail_to_filter_my_mail.3F
however … note that this method of forwarding doesn’t alleviate any of the forwarding issues this thread is about. (which is why i am actually reading this)
“Mail to Gmail forwards are being delayed, but they are going through.”
This is interesting, because while some of my messages are being forwarded, MANY are not. Does this just mean that some messages are being delayed more than others? Some emails are now over 40 hours non-delivered.
TRISH: The mail that has already been forwarded is not going to be seen by your gMail account as it connects to Dreamhost using POP3. That mail is already past that point in the system. So, unfortunately it doesn’t solve the immediate problem, but should eliminate it from happening again.
Sorry.
sjt
Could you please please escalate the severity of this issue to HIGH! Please! Most of my domain is forwarded to several GMail accounts and I am already being called why I don’t respond to my email messages!
I took off my fwding and emails are coming through fine now but I know there are ones missing - this is because I have had PM’s on Facebook that I would always get notification for. So I’m wondering how many other emails are ‘lost’ and have they been lost forever or are they going to come through?
Ok seems I’ve just answered my own question. Some just came through to both - so if they are in the Gmail queue it seems they will eventually come through and then also to your ‘new’ setup. This is so confusing!
I’ve come up with another temporary solution - if you have a spare and/or unused domain name with a registrar that allows free email forwarding (I’m using fasthosts/UKreg) you can do the following:
1) Use the free mail forwarding service to forward anythingyoulike@yourunuseddomain.com to your gmail address.
2) Set up your ‘dream-hosted’ domain email address to forward to anythingyoulike@yourunuseddomain.com
This can take 24 hours to start working because it requires changes to DNS settings in some cases.
Note: I suggest you have your ‘dream-hosted’ domain email address forward to both your gmail address AND your new anythingyoulike@yourunuseddomain.com so that this fix exists in tandem, reducing the chances of emails going missing and it means that when the problem is resolved you’ll be getting emails twice delivered at around the same time.
I’m no expert on this matter, so please anyone let me know if there is a flaw in this solution that I have overlooked.
yipee! I just got an email sent at noon on 11/28!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 40 hours time delay?!?!?!?!
When can we expect this to be functioning normally? We need a guestimate!!!!! This is NO WAY to operate.
I nearly failed a SUBJECT of my Masters as my Lecturer didn’t get a response.
She didn’t get a response because I didn’t get her email. Luckily I was chasing her up re. something else so she was able to question me about why I hadn’t responded.
Like SERIOUSLY DH this is SERIOUS!
The work around of having gmail collect the mail via POP3 instead of just using a forward sounds like a decent solution for now.
Still haven’t gotten more than 4-5 e-mails through.
Ah damn… this is still going on.
Hopefully it is resolved after the spacey cluster move so I can go full speed ahead with development again.
What iamkeir said is a good idea, provided you have another domain not on DreamHosts system though.
I also agree, that this should be a higher priority. Email is very important. But, i suppose it just just Dreamhost waiting on GMail…
30th Nov i began to get thi situation too… !!!!
The priority of this should be elevated. This is not MEDIUM. Many customers forward to Gamil. This is seriously affecting my communications.
this is simply a lesson learned for us all. whatever damage done is the penalty for trying to utilize a free and clearly stated ‘BETA’ service (which gmail has been for roughly 3 years while gradually taking over the planet) to supplement in the name of spam filtering a friendly but discounted host that isn’t granting free software but will at least answer my messages quickly and succinctly. DH staff actually led me to this forum where they are getting soundly bashed by lots of stressed-out folks.
indeed, myself and my boss here have used our email fwd to gmail feature for months…being more of the i-t guy here, it nagged at the back of my head that something about this system could go awry. sure enough….
so what we’ll do is setup our pop3s & learn. we’ll take responsibility for setting our stuff up this way rather than shaking tiny fists @ the heavens and bitching about things we can’t undo. Meanwhile, my dialog with DH team has given me a good impression they’re doing what they can. Has anyone here actually had any real correspondence with gmail support on this? I’d like to hear how that went.
Another vote to elevate this to HIGH. I’m getting really anxious about not getting timely emails. Comeon DH - say something!!!!!
It’s been about 3 days now - surely this is a HIGH priority situation. And now I’m getting bounced emails when I send to some of these addresses.
I agree, this needs to be elevated to HIGH and resolved very quickly (before the weekend). I know I have E-mail from at least two days ago that hasn’t been delivered yet. :/
This is pretty bad. I’m getting emails well over 24 hours old and still waiting on a few important items. I agree, the longer this goes on the higher the priority should be.
Still not getting my emails properly……I also don’t understand the workaround thing. I thought I had mine already set up to do that but it still isn’t working for me.
Not only should this priority be upgraded to HIGH, but updates from DH should be coming in much more frequently than they are.
When do they expect this will be resolved, if at all?
How full is the outgoing mail queue?
Is the size of the queue decreasing?
Is more mail coming in faster than it’s going out? Do they expect this to get worse before it gets better?
I promise the appropriate people are working as hard as one possibly can work on an issue that hinges on waiting for a response from a 3rd party.
@BJ and Jeff S…the severity level is not set to HIGH for several reasons. #1…the rating is relative, and in the overall scheme of things this issue is SMALL. This does NOT mean it’s not being worked on…it’s just means a very small fraction of customers are being affected. So, while in your own sphere of reference, it’s affecting 1/1 people, and thus 100% of the People Who Matter, for us, it’s affecting, say, 1/1000 people (to pull a number out of thin air…seriously, I have no statistics or anything…but it’s relatively small), and thus, is a “LOW” severity issue. The other reason we don’t mark such “small” issues as HIGH is that the designation would lose all meaning…we like to save the drama for when there’s at least a small apocalypse. (OMG People are DYING!)
Also, of some comfort to everyone, the admins don’t consult the status blog when they get here in the morning to decide what needs to be worked on…they get a problem, and they work till it’s fixed…that’s pretty much the workflow around here. Heck, the tech support people really don’t even read this blog much - except me…because it’s entertaining (I’m talkin’ at YOU, VOO)…this is here for *your* benefit…and while posting comments may be cathartic, if you’re having a real problem, contact support through the panel (unless your issue is definitely being addressed by the status post…then post away, if it helps.)
@VOO
>Please give us another Dreamhost outage soon
My son, you have been faithful, and your cry has been heard: http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2007/11/16/spacey-cluster-move/ …please note, the dreamhoststatus blog is not an official channel through which to contact The Almighty. If you have an issue, please consult with your local spiritual leader.
Just to clarify JeffH - high means the hosting service is experiencing something that is detrimental to the services they offer (overall). Typically, issues have required turn around time based on severity, and the severity is based on on the issue impacts operations. When I used to work in support - high meant it HAD to be fixed in one hour. While some of you think that should be the case, the resource allocation to give that type of turn around needs to be justified by the problem, which obviously is not the case here.
Gmail forwarding not working - Medium at most, I personally think it’s a low priority issue. The work arounds work for the time being (resorting to pop3/SMTP, or using DH’s free webmail service), but it will be fixed soon.
Those of you who are not happy, realize that you will never find a zero problem host. Even if you pay a lot more for access to your own server, you’ll still have problems relating to db, connectivity, hardware and a whole bunch more. That and you won’t have a blog to post and whine on.
@JeffH: I don’t know if the severity should be changed, but it does seem logical that the longer this goes on, the more of a problem it is. I would also suggest (respectfully request?) to you that get some more stats on how many are actually affected here. I’m one customer, but I know of several email domains that are affected, since I have more than one, and each has several users. Perhaps you could quantify as a percentage of email messages rather than users?
I’ve been sitting by - watching - and not submitting a trouble ticket, but that doesn’t mean it’s no issue for me!
Can you comment on a suggestion I saw yesterday that said if you deliver to a DH box and forward a copy, there is no delay in that case?
“Those of you who are not happy, realize that you will never find a zero problem host. Even if you pay a lot more for access to your own server, you’ll still have problems relating to db, connectivity, hardware and a whole bunch more. That and you won’t have a blog to post and whine on.”
I love when people pull this out of their crap bag. Saying “no host is perfect” is meaningless drivel. I’ve been on dreamhost since 2001 because at the time they put out a quality product for a good price. Those days are gone. There are two kind of customers that are useless. Those that wine all the time about everything, and those that accept everything without putting any blame on the host. With an attitude like yours why would they consider this high priority at all?
I have another domain on pair and I have never had as many problems as I’ve had at dreamhost for a year now. Please, if you’re happy being screwed, or if you don’t see how others are upset about this, go to another thread.
@Frank
It’s not that if you deliver a copy there isn’t a delay. It’s that you’ll still have access to it through some means. If you’re purely forwarding that means everything gets stuffed into the queue and waits on gmail. If you store a copy it still gets stuffed into the queue but you can still fall back on webmail.yourhost.com@DH.
Second, to what most people have said. This isn’t a DH issue as much as it is a Gmail issue. GMail gray listed Dreamhost, not vice versa.
(Hypothetically speaking if I was divorced and had kids).
Say I want to send my kids a package. But for some reason, I send it on to my parents who then forward the mail to my kids. Right now my ex wife is stepping in seeing that it’s being forwarded by my parents and refusing delivery.
Whose fault is it that my kids aren’t getting their mail. My parents or my ex-wife?
Taking this horrible analogy even further. By changing your settings to Store then Forward or Store and Retrieve, it’s like my parents making a copy of every letter that comes through.
With store then forward. Even if it gets bounced by my ex-wife, my kids can still go over to my parents and get the letter (Ala webmail.yourdomain.com) and there’s still a copy stuck in the postal system.
With store then Retrieve via Gmail, it’s my kids explicitly going over to my parents and picking up all the mail for themselves.
While it’s an issue I’d bring up with my parents (Dream Host) for not getting my mail forwarded. It’s ultimately my ex wife who decided to refuse all mail. And while my Parents and Ex-wife are having discussions (Just like DH is with Gmail) there’s still a ton of mail piling up.
@DS: So, let’s talk about why GMail “greylisted” (a new term to me…will have to look it up) DH. In the past, when I’ve had blacklisting issues (other hosting providers), it has been because of activity being allowed on the mail host in question, or, in rare cases, on the entire subnet it resides in.
What’s going on on DH’s end that GMail doesn’t like, and what’s being done to stop it so GMail will remove the roadblock? I find it hard to believe that GMail would take punitive action like this - automatic OR manual - without a legitimate reason. Let’s fix the reason!
Another solution that was hinted at earlier (for those of us who use gmail as our main email account/interface and forward from Dreamhost) was using Google Apps free service (http://www.google.com/a/) where you can set up Google Mail to manage your email, independent of your hosting.
Do note, however, if you want to host your domain on DH and manage your email with Google Apps, you’ll need to change a CNAME setting but Google guides you through this process. Of course, if your domain goes down, you email will too (this is the current case anyway) but it prevents this gmail-email bottleneck.
HTH
@Frank
The activity is going on is the exact same thing that everyone is complaining about… people are forwarding their e-mail to gmail.
That means that *dreamhost* shows up as the last person to send on a piece of mail.
Using the analogy above. Say the reason my ex-wife stopped accepting forwards from my parents is because they also happen to forward her every piece of junk mail that they get. After a while she’s going to go “Well gee, all this spam is being forwarded on by one source. I don’t like spam so I’m going to automatically bounce everything forwarded on from it.”
The FIX for this is STOP FORWARDING YOUR E-MAIL TO GMAIL. Or at least stop forwarding your addresses that get a majority of spam.
This is, as I understand it why this keeps happening. People forward their catchalls or their ‘webmaster@domain’ (which gets a ton of spam) or their registration e-mail account. You take a few thousand DH accounts. Forward on one account that gets 100 pieces of spam a day. You’re now talking 100,000 pieces of spam that gmail gets from (what appears to be) DH. Maybe it’s automatic and kicks off at 1M pieces of spam.
And by Gray list, some e-mails were getting through, just not all so not a blacklist So I don’t think it was a total black list. Gmail just said “10,000 pieces of spam a day. You need some cooloff time. No more than 1,000 pieces of mail a day will be accepted by you”
Apparently no cheap shared hosting can handle e-mail well. At least Dreamhost lets me use SSL to check my messages. I’ve dropped 2 other web hosts- Mavweb and Siteground, because they repeatedly ate my e-mail. It sucks. THAT’S why I forward everything to GMail- GMail works, and it filters spam well. Siteground actually does pretty well with spam now if you turn on SpamAssassin- I really think Dreamhost should be using SpamAssassin for mail filtering, rather than their in-house solution that warns very strongly that you will probably lose some mail that isn’t spam.
Maybe I should start a company that does nothing but host e-mail cheaply. I suppose that would be GMail for Domains, though.
You can blame this on GMail, but I’m sure there was a good reason for blocking the mail server.
@DS - I wish you’d leave your ex-wife out of this - I had nothing to do with that
I think Google should be more sophisticated than you are describing. Not that they care what I think…
Even so: it would be nice to hear from DH how much of what we are speculating is actually going on. It’s one thing to say DH has been greylisted, but the level of information we’re getting is less than stellar. For example - moving all the traffic to a different box seems to me like a recipe for another IP address going on the greylist…it doesn’t solve the problem at all.
I’d appreciate hearing from DH with more technical details, and quicker disclosure.
And, I’m not going to stop the forwarding. It’s a practical solution to a real-world problem, and I don’t use catch-alls anyway. I’ll switch to another hosting provider if need be - and request a full refund from DH. If they can’t deliver on the product…I shouldn’t be asked to pay for it.
Can we get an update!?
(AMEN!)
@Frank
“And, I’m not going to stop the forwarding. It’s a practical solution to a real-world problem, and I don’t use catch-alls anyway. I’ll switch to another hosting provider if need be - and request a full refund from DH. If they can’t deliver on the product…I shouldn’t be asked to pay for it.”
From what I’ve read and put together they’ve talked to Google. The gray list sounds like it was automatic. As soon as DH realized there was a problem, they opened communications. I’d imagine right now they said “Hey google, ALL of our traffic is going to be coming from this IP address and nothing other. Let it through.” Personally this sounds like a better solution. Assuming you can’t root it google can now add that IP to their whitelist/unconditional let it through and stuff will get forwarded with out a problem (once the queue empties).
And by refusing to stop forwarding, you’re contributing to the problem. Dream host’s “problem” is that it has too many people doing this. If a smaller host has no problems with gmail it’s probably because they don’t have enough people forwarding to trip the threshold. While I think it’s dreamhost job to open the dialog, It’s google’s decision. If tomorrow someone at gmail said. Screw this and blocked ALL e-mail from dreamhost it’d still be gmail’s fault.
I would follow lowtech’s solution (and actually that’s what I’m doing right now). Is migrating mail and some other services to Google Apps. I thought it was All or None, I didn’t know that you could mix and match hosting and mail hosting.
@Jamison
“Can we get an update!?”
Comments posted here may not be viewed by DreamHost staff at all. This is not a way to contact DreamHost.
-
That said. For what I pay/month. I’m extremely happy with what I got. I have an offsite archive of every photo I’ve ever taken. Some awesome hosting tools and an ssh account.
“Dream host’s “problem” is that it has too many people doing this.”
And why do you think that is?
Why have so many of us given up on using our email here and started forwarding it all to gmail?
Could it be because Dreamhost’s spam filter is crap?
“For what I pay/month. I’m extremely happy with what I got. I have an offsite archive of every photo I’ve ever taken. Some awesome hosting tools and an ssh account.”
And you get a webhost that oversells beyond their ability. That’s why you’re wasting time in the emergency status blog - which, by the way, you certainly are.
“That’s why you’re wasting time in the emergency status blog - which, by the way, you certainly are.”
Or My Total Fark subscription ended yesterday AND it’s a down week at work. I gotta talk somewhere.
“Could it be because Dreamhost’s spam filter is crap?”
Admittedly, there isn’t a spam filter that can touch gmail’s. There was an article on slashdot about it yesterday.
Anyway. I just set up google apps. Rather than forwarding your e-mail, I would suggest you do this instead. No more forwarding. Google takes over your MX. IMAP works just as it did before. Looks completely transparent from my end.
Plus I can create user e-mails and not have to create new dreamhost mail users. They can still use gmail (which does beat the heck out of squirrel mail).
Friday, November 30, 2007 at 12:09 PM, Colorado Time
Add me to the list of no email for the past 24 hours. About 10% gets through, but everything else isn’t.
Add me also to the list of those who run businesses on DreamHost and aren’t getting any orders.
Thanks to whomever suggested using Squirrel mail. I’d forgotten about that. For those that don’t know, you go to:
http://webmail.YOURDOMAIN.com/scr/webmail.php
Dreamhost: make this TOP PRIORITY, please.
I would pay DOUBLE my Dreamhost rates for a Pro version that was more stout that what we’re getting.
I don’t receive mail… so please resolve it!
Add me as well (account username: studiodanger). No mail for the last several days except a few here and there.
This is a huge deal. Is there some way we can help pay for you guys to bring a consultant in?
I haven’t received a single email since Wednesday afternoon.
I didn’t even noticed this… but yes… the mails are not coming in. Not even with an alternative address set in the forward. Dunno… but please make this a high priority (red) instead of the current yellow… since most of our sites are not just promo sites and depend on emails sent.
+1. dh spam filter sucks. so a reasonable workaround is achieved but this can’t keep going on. BUSINESS EMAIL DOWN is a major problem. should we users just bite the bullet and setup gmail for domains? will you credit my account if i stop using you for mail? wah wah wah. ANY UPDATES ADMINS?
Guys - THIS IS A BLOG TO DISCUSS. The tech guys, support people, admins etc. DO NOT FORMALLY read this.
Submit a ticket if you want. Otherwise use the work around and be happy.
@MH I know they don’t *formally* read it and have opened a trouble ticket as have many other users most likely. The point is that if they update the original post early and often with more info they won’t have to answer 100’s (?) of support request from people just looking to know if and when this will be resolved or if they should just take there business, or at least there mail or forwards elsewhere. There is no workaround for a business with lots of users. Some mail users may not have their passwords to use squirrelmail, might have access to the internet, nor do I have trainers/techs that can travel between 20 sites to change settings and or retrain.
INFO PLEASE.
@MH (and others): The work around does not seem to work. I activated the webmailaccount and also set an alternate emailaddress as a forward, making them both work… but I can only use the webmail account for outgoing messages. When I mail myself with other personal accounts, those mails are not shown in the inbox of the webmail, which IS my inbox of the domains I’m hosting. So… don’t go yelling that it should be working and this is not read… cause apparently it is not.
I do however tend to sent a support ticket but its to be expected to take slow response time since I’m not the only one effected with this problem. I still don’t understand the usage of this dreamhoststatus thing, if they do not regularly keep us up to date with the real status… and sure, reading this is somewhat a dayjob… but come on… webmail set as a medium priority??!
I seeing this problem with Yahoo getting more and more delayed (some seemingly lost) for the past week. Last 2 days, this problem is hitting my forwarded Yahoo & Gmail destinations.
@DS
How do you set email to “store”? I’ve changed the address from Forward-Only (forwarding to gmail), am now in “Fully-Hosted Email”, am forwarding to a DH hosted email address. That part is working - email is forwarding to another DH address. But I cannot see any messages using webmail. Help, please, and thanks.
“And by refusing to stop forwarding, you’re contributing to the problem.”
So the reason my email isn’t forwarding is because I’m forwarding my email? It all makes sense now!
Seriously though, I’ve got too many problems running my business in the middle of the holiday season to have to worry about whether or not my customers and business partners are able to contact me. The whos or whys do not concern me. Get this thing fixed.
I’m having the same problem as well - emails are delayed at the moment anywhere from 5 mnutes (fine with me) to 14 hours (hmmm… not so good!). If this is fixed quickly then ok, no problem, things happen.
However if it continues it will start to hurt me a lot.
@ Terminator
Using squirrel mail you’ve having the problem? It’s working for me no problem (tested to receive emails from corporate email, gmail, yahoo, etc to DH hosted webmail).
Did you check the settings at the top posters who give the instructions on the work around?
@Arthur
You already did it. I use ’store’ and “Fully-Hosted Email” interchangeably. All new e-mails you should be able to see in webmail. However everything that’s in the queue is stuck in the queue
@Andre.
So the reason your e-mail isn’t forwarding is because everyone is forwarding their spam (along with valid e-mail) and google blacklisted the DH servers because of this. If no one forwarded their spam, this wouldn’t be a problem.
It seems to me that every single person here is forwarding all their mail to gmail. Even business and critical e-mails. If you are just going to use gmail anyway, why not sign up for Google Apps and have Google host your mail?
The point of paying someone for a dedicated e-mail host is so that you have your mail hosted by them so that you can access it with a real client. (This proliferation of webmail annoys me personally. It shouldn’t be a *main* client, but rather used when on the road. Install Thunderbird or something.) If you’re just going to forward ALL your mail to a webmail based client. Again, why not use google apps and have them host your mail. Or even… just give out your gmail address.
While I’m in the same boat because I was using google for my spam filtering, I’m not blaming Dreamhost as much as I am Gmail and I’m just waiting for the queue to be flushed. It’s my own fault for setting up a single point of failure (The DH-Gmail Link) and that’s now been corrected.
@DS:
Unfortunately one reason I can think of that would cause so many people set up forwarding is that email has been so unreliable here at DH for so long … it was necessary.
I wouldn’t dream (no pun intended) of using DH for any business or critical email for the same reason.
- Roach
Oddly enough, last week I turned my website over to dreamhost, with the same content, and my daily spam went from 40+ to 250-300. I am not saying A caused B but it is ironic. I didn’t set up a catch all either and I do forward to gmail. Maybe I broke the camel back for gmail.
And 3 spam just came through but no real mail did. Funny
So, is there any ETA on when the queue will be fully flushed? I have been getting emails here and there today(nothing newer than 5pm yesterday).
However, I’m also finding that people emailed me earlier than 5pm, and those emails are no where to be found. Is it safe to assume the queue may be flushing non sequentially?
This is a huge problem for me. My emails aren’t being forwarded to Gmail until two days after they are sent to me.
FWIW _ my experience and happy for advice from others on what to do.
I was forwarding my DH domain email (as well as keeping it in the full account - or so i thought) to Gmail and noticed the slow downs a couple days ago - checking here i found out that the original issue began Nov 17.
Today it became apparent that I was missing some important (to me) emails because of the bog so i removed the Gmail forwarding and visited my Webmail only to find that messages i was told were sent to me were not there either. After having many people send me test emails to my DH hosted domain email it became clear that they are not showing up either in WEbmail, IMAP or POP - so they go nowhere. Tests sent to my Gmail came through fine. So this is more than a gray listing - its a dream host problem. I ahve submitted a support ticket and am waiting. This is the deal breaker for me - i need more reliable hosting for email and as i know and have been told will have to pay more - so be it - this sucks.
Question: should i set my account back to also forward to Gmail because it seems that at least some emails sent to my DH account were actually getting delivered there - as opposed to none coming in to DH only? Anyone else have experience with this?
TIA
This is ludicrous. I had a major work screw-up today because I didn’t realize the e-mail I received today was from 24 hours ago. What on God’s green earth is wrong with your service?
Why don’t I sign up for Google Apps? Come on.
The other thing is that this is like the nuclear leak in Japan the other day…you guys should have sent out a warning to users the minute you knew our Gmail wasn’t forwarding. Instead we were kept in the dark gradually figuring out that “today”’s e-mail was from days ago.
This reminds me of the Fidonet days, I love it, not getting email for along periods of time.
this is ridiculous. absolutely unacceptable.
@Ink Syndicate:
If all you’re doing is forwarding to gmail, why not sign up for google apps?
And how would you have suggested they sent out that message, via e-mail?
Fix it.
I have some mails over 6 hours old that are stuck in limbo land. Are you guys working on this?
Days and days of some mail in limbo….at least pulling via pop3 is working.
@DS:
I have some 25 email addresses forwarding for my domain and only a few of those go to gmail. If I set up Google Apps I would have to give each of them an account, log in to each account, one by one, and set a forward for each of them. This is not acceptable.
@Mike:
I had the same experience. When I moved from GoDaddy to DH my daily spam count skyrocketed.
Now I can’t even log into my webmail account to check the emails that never make it Gmail. This is a serious inconvenience for my business.
Are the emails backing up or will they be lost forever? Once the DH blacklist is removed, if it is removed, will all of the emails be delivered?
DS: “While I’m in the same boat because I was using google for my spam filtering, I’m not blaming Dreamhost as much as I am Gmail and I’m just waiting for the queue to be flushed. It’s my own fault for setting up a single point of failure (The DH-Gmail Link) and that’s now been corrected.”
You are a companies wet dream. Thank god other aren’t so accepting of horrid service. Thank god others don’t make excuses.
Can you give us an estimate as to when the queue will be cleared?
As per other questions on the thread, please confirm that email is NOT getting lost as a result.
@markg
A company’s wet dream? I suppose you boycotted Ford after they had the tire blowouts due entirely to their tire supplier.
Read up a bit on WHY this happened “We believe the slowdown to be on Google’s end”. And it was, Google Gray listed Dreamhost.
I suppose you wouldn’t blame Comcast for bad torrent speeds when they insert reset packets, it must be entirely the fault of the person you’re downloading from.
Up to now I was quite patient, cause i frequently checked the important accounts via webmail. But now webmail (I us sqirrel mail) is down to. Could someone please comment or update us about this next problem?
Frank: “Can you comment on a suggestion I saw yesterday that said if you deliver to a DH box and forward a copy, there is no delay in that case?”
I believe that was my suggestion and it turns out I was wrong. It worked for some minutes, but then it started having all the same issues as direct forwarding.
The workaround that does work is to have mail stored in the DreamHost mailbox and configuring gmail to fetch it with POP3.
If all you’re doing is forwarding to gmail, why not sign up for google apps?
What preposterous IT-department apologetics. Because I’m already paying Dreamhost for “working e-mail forwarding, allegedly to the mailbox of my choice,” is why.
And how would you have suggested they sent out that message, via e-mail?
Hey, any explanation would have gotten here days ago, plus it would have shown up on PINE when I logged into the shell.
I’m having the same problem with my school email account forwarded (around) an exchange server on an unrelated hosting platform, so this appears to me to be a Gmail-side issue, not just a dreamhost problem.
Still no luck… Why is this taking so long to resolve?
well i have some emails on a 3 day delay now. this is preposterous. im losing substantial chunks of income and credibility for my businesses every day. someone help. i am at wits end
Interesting. This morning I received some email sent to my DH address and forwarded to gmail quickly (at least within an hour or so). But I have some email that has yet to arrive–some of it days old at this point. So I wonder if the problem is solved for new email but the old queue is still *way* behind.
How many more days is this going to take?
@Henrik: Yes, I found the same issues.
To all: I have also found (as Henrik says) that if you set up GMail to retrieve via POP, it is an acceptable solution. I personally set up a label for that situation so I know which ones are arriving via POP and which are still leftovers from the still-unresolved forwarding fiasco.
I just worked out a temporary solution for those that DONT have a spare domain on a different host kicking around.
http://www.4warding.com has free email forwarding functionality.
sign up, have it forward to dreamhost.
Dreamhost >> 4warding.com >> gmail.com
tests are still showing a 30-45 minute delay, but that beats the hell out of 12-48 hours.
So rather than complain, I’m trying to find a solution while the great folks here at DH do their work.
I tried using gmail’s handy “mail fetcher” feature, but it is not working.
This is what I get:
There was a problem connecting to mail..org
Show error details Server returned error: “Protocol error”
Has anyone else been successful with this? If so, what is the trick to make it work?
This kind of shit happens, guys. Since it only affects forwarding to GMail, just check your DH webmail in the meantime, or hop in through POP3/IMAP.
Or configure GMail to connect to your account via POP3 in the Accounts area of the GMail Settings section:
“”"
Get mail from other accounts:
(Download mail using POP3)
“”"
Then you don’t have to forward to GMail first. Google just downloads mail like Outlook.
New email only showing a delay of 2hrs or so.
What are everyone else’s delay times looking like as of this morning?
18 hours
Fix it fix it.
I have mails over 18 hours old now, still haven’t showed up.
I just received my horoscope in my email this is what it said… no kidding:
You’ve got plenty of mail, email and other messages to catch up on — including a few you might not know about yet. Block out all the time you need to make it happen, as it’s more pressing than you realize.
Hey DH, is there any chance you can give us a status update? “You email will trickle in slowly” just isn’t cutting it for some of us. It would be greatly appreciated!
WHY IS THIS “MEDIUM” SEVERITY?????
It’s been going on for over a week and many, many people are affected. Email is a lifeline. I understand fixes take time, but I believe DH should:
1. Communicate updates MUCH more frequently than every few days
2. Elevate severity to the highest possible.
Just received a message at 27 hours (checked the time zones and everything).
Agreed. Given the horrible performance of the webmail system, the forwarding to gmail is key for me. Is there any status update on this? It’s been going on far too long.
since DH spam + junk filters are so horrible, i was forced to utilize gmail’s services….
this forwarding situation is a HUGE annoying problem.
my mail is tricking in on a random basis. some mail makes it after 8-10 hrs, others do not!
PLEASE, PLEASE FIX THIS PROBLEM SOON!!!!
Can someone verify for me that i am not the only one with this issue?
NO email to my main email account is making it to webmail or POP
(anyone know where i can poke around on a server to see if these emails made it to my account by some other means?)
I removed Gmail forwarding yesterday and emails still stuck in the queue on that are trickling in but nothing sent to me since then is showing up.
I submitted a support request (my first ever “people are dying” level request), received a canned “issues with Gmail and also Verizon” blocking us response that hinted that other mail may be backed up as well, but that seemed to be sending via DH rather than receiving.
I replied and reiterated that I had removed the Gmail forwarding and that my main account was not receiving any emails - asking them to please read my original request for details pertaining specifically to my issue.
I found a reply on support history (apparently they sent it to my nonfunctioning DH domain acct) that they had tested what is very obviously a nonactive email address at my domain because i had not specified a specific account - Well I DID in the original support request! which apparently STILL no one has read. Arg.
Anyone else experiencing this? (emails from outside hosts to fully hosted DH account that don’t show up) that can lend me some ammo to go back at customer support with? I would love it if they could even just say “yeah, all mail is backed up, your lost emails aren’t lost and will get to you eventually” if that is the case.
I, too, would appreciate an update even if it’s just to say “no progress yet — we’re still working on it”
This situation is really frustrating.
I have started receiving a few emails, but just 11 non-spam. With little to email since Wednesday, I know this is a small number. Are the others on their way or are they lost forever?
Received this email from Dreamhost support:
Hello,
Sorry about the mail delays you are experiencing. We are unfortunately
dealing with temporary greylisting from both gmail and verizon. Gmail
being the major cause of the problems with delayed email. These delays
are affecting gmail and verizon forwards, as well as sending messages to
non-customers with gmail or verizon addresses. We are also seeing delays
of all mail sending from our hosting machines. A lot of you have noticed
php mail with regards to the hosting machine delays. Unfortunately mail
from our host machines is also causing non-gmail/verizon messages to be
delayed. We are currently creating a separate relay server to handle the
mail that is getting backed up, this however will only cause non-gmail
accounts to go through without any delays. This relay will help with php
mail and other hosting messages that are going out, and hopefully clear
up delays for non-gmail destined addresses.
This is a serious issue and we are doing our best to contact google for
resolution. We do have some google employees who are customers who are
trying to help us resolve this issue. We have experienced this problem in
the past with aol which caused us to disallow all aol.com forward
addresses, hopefully we can avoid this drastic measure with gmail
forwards. This is a volume block unfortunately, so any forward email
address is contributing to the gmail greylisting. If you are using a
gmail forward we would suggest that you remove it and set your address to
go to a normal mailbox until this is resolved. Sorry about the problems
this has caused you. If we could directly fix this issue it would never
have gone on this long or be ongoing. We do also hope that you can use
your accounts to contact google in order to let them know that they are
affecting their clients with this greylisting. Any contact to google,
their gmail team specifically, will greatly help and will be greatly
appreciated.
Note: The verizon block is a temporary block and should be lifted soon,
it is not the same level of greylisting we are receiving from Gmail.
Please take note that if you are forwarding mail to Gmail and you
complain about it as spam, Gmail will flag our servers as the source,
actions like these lead to our servers getting blocked. It is also
suggested that if you want google to handle your mail you can use google
apps, http://www.google.com/a/ , then use the MX editor to have your mail
handled by Gmail directly without using our servers at all.
Thanks!
DreamHost
Wow, that’s scary. It sounds like Dreamhost isn’t very confident that they’ll be able to come to a resolution with Google. This is so completely unacceptable. What a hassle to change hosting companies, but honestly is there much choice given the bleak picture painted by this support email?
And I agree with the comment above - how is this only a Medium severity issue? Brutal.
Folks, use Francis’s suggestion! It works great. I set it up, had a friend e-mail my DH account, and got the e-mail at Gmail almost immediately.
And yeah, this really should be HIGH severity, IMHO. I do wonder if anything will get done over the weekend.
@-WORKAROUND- Francis
“Dreamhost >> 4warding.com >> gmail.com”
That’s a genius plan. That way when gmail denies 4warding or 4warding denies DH, or BOTH at the same time. This is how I have it set up. Let me know if it sounds good:
“Dreamhost -> Hotmail -> Yahoo -> 4warding -> Mail.com -> Gmail.
Why the hell don’t you just hand out your gmail address?
If you want to use your ‘own domain’, setup google apps or set up gmail to do a PULL and not a PUSH.
@ Jason
“What a hassle to change hosting companies, but honestly is there much choice given the bleak picture painted by this support email?”
And what happens when gmail grey lists that host? What happens when gmail greylists everyone that ISN’T gmail? Will you start to ask Gmail questions or continue to blame your host?
@DS
Clearly grey listing from Gmail can happen to many hosting companies but my issues are with Dream Host and the hosting of my email account. As I state in comments above, my fully hosted account is ALSO not receiving any email even 24 hours after removing the gmail forward. That says to me this is not a Gmail issue but a DH one and their response has been ridiculously inept - to the point where I suspect intentional deception. So please take into consideration that this may not all be the customer’s fault and maybe, just maybe DH has some culpability and responsibility here too.
Many times on various DH outages and system failures I have consulted this blog and comments and seen this type of “what a fool you are” to a. rely on DH for anything important, like a business web site or critical email service and b. Not be a techno-whiz in your set up or use of their services - you should have done XYZ instead. I have taken this with a grain of salt each time since, true enough the prices are low and I am only moderately technically knowledgeable or inclined.
But I would love to hear from one of the “get what you pay for ” or “need to be a pro to be on the net” folks just what the bottom line is here - what is the minimum we have a right to expect of this hosting company? Where is the line past which they are actually at fault for providing bad service? 50% up time? 30 day turnaround on support requests? I am not saying that they are that bad now - but exactly what do you feel is the very least we can expect for our money?
Also - when i signed up and to this day - I don’t see anything on DH home page or sign up that states “Hosting for pet projects when they don’t really matter and you know enough to solve your own issues” Which, if that was there everyone would at least have to shut up because they had been warned. Sigh. I am frustrated to the point of baiting the trolls it would seems and i fully expect to get body slammed for daring to say that this is not acceptable but what the hell - it ain’t like i can read my email.
Do I hear
R
E
F
U
N
D
?
?
?
?
Fix it fix it fix it.
I have a very bad feeling that email that hasn’t been delivered by now will never be delivered.
Just an update - I have had email fwding turned off for 36 hours.
One email just came through (as if it had been fwded as well as it arrived in Gmail) 56 hours after it was originally sent.
We’re showing delays of over 4+ days as well. This is the main way I keep in touch on my iPhone and then pop the mail when I’m home. I’m seriously bummed.
Things seem to be back to normal for me — big relief.
I’m noticing several delayed e-mails starting to come through now - are we almost out of the thicket?
Hi, So is it fixed? Im getting current emails now on time but there are a few email from the past few days which I am waiting for. Any more news on this? Thanks
I wish they would update for us. I am still getting older emails but it seems I am back to getting ones to my main domain name on time. Everyone else getting their email too?
I definitely spoke too soon…..still not working properly. ARGH.
Please, change the severity to High.
Forward is very important.
Thanks
Roger
@scout
A couple emails stuck in Gmail queue from 11/28 and 29 came through this AM.
No emails that have been sent since I turned forwarding off on 11/30 have arrived yet at my Webmail or through POP on DH acct.
DH has not replied to my last support request (yest 1pm) where i redirected them to the email account that is notworking (oddly they tested a alt email acct on this domain that never had Gmail forward and it was not affected).
Anyone else have a status update? This blog entry is my best source of info at the moment.
Status as of now (two days later):
- Mail sent through mailform website, in Webmail within seconds, in Gmail Forward within seconds
- Mail sent through outer sources: approx. 15 minute delay.
- All mail sent to me prior are drippling in as we speak, so are in the que of their mailserver solution.
Little update: I even recieved a snailmail letter from one of my affiliated sooner, then their initial email sent out the same day. And thats from the US to The Netherlands in Europe. Ha!
Soo.. things seem to come to normal now.
Still annoying to have to check the webmail and Gmail accounts… and seeing differences
Crazy. on Dec 2 at 11 AM CST I am still receiving mail sent on 11/30.
In 16 years of using email forwarding this is the only time I have experienced this. Am I just lucky?
2 questions for you, fellow posters,
Does this render mail forwarding at DH useless, and mean that forwards should simply not be used?
And,
How does one determine how high or low to set the bar for expectations regarding DH hosting?
Best to you all,
Steve
I am getting mails this morning from Nov 30. These are OVER 48 HOURS OLD. I MAY HAVE WELL USED THE POST OFFICE. WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU GUYS.
Can someone please answer this question…. Will we eventually receive all email from the past few days or is there a possibility some will be lost forever? Thanks
Dammit Dreamhost, what is the status here? It’s Sunday morning and I’m now receiving email from Friday afternoon.
I’m going to bail on DH if this isn’t fixed by next week - I can’t live with e-mail that trickles-in 3 days late. Any thoughts Dreamhost?
I’m getting email 4 days late now. This is absolutely ridiculous. If this isn’t fix this week, I’m cancelling my account.
Today I am seeing all mail forwarded to my gmail account in a timely manner. However, I am still missing mail at least 5 days old. I would have had it backed up on DH itself if I hadn’t run into another DH problem that was truncating mail spools. So I have backups since 11/28 (5 days ago), but unless email from before then is still in DH’s queues, then they’ve likely lost it forever.
I’ve been with DH for nearly 4 years and this is certainly the most serious and longest-lasting problem I’ve had with them. DH: we really need to see this resolved and no mail lost if you don’t want to lose customers like me.
@ben - you said:
I would have had it backed up on DH itself if I hadn’t run into another DH problem that was truncating mail spools. So I have backups since 11/28 (5 days ago), but unless email from before then is still in DH’s queues, then they’ve likely lost it forever.
um Yike! How did you find out about this problem? did you get some DH support to track it down or is there some way i can check this myself on my acct to see if that’s where all my mail is stuck?
Have been very frustrated that everyone says just use the full DH account when my DH acct hasn’t received any mail (according to Webmail) for weeks - i was wondering why sep 19 was the last date in webmail since i have been getting it fine until the gmail issue the past week.
Any help on understanding what might be going on beyond the Gmail queue slowdown v much appreciated
If you read through the comments on this page and others in this blog, the general consensus seems to be “Don’t rely on DH for anything important.”
Which begs the question… who sets up “unimportant” websites and email addresses???? Am I to assume that unreliability is somehow the new standard in shared webhosting?
Dreamhost wants to pass blame on this to Google. But think about that for a second. I DON’T PAY GOOGLE. I pay Dreamhost. DH should EXPECT that things will go wrong with 3rd parties and have CONTINGENCY plans for this spam-related issue. Google greylisted DH for a reason.
DREAMHOST: Please watch your servers for unusual activity. Please monitor your servers for processor hogs. All of the problems I have had occurred because DH was letting shit get out of control. Let’s ask ourselves an obvious question: how will we prevent this from happening in the future?
forwarding to hotmail accounts isn’t workign either. this is pretty weak, DH.
@eric
I’m still amazed at the number of people who still don’t get it.
“Google greylisted DH for a reason. ” Yes. Because of the amount of spam being sent from the dreamhost servers.
You may think that you don’t “pay” google but you do. They’re reading all your e-mail they’re making targeted ads directly for you. You’re paying dream host to forward your mails. How is it their fault if gmail refuses the forward? It’s not that Dreamhost is refusing to forward them.
“Let’s ask ourselves an obvious question: how will we prevent this from happening in the future?”
STOP FORWARDING YOUR E-MAIL TO GOOGLE.
1) Set up google apps, let google be your MX
2) Set up POP3 and have gmail PULL.
What do you people not understand. Every single e-mail piece of spam you forward contributes to any company grey listing DH in the future.
–
What happens when Gmail starts refusing to accept mail from Comcast or Yahoo. What happens when you drop DreamHost and your new host gets grey listed?
What happens when Gmail stops accepting e-mail from non gmail accounts? What happens when Google stops letting you search from IP addresses that aren’t on the Gwireless 700 mHz spectrum
I’m just amazed. I know that their spam filtering is excellent, but talk about putting all your eggs in one basket. What happens when google, tomorrow brings gmail out of Beta and Says “$400 a year to access your account.”
At least with Dreamhost, I’m already paying them to host my mail and they are. If you want to access your e-mail THROUGH gmail, then set it up as #2 above and PULL it.
DS is a tard.
I have always been fine using webmail and PREFER it to using Gmail.
So what I was doing was having mail come into my original 10 year old email address, forward it to Gmail to get filtered and then it gets forwarded to my alternate email which I have always accessed using Squirrel mail and it gets ’sent’ from my original 10 year old email account.
This has cut down from 200+ Spam a day to maybe 2 or 3 on a bad day.
Maybe DH really should have instigated a proper SPAM filtering system instead of patching up mess like this. People had been screaming out for it for long enough so when a proper solution came along (Gmail) the users took it upon themselves to fix the spam problem as DH had ignored it for so long.
Yes, it seems pretty likely that Google’s greylisting of DH is due to spam volume. There’s no reasonable reason to greyhost a web hosting company that is only sending a small amount of spam.
So for those of you that want to point the finger at Google, keep in mind that Google is reacting to something (bad) that is going on at DH.
I just had an e-mail arrive THREE days after it was sent. At this speed, it might be faster to use snail-mail.
Maybe Ted Stevens was right about the internet being a a series of tubes. 
Mail is now getting bounced as undeliverable.
I should clarify, Mail from earlier in the downtime. Anyone who hasn’t redirected in some way by now is probably just a glutton for punishment.
“So for those of you that want to point the finger at Google, keep in mind that Google is reacting to something (bad) that is going on at DH.”
Yes. The BAD thing going on at DH is PEOPLE FORWARDING THEIR MAIL. It doesn’t matter if the spam originates at DH or if it is only forwarded by the DH servers.
To google it looks the exact same. By your accord, I think that DH should disallow forwarding that way their servers can’t get blacklisted by any hosts. This will also help us that send legitimate mail to people at gmail because we’re only sending phpBB registration emails, etc.
Someone put this on digg. so that it gets googles lazy ass going. put the link here so that everyone can digg it and it will reach the front page. the hell. googles and idiot for doing this. it should realize, that DH’s servers relay mail. not send out mail.
DS: I don’t disagree with the method you suggest. And I signed up for Google apps and I’m in the process of doing what you recommend (it does require some waiting for confirmation).
That said, the “solution” with Google apps doesn’t change the fact that my email has been buggo for a week. And it doesn’t change the fact that I have to spend several hours dealing with a STANDARD feature. Forwarding emails is not MY job, it’s my webhost’s job.
My only interest is in helping DH (and thus helping myself). I am simply pointing out a way to improve their service (namely, to keep better tabs on these scaling-related issues). I don’t want an average webhost… why should I settle for average performance?
Actually, aside from this latest gmail fiasco, I have noticed an improvement in the performance of my websites. DH does finally seem to be taking an ACTIVE interest in managing my servers. Hopefully, this will be the last and only gmail issue.
That said, I haven’t forgotten about the Google apps “solution” (ahem, workaround, if you ask me), therefore you can rest easy knowing that you have, actually, educated this DH customer.
This is a nightmare (no pun intended) for people using this service for financial means. Hurry up and fix it. it’s not googles problem, it’s our problem and therefor your problem dreamhost.
@DS: Stop pluggin Google Apps. This is not a solution for most of us. Mail should work on a hosting party. Also.. saying that one should scrap forwarding services and keep it to themselfs, also does not work, since the spam-filters on DH are the problem.
The best solution would be DH adding super high tech spamfilters… and then forwarding the rest to Gmail.
Stop your high horse attitude about Google Apps. Its getting annoying.
@DS:
‘I’m just amazed. I know that their spam filtering is excellent, but talk about putting all your eggs in one basket. What happens when google, tomorrow brings gmail out of Beta and Says “$400 a year to access your account.” ‘
PRECISELY the reason I won’t fully commit to GMail and set my MX to them. I own my domain and I choose where my mail gets delivered, without being held hostage to anyone. GMail is a mail client to me. A very good one, but not one I want to pay through the nose for, and certainly not one I want to be roped into by coercion.
Received mail this morning at 04:19 ET from Thursday afternoon (~60 hours delivery time):
Thu, 29 Nov 07 20:22:53 GMT-0700
@Terminator
“Stop your high horse attitude about Google Apps. Its getting annoying.”
I have no high horse about google apps. People here are bitching about mail not getting delivered and that is a solution to still use gmail. Most of the comments I see here are by people that *must* use Gmail because any other service is unacceptable. Google Apps is one way to do this.
And yes. DH’s spam filters suck. Althouh *everyone’s* spam filters suck compared to gmail. However I just setup spamassasin and isbg (Imap Spam Begone) and it’s actually working rather well. Not GMail well, but well.
Set your gmail up to do a pull and be done with it.
I have been with dream host for awhile now. I am pretty new to web authoring. i Started doing work in php. i have created a mail response form using the php mail() function. all the mail i send from this works great. but the stuff i send to gmail never gets there or is DAYS late. sorry about the noob question, but is this the same issue as the one being discussed? Am i having my problem for the same reason?
thanks
@ryan lewis
Yes. This is the issue being discussed. Your mail (and forwarded mail) is all being delayed due to the grey listing.
Here’s the status for me:
inbound e-mail messages are still taking between 30-60 minutes to get through
e-mail messages from Thursday and Friday are still trickling in now
if any messages have bounced, the senders have not notified me.
This all comes at rather unfortunate timing, since last week I was in the middle of some correspondence about scheduling job interviews. I’ve since set the important addresses to retain a local copy before forwarding, and sent notifications to all parties about the issue and to please resend any e-mail messages I might have missed (a bit embarrassing, but it’s better than the alternative).
It is inexcusable to keep pointing the finger at google.
You are providing a service. You state in your advertisements that you can do email forwarding:
“Every DreamHost plan comes with unlimited email addresses @yourdomain.com! These addresses are configured through our web panel and can be set to go straight to a DreamHost mailbox or forward to another email address.”
THIS IS A PROBLEM WITH YOUR SERVICE. NOT GOOGLE.
I have to take responsibility and tell my clients that I purchase affordable, semi-reliable service from an over populated service. That is my problem and I accept that. I take responsibility and tell my clients I messed up and in trying to save some money got myself involved with consistently unreliable services that have been worth it despite the faults… up until now that is.
Why don’t you take responsibility Dreamhost? Stop passing the buck and tell us you’re going to fix this. Tell us WHEN you are going to fix this. I have 50+ clients who are absolutely freaking out because of this. This is unacceptable.
It appears it is fixed for now, but I still get old emails (clearly from the cue) dated as far back as 4 days ago coming into my inbox today.
@kessinge:
DreamHost IS forwarding your mail to gmail. But… when it’s slow or not working… gmail isn’t “answering the phone.”
There’s an easy fix. Change your DH email account to hosted and have gmail pick it up there. Then, instead of gmail’s fully automated system blocking your forwarded mail, it will actually go out and get it, Your instruction to pick up the mail tells gmail that it’s okay.
Even when the queue is flowing, old email will filter in slowly, as the mail servers continue to retry to deliver. Each time they retry, they wait a little longer for the next try. So the FIRST email caught in the trap will be near the LAST to get delivered.
Yes, kessinge, you bought a discount service. A proper solution is to buy dedicated server hosting where the mail server is on your server… with your own ip address. FAR more expensive, and it could still get blocked by gmail if you get spammed enough. If you’re forwarding the mail that is.
BTW, this is not unique. Other isps have blocked DH before. And they’ve blocked other hosting ips as well, so it’s not unique to DH. So take your behind over to your DH control panel, change your email to hosted with an actual mailbox, then tell gmail to pick up there. IF you want your mail to work.
I saw delivery return to relative normalcy this weekend (even though I still have messages 5-6 days old that haven’t been delivered). But this morning it’s back to the delays. I already have email a few hours old that haven’t been forwarded again. Perhaps this weekend’s reprieve was due to lower overall volume.
@kessinge
Thanks Rich. It’s nice to see that SOMEONE understands how this works. Man. It’s like arguing with a bunch of … non engineers.
“THIS IS A PROBLEM WITH YOUR SERVICE. NOT GOOGLE.”
No. No. No. No. No. No damn it No. This is a problem with GOOGLE. Dreamhost is doing exactly what you tell it to do and Google is not answering the phone.
If you call to make reservations at a very upscale restaurant, but every time you call the line is busy. It might be your fault. Now if you’re calling hanging up, calling again, hanging up Basically autodialing the restaurant and you’re still not getting through, is it really your fault?
So, go buy your rack mounted CoLo and Pay $99 a month. And when the person in the rack next to you starts sending spam to google and gets your IP block black listed, you’ll be in the same boat and out an extra $92. a month.
Status update:
emails in the Gmail queue from 11/29 and 30 trickling in
emails sent to my DH domain account directly 11/30 til now still have not arrived
test sent this morning from Yahoo to me@mydomain.com have not arrived
anyone else NOT getting email at their webmail or POP? How do I get DH to address this?
There is one trick you can use to get your email to gmail. Set your mail not to forward, but set gmail to pick up pop mail from another account. (it’s in the setting menu, under accounts). Now it creates a slight delay in getting your mail, but at least you can read it using all your gmail tools.
It’s surprising how confused people are about this whole thing, and how unrealistic their expectations are.
I bought a year of hosting for $20, as did many of you. I never thought that it would work as well as it does, and I certainly never forwarded my email without leaving a copy on DH servers where I could go get it any time.
Those of you who complain that DH is not doing its job are infected with a consumerist attitude- wherein personal responsibilty is passed off to some service provider in spite of all rational thought pointing to the faults in this method.
It’s simply astonishing that anyone would complain that they have no access to their email, and even more amazing that anyone would force this unprotected forwarding onto an unknowing customer.
Here’s a link to gmail support if you want to bug them to stop greylisting dreamhost.
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=bugs&ctx=bugflow_receivenewbug02
Barb:
“There is one trick you can use to get your email to gmail. Set your mail not to forward, but set gmail to pick up pop mail from another account. (it’s in the setting menu, under accounts). Now it creates a slight delay in getting your mail, but at least you can read it using all your gmail tools.”
one question about pop3. i have been using imap for so long now that i forget the implications of using pop3. if i recall correctly, pop3 means that the mail is transfered to the client off of the host server which means that the mail once read is not available for reading on another client. how does this work with setting gmail to use pop3? i just want to make sure that i can read the same mail on different machines at different times.
sorry if this seems dense. i can see that there are settings to leave the message on the server but i’m reluctant to make any big changes right now.
I LOVE GMAIL AND I HAVE EVERYTHING FROM DREAMHSOT FORWARDED THERE AND IT TAKES 3 DAYS TO GET AN E MAIL IT IS PISSING ME OFF
@cedub (and anyone else)
1) Log into Gmail
2) Click on “Settings”
3) Click “Accounts” and “Add another mail account”
A window will pop up
4) Enter “username@yourhost.com” and click “Next Step >”
5) Enter your username, password, pop3 server.
Then click “Leave a copy of retrieved message on the server.” This will leave a copy on the dream host servers.
Click any of the other things you want such as SSL, labels, Archive.
Add account.
I’d suggest setting up the dream host so that it removes stuff after a set time or setting up a limit so that you don’t run out of room. (Although 1024 spams a day at 1k would take 3 years to even break 1 GB.)
@InnocentBystander:
Yes, I am a non-engineer. If I were an engineer I would probably run my own server, but as my lot in life stands, I pay someone, a yearly fee to do this for me, without any hiccups or problems (hopefully).
Yes I am reacting like a consumer because I am a consumer. One who is promised a set of services (granted none of them explicitly say “no problem with forwarding gmail” but all the same…) so why should I have any reason to believe that I won’t get what I’m paying for?
This is DH’s problem as long as they are offering a service that is broken. I can respect that they’re trying to do what they can, but everyone on this thread is trying to do whatever they can to make things work. We’re hearing a lot of workarounds, but we need a final solution from DH. Otherwise WE NEED TO OFFICIALLY HEAR WE ARE DOING SOMETHING WRONG Else we should assume that the problem lay in DH’s court and they need to deal with it. I’m not saying that they can flip a switch and make it better, but they are accountable for this and we need answers.
Anyway… If its not their problem, why then would they be trying to fix it? They are beholden to thousands and thousands of people who rely on their services. They have to step up and let us know whats going on. This is a service they are providing and as a consumer I, along with everyone on this board, has a right to express what they feel is right and necessary from their services. A good business listens to that, and adjusts to it… Much like I might have to do by switching to a host who is able to deal with forwarding email better.
I love DH and the services they have provided thus far. Sure, its not perfect, but its the right price. I just want answers. Solid answers. This is business. Nothing is impossible here. If it was working 5 days ago, it can resume working… DH has to find a way to make that happen. DH needs to negotiate with Gmail to make this happen.
@kessinge
“Anyway… If its not their problem, why then would they be trying to fix it?”
They need to make gmail aware of the problem so that gmail can fix it on their end. What DH is working on is getting all the mail to go through. They have 3+ days of backlogged e-mails. They’re ‘fixing’ was getting it on one server, etc. Making sure that gmail was doing their part.
“so why should I have any reason to believe that I won’t get what I’m paying for?”
Dreamhost didn’t change a single thing. Gmail stopped accepting stuff from DH and that’s where the problem started. You’re paying the cable company (dreamhost) for a service (forwarding) and if FOX (GMail) cancels House (Forwarding e-mail from DH) then that’s not the cable company’s fault.
“Much like I might have to do by switching to a host who is able to deal with forwarding email better.”
What happens when Gmail blocks that host? And the next one. Go reread most of my comments. I’m trying to explain to everyone that if Gmail decided tomorrow no more e-mail from non-gmail. What would you do? It’d be like the days of AOL and Comuserve.
@Barb
Thanks. Reported the problem. Lets see what gmail sends back
I’d be happy if they just put a foot down and said: No more forwarding to gmail. (Like no more forwarding to aol.) If you want to use gmail. Set it up as a POP3 pull. Otherwise, deal with it.
update - have found the issue with nongmail email not arriving - apparently user error (mine) which when DH actually read my support requests they found quickly and apologized.
for anyone curious - i had at some point set up a second forward only on the same email acct to a different gmail address using some sort of keyword filter (can’t for the life of me remember doing or any clue why i would have but there it is) so that was where all my DH acct email was going (slowly).
Good luck to all still waiting out the greylist and do bug Gmail to remove it quickly.
Well, I guess another day and no progress on this. I understand that timing is up to gmail, but I feel like the least DH could do is periodically (a couple times a day) update the status to say “We are still waiting on Google” or “Google has replied but no resolution has been found”. To me, the largest issue is how this is being handled. I don’t appreciate being told “we haven’t fixed it, we need Google’s help, so stop complaining” which is how I read the status response above. I think all people want is a reasonable estimation of if and when this might be fixed so we can a) know when we will get the emails that are in limbo and b) decide if we need to look temporary or permanent solutions.
Hello,
Thank you for your report.
We apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced. The issue you
described should now be resolved. Please allow some additional time for
any further delayed messages to arrive. If you continue to experience
significant delays on new messages, please respond to this message, and
we’ll investigate further.
Sincerely,
The Google Team
I submitted a bug report to google through the link someone posted and received this response. Not sure if google is blowing smoke or what.
“Hello,
Thank you for your report.
We apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced. The issue you
described should now be resolved. Please allow some additional time for
any further delayed messages to arrive. If you continue to experience
significant delays on new messages, please respond to this message, and
we’ll investigate further.
Sincerely,
The Google Team”
@Steve: “It’s surprising how confused people are about this whole thing, and how unrealistic their expectations are. I bought a year of hosting for $20, as did many of you.” Well… you might have found a reliable host for 20 dollars a year, but some of us pay that each month! If they sell it to you, why not expect better service for that? If I would have one domain for 20 dollars a year I would not have hassled that much over here… but I run several domains with millions of hits each month… and am dependent on email coming in… even if its forwarded to gmail.
@DS: I did not want to sound that harsh. I was just amazed with the fact that another hack or solution was given, but still the problem being Google that does not except DH mail.. and DH mailfilters sucking.
@Barb: I used it, and await Googles reply (if any). Oops… I also entered my DH emailaddress,… so that reply might even take a bit longer ;).
@All… Get this: I have been spam free, give or take two messages a week since 2001. If you do not post your emailaddress to website or each and every service out there, you won’t get bugged anyway. And use a good form action on your site helps. Soo… spam is not coming in at all, yet DH’s IP is grey or blacklisted anyway. I might be forced to think about my own server anyway, but its a staggering 4,399.95 dollars (3000 euros) what I want, and at a price of 20 dollars a month (not a year, Steve) I get the same, but its shared hosting. You folks do the math.
@Problem… Mails are dripping in as we speak, the older emails are coming later then new ones. I have not set up MX records on Apps, nor POP3 fetching. I only set my addresses to full hosting, and checked to keep mails in. I now delete them twice, keeping the webmail as a backup… gmail as the main service.
Ooh… and gmail is a solution for the most of us, that are not bound to one system. I run my sites on seperate computers spread around the country so I can update them the instance I need to. This is where emails on Gmail come in as perfect, since its viewable from anywhere. Sure… DH’s webmail is too… but its a bit cluncky in its usage. If this all was not a problem, I would have set my Outlook to fetch with POP3 ages ago ;).
Hope the solutions given by any member is working for others… I found my own working area, that works for me. POP3 fetching by Google sounds intruiging, though.
FYI, the problem seems to be back (in full swing?). I’ve got two e-mail messages in my squirrelmail inbox that were sent to me three hours ago and I still haven’t seen them on the gmail side of things.
Following the suggestions from DS and others, I just setup a Google Apps account to manage my domain’s e-mail. Google walks you through this and takes about a 1/2 hour to complete. The only problem here is that I ended up with two different Gmail accounts, which was resolved by simply forwarding my new Google Apps account to my old Gmail account. With this, Google is forwarding to Google. No slow-downs. Back in business.
I wish DH used language that gave me the feeling that they even cared about how frustrating this is to us.
people keep talking about forwarding your mail accounts. i have a PHP script that uses the servers mailer to send email to my friends and family ( some gmail users). The gmail users never get their mail or some people get it 30+ hours later. no idea if dreamhost will ever fix this problem ( i have been with them for 7 years) anyone have any suggestions for my issue?
thanks,
@ryan
Your issue is the same as forwarding. It’s just more people start noticing when they’re missing email than when other people are
i got some mails delayed for 5 days, from nov 28 to dec 3. just queued in the dreamhpst server for 5 days.
If this problem continues, i probably switch to hotmail. (i dont like the squilrrelMail UI).
You guys need to start treating this like it is. This is a disaster; a no one goes home until it’s fixed kind of disaster. You’re talking about a chunk of your users who are utilizing a service that you advertise and collect money to support. Put a big red flag on this and recognize that it isn’t some server in your mom’s basement, it’s effectively an outage, and it’s ongoing. Does no one in your office know how to escalate a ticket?
I’m sick of paying a company for hosting only to find out six months in that you’re not professionals. What the hell kind of management puts up with employees who allow this kind of outage to continue? More importantly, is Dreamhost hiring? If you need a UNIX security guy, I would love a job with such little accountability.
Hmm. I _do_ wish there was a way for DH users to indicate how much of a disaster an issue is for them. This is a pretty high priority for me, and while I recognize that what DH can do is somewhat limited, it would be nice to know that they were doing what they can and that they recognize how many people are affected and how badly.
I’m sure in the scheme of DH problems, this doesn’t rank that high (compared to, say, losing a router, losing the panel, having a power outage, etc.), but it must rank somewhere, and I’d be curious to know where that is (and I’d even be curious to know how serious users find other problems I see listed on dreamhoststatus, which very rarely affect me). Perhaps a feature on the panel where we can rank how affected we are by each of the unresolved issues on dreamhoststatus (this would, of course, not include panel outage, but we all know how serious those are).
I reported this to the GMail support team and just received an email back that said it should be resolved now. Of course, that email took 5 hours to deliver.
@Jess:
Even though this affects me pretty severely and it makes me very sad, I wouldn’t say this is a ‘no one goes home until it’s fixed’ level of disaster. DH has those from time to time, and this isn’t really one of them. What’s more, even if they were to treat as such, what exactly can they do? Harass Google non-stop until they get completely banned? I don’t expect them to have the entire staff focused on this problem 24/7 until it’s resolved, but it would be nice to know that they are on top of it and continually pressing Google to take them off of whatever grey list they are on. And yeah, I’m with BIF says, it would be nice to get a little more of that language and communication love that I’ve come to expect from DH.
I don’t know about the mechanics inside of the company, but as a whole company DH has tons more accountability than I’ve seen from any other hosting service. I wish I could say the same about the executive branch of my government.
Sometime after 5:00pm tonight, I finally got the first message I knew was missing, from 8:50am on 11/29 (5 days ago).
This really sucks.
just setup a new pop account on dreamhost and forward there. then have gmail access that pop account, thats all. temporary solution. no biggie, dont blame dreamhost. we’re getting very cheap hosting and email, be happy.
hopefully this gets resolved soon.
Went ahead and set up Gmail to access my Dreamhost mail over POP. Can’t afford to have this forwarding issue again in the future, and now my mail is being “safely” stored in 2 places.
@Jess
Congratulations. You get the fail award for the day. Complete and utter failure to understand the situation. It’s not an outage.
It’s a grey listing. I’d throw in some big words you probably don’t understand and wave my hands a lot. But i’ve already done that numerous times in the posts above. Just search for them and take that as your reply.
Like Annie said, what do you propose everyone at DH does? Sits there and calls google head quarters “Are we unblocked yet?” “Are we unblocked yet?” until google’s secretaries grey list the Dreamhost phone nnumbers?
And what does UNIX security have to do with a grey listing from gmail? You could have hired the top professionals in every field and it still wouldn’t fix the problem that…. GMAIL GREY LISTED DREAM HOST BECAUSE TOO MANY PEOPLE ARE FORWARDING ALL THEIR MAIL, INCLUDING JUNK MAIL TO GMAIL.
I don’t think that DH has ever left a ticket of mine open for more than 12 hours or never responded. Most are very quick and “Oh, we just had a hard drive fail, it’ll be up in a second.”
It’s 8/month. I’m not expecting quad core Mac Pros with 16 GB of ram and 8 cores per 2-3 users all on a nice OC-48 line.
I don’t think that DH has ever left a ticket of mine open for more than 12 hours or never responded. Most are very quick and “Oh, we just had a hard drive fail, it’ll be up in a second.”
Need a napkin? You gotta little smudge on your nose.
Honestly, you should get paid for the BS PR work you do for dreamhost. That you do it for free, and have nothing else better to do, is both commendable and pathetic. Not sure which one wins out.
you ever notice that the dreamhost current time is off?
Situation for me.
Mail Dreamost -> Forward gmail
in about 5 minutes
I hope they’ve solved
@mark
“Honestly, you should get paid for the BS PR work you do for dreamhost.”
Fine. If you don’t believe me. Here is everything in my support window. I’ve been a customer since Nov 2005. Looks like I could have said under 2 hours.
14807022 Re: Gmail Forwarding DreamHost Nov 29th, 2007 - 13:40:53
2189239 Gmail Forwarding you Nov 29th, 2007 - 12:50:20
14789946 Re: It’s all slow DreamHost Nov 28th, 2007 - 13:27:47
2187293 Re: It’s all slow you Nov 28th, 2007 - 13:20:14
14789697 Re: It’s all slow DreamHost Nov 28th, 2007 - 13:03:14
2187253 It’s all slow you Nov 28th, 2007 - 13:00:37
13857577 Re: Websites B0rked DreamHost Oct 2nd, 2007 - 05:08:22
2098235 Websites B0rked you Oct 2nd, 2007 - 04:25:19
12560037 Re: Sub Domain Registration DreamHost Jul 6th, 2007 - 07:08:01
1959420 Sub Domain Registration you Jul 6th, 2007 - 07:03:37
11777234 Re: Site Temporarily Unavailable DreamHost May 24th, 2007 - 01:59:59
1887965 Site Temporarily Unavailable you May 23rd, 2007 - 21:44:56
9950957 Re: All files gone. DreamHost Jan 19th, 2007 - 11:06:08
1687124 All files gone. you Jan 19th, 2007 - 10:10:40
And I didn’t know that anti FUD (F*ck’d Up Disinformation) was PR. I guess it is. At least on slashdot and sometimes Fark I feel like I’m arguing with somewhat intelligent people. For the most part it feels like I’m arguing with a bunch of liberal arts freshmen who have absolutely no clue how the world around them works. All I’m trying to do is intelligently argue somewhat how the blackbox of the intar webs works and I outlined 2 solutions which seem to work for EVERYONE THAT HAS ACTUALLY TRIED THEM. Everyone else is content on continuing to blame DH and not fixing what they can from their end. (I bet even more of you would be upset if DH went into your settings and changed your forwarding to Gmail.)
“Mail not forwarding to gmail? Well I’m taking my business elsewhere, you fail Dreamhost it’s all your fault and absolutely no one else could be to blame”.
For what I pay I have every digital photo I’ve ever taken backed up. It’s cheaper than a safe deposit box and will outlast any DVD I burn. If dreamhost permanently loses those. Then I’ll have issues. E-mail not forwarding. No, that’s not a ‘high’ priority and DH explained it best. To you 1/1 of DH customers isn’t getting mail. To them 1/1000 customers isn’t getting mail. It’s the same reason you don’t get too broken up about someone killed in a car crash 1/2 the country away, but if it’s someone you know it’s different.
Apparently this issue has been resolved (at least for me). Yesterday I mailed google support and got this message back from them like 5 minutes ago:
——
The Google Team to me
show details 2:25 PM (20 minutes ago)
Reply
Hello,
Thank you for your report. We apologize for any inconvenience you may have
experienced. The issue you described should now be resolved. If you
continue to experience difficulties, please respond to this message, and
we’ll investigate further.
Sincerely,
The Google Team
This was my original message:
——
GmailUserLocale:
IssueType: Bugs
Language: en
Name: Cassiano Rabelo
Problem: Hello. I’m a Dreamhost costumer and since last week I’ve been
noticing huge delays when sending email from my dreamhost email to my
gmail email. So I got in touch with Dreamhost support and this is the
answer I got from them:
“I’m sorry for the problems you’re having with this. Gmail has
greylisted some of our servers that normally send out mail to them. As a
result, we had to move all messages outbound to Gmail to another server
that isn’t being blocked. Because of this, that servers mail queue is
backlogged and is pumping out mail as quickly as it can. This is causing
mail being forwarded to Gmail addresses to be delayed. We have a personal
contact in Gmails support, but have yet to get them to help us resolve
the problem. You can keep up to date on the status of this situation on
our status page:
http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2007/11/17/gmail-forwarding-slowness/
All we can really do is wait for Gmail support to get back to us and
assist with clearing up the issue.”
It would be great to see this fixed, because the email I give out to
all my clients is forwarded to gmail from my dreamhost account.
Thank you for your help,
Cassiano
Steps: Just send an email from Dreamhost to gmail and you will see. It
is taking days to arrive (if it arrives).
TroubleshooterType: bugflow_sendnewbug01
—–
Please give us an update.
switch to GO DADDY. That’s where I am now hosting my site…. MUCH better customer support, and none of this annoying forwarding problem.
“To you 1/1 of DH customers isn’t getting mail. To them 1/1000 customers isn’t getting mail. It’s the same reason you don’t get too broken up about someone killed in a car crash 1/2 the country away, but if it’s someone you know it’s different.”
Wow, that’s a pretty brilliant explanation of the lack of perspective people show around here. I never thought about it in quite those terms. But again, I would like to know whether 1/100 or 1/10000 of DH customers are affected and how seriously, and more importantly I’d like to know that DH knows.
Please find a solution or workaround or else… Dreamhosters will start looking elsewhere.
Has Google become invincible?
Incidentally, the last several e-mails have come through promptly now and arrived in my gmail inbox about they same time they arrived in my squirrelmail box.
An update please!!!
Also, if you use pop on Dreamhost instead of forwarding, are you limited to the 500MB per account that Dreamhost enforces? One of the features that I like about Gmail is the 5GB+ of storage space.
It has been 2 days since the last update. Surely something has changed. At least tell us that the mail queue is getting smaller as the forwards are being delivered.
NOPE…not for me…still not resolved!!! COME ON DREAMHOST!!! This is going on WAY too long.
Thanks…
Please change the priority to high.
I hope everyone commenting here has had the good sense to switch to using Gmail on the web and change their default address back to xxxxx@gmail.com …
Other customers: Please file a complaint with Gmail:
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=bugs&ctx=bugfl
ow_receivenewbug02
Yes I SECOND the motion for changing the priority to HIGH…I have already started figuring out how big of a pain it will be to switch hosting companies. I would say that would warrant a “HIGH” priority.
i changed mx records yesterday. what a relief. now i just have to move dns and my website and i’m rid of this nonsense after years and years of always saying it’s too much work. when you just get to it isn’t as hard as bad as you think
“Yes I SECOND the motion for changing the priority to HIGH…I have already started figuring out how big of a pain it will be to switch hosting companies. I would say that would warrant a “HIGH” priority.”
“The severity level is not set to HIGH for several reasons. #1…the rating is relative, and in the overall scheme of things this issue is SMALL. This does NOT mean it’s not being worked on…it’s just means a very small fraction of customers are being affected. So, while in your own sphere of reference, it’s affecting 1/1 people, and thus 100% of the People Who Matter, for us, it’s affecting, say, 1/1000 people (to pull a number out of thin air…seriously, I have no statistics or anything…but it’s relatively small), and thus, is a “LOW” severity issue. The other reason we don’t mark such “small” issues as HIGH is that the designation would lose all meaning…we like to save the drama for when there’s at least a small apocalypse. (OMG People are DYING!)”
“we’re getting very cheap hosting and email, be happy.”
Sorry, but that’s not the way it works. If I’d known Dreamhost forwards a crapload of spam to GMail and elsewhere and gets greylisted on a regular basis, I would have paid more to a company that knows how to install and configure Spamassassin properly. Nowhere on the Dreamhost web site does it say, “our prices are low because our service sucks!” It says, “our service is great!”
Even on very conservative settings, Spamassassin would stop a ton of junk mail and have very few false positives. I’d take a couple of false positives a year vs. no e-mail getting through for a week any day. I’m sure the people not forwarding to GMail would appreciate seeing less spam too.
For those of you blaming Google, try to look at it this way: If somebody was on the phone screaming at you all day, every day, and you were forced to listen to them because your job depended on it, I’d hope you’d turn the volume down a little too.
“For those of you blaming Google, try to look at it this way: If somebody was on the phone screaming at you all day, every day, and you were forced to listen to them because your job depended on it, I’d hope you’d turn the volume down a little too.”
Look at it this way. You’re the person paying that person to scream on the phone every day all day. Every single person here is mad at that person for screaming, even though that’s what you’re paying them to do. Right now you’re all MAD at that person for getting the volume turned down on them. You’re sympathizing with the person turning the volume down and yelling at the person you’re paying to scream for not getting the message through. Which way do you want it?
If DH installs Spamassassin (I think it already is) what happens when there is a false positive? You’re PAYING DH to forward ALL your mail. No more no less. Say the go ahead and install SA. Grandma sends her HTML picture yearly christmas card and it gets rejected. You’d be in here complaining that you got a false positive. SA is good. And I’ve used it. And I even think it’s what they use for spam. (When you check the tick mark).
–
Just checked. Spamassasin is installed. I used it with imapspambegone.py. I set it up as a cron job to run once every 10 minutes. Every 10 minutes it runs, shoves everything into a spam folder and e-mails me a report.
I’m sure the people not forwarding to GMail would appreciate seeing less spam too.
This person not forwarding to GMail already sees less spam than he did 6 months ago. Could be luck, could be an improvement somewhere up the chain. Considering I haven’t touched my own spamassassin settings with the exception of adding a couple addresses to the whitelist since I initially set it up, I’d say something’s going right.
You have to wonder, though, how many of the people who forward all their email to GMail don’t have junkmail filtering turned on for their domains, figuring, “Well, it’s going to GMail anyway, so their spam filter will deal with it.”.
I would say that would warrant a “HIGH” priority.
On the other hand, if enough of the people who claim to be losing 50 billion dollars for every email that gets to GMail’s servers 5 seconds late get fed up and leave, DH won’t have to worry about fixing anything. And the status blog will actually give the impression of being constructive.
Hmm. I _do_ wish there was a way for DH users to indicate how much of a disaster an issue is for them.
Well, there’d certainly be no use for medium/low priority then. No matter the post, if the word ‘down’, or ‘outage’, or ‘problem’ is anywhere in the post, there’s always gonna be a handful of mostly nutjobs screaming this is a people are dying level issue. And I’m sorry, but it’s really not. If it was, you’d of picked between DH and GMail for your mail service and wouldn’t be having this problem. Single provider, single point of failure, single person/group of people to blame. None of this ‘Well, DH should be leaning on Google harder to fix their problems.’. If Google is the cause of service interuptions, than do what most of you continuously threaten to do every time DH has supposedly broken something–find another host.
Wow. Reason. I didn’t think that it’d make it to this thread.
@James
An Aside… how do you configure your SA settings? Was I correct in assuming that’s what DH uses when you click the “Filter Spam” setting?
Although… a settings dialog on the Panel would rock… hrm.
Still no resolution? Our forum user email responses are soo slow to get thru, often now two days or more behind, that users are in turn not returning to the site for updates. Get your stuff together “Dream”host!
Your update today says it is improving but it’s getting worse.
I sent a test mail from my app to my gmail account 2 hours ago and it’s still not arrived.
In some cases over the weekend emails were taking over 3 days, in fact one from Saturday morning arrived this afternoon (Monday).
Not impressed.
Big companies like Gmail are unable to offer suitable customer service.
An Aside… how do you configure your SA settings? Was I correct in assuming that’s what DH uses when you click the “Filter Spam” setting?
Yessir, you were. And you can do so from the webmail interface if you’ve got a POP3/IMAP account with DH. Unfortunately if you’re strictly forwarding only, you’re kind of up the creek so far as that goes. That being said, I *believe* you can still turn on junk filtering for your domain via the control panel. You’ll be using the default DH-customized SA settings for it that way, but y’know, I don’t get many emails in my junkmail folder either.
Does anyone know if Google still has DH grey listed? I got a reply from Google support saying it had been “fixed”. So where’s the problem now?
the problem still going on.
the mails send it by my website to gmails accounts take over 3 hours to arrive.
and others doesn´t appear.
i needed fast
my website send password to the users and they wanted rigth now, now 3 hours late.
guys… come on
I also got an e-mail from Google support saying it has been “fixed”…
We use dreamhost to forward our boushley.com mail to the family members account, some at gmail, some at other services… I cleaned out my gmail inbox at approx 5 pm EST and at 9:30 there was an email in my inbox that Gmail indicates was 5 days old!!! Boy am I glad this problem is solved.
this is still going on!!!MADNESS. today on 12-4 i am getting just getting emails from the 11-29.. W.T.F.? missing emails and not getting current emails?
Still not solved. Still getting emails from 11/29 as well. New emails not coming in yet.
I can’t understand why this is taking a week to solve.
Eh, once they figure out that it’s NOT just gmail, maybe they’ll get a clue. Putting in a support ticket about it didn’t seem to do much.
All mail being sent on my local machine (bourbon) takes hours if not more to reach its destination, no matter what domain it’s going to.
- Roach
I really hope this gets fixed soon, already missed some business. Do I send that bill for loss of revenue to dreamhost?
@David.
You can send it to Gmail actually.
Seriously. Who the hell earns a living with a gmail account. It’s a beta free webmail service.
Gmail is hardly beta, despite its official hipster “beta” status, when it has been taking in massive amounts of ad revenue for over two years.
@DS, you’re an idiot. What does using a gmail account as your “primary interface” for mail have anything to with earning a living? you’re a fucking moron. If you think having the gmail.com domain isn’t “pro” to your standards, you’re still a dipshit because we’re talking about email fowarding, meaning we are using our own email domains where we have our own business located. We probably make more money than your whole extended family. Now shut the fuck up and get off the internet.
@David is a moron too, bill for loss revenue? fuck you dumbshit its not dreamhosts fault. look up grey-listing.
The whole situation sucks, and I wish I put my money in a different host but whatever, I am living with it — FOR NOW.
re: DS
Who said I use it for my living? Ever heard of freelance on the side? You need a jump to conclusions mat.
And you are going to have a hard time convincing me this ONLY has to do with Gmail.
re: SA “@David is a moron too, bill for loss revenue? fuck you dumbshit its not dreamhosts fault. look up grey-listing.”
You need to kick your your sarcasm meter a few times and get it running again.
@DS, i read your other posts, you dont seem like a dipshit, but that last comment about “Seriously. Who the hell earns a living with a gmail account. It’s a beta free webmail service.” still makes you the #1 dumbass here. Happy fucking holidays you pimply faced fuckhole
@David, i suggest you work on your “sarcasm” skills…
sarcasm meter. god -10points on David. #1 Dipshit Award goes to DS, #2 Dipshit awards goto David
re: SA
Sounds good, will do. Thanks for the suggestion and letting people know they are dipshits. I almost went to work tomorrow not knowing I was a dipshit. Imagine my boss finding out and calling me out on it. Thanks!
“still makes you the #1 dumbass here.”
Because if I was earning $$ from something. I would not put all my eggs where they could be taken away tomorrow. What if google decided to charge $500 a year for gmail. Would you up that just to get at what is in your inbox right now? Oh the days when Hotmail was Good, Free and Worked. Gmail could very easily go that way too.
I understand some people use it as a webmail alternative. It is better than squirrel mail, but reanding a majority of the posts here, it’s how people primarily use e-mail. Heck I’m meeting people now that don’t even know what an e-mail client is. Purdue was having issues with webmail being slow because 30,000 students thought that that was how you were supposed to access email.
You can pry my mbox out of my cold dead hands.
Dreamhost, this is a major issue clearly, so I just wanted to put in another “please resolve this ASAP.”
fix it
fix it
fix it
Severity: Medium ?????
is totally CRITICAL
What does this mean? It’s still listed as medium on the dreamhost status page…
—————-
“Hello,
This is just a notification that your message has been moved to our
severe problem queue. This queue is for major outages that cause a large
amount of support to come in. Our goal is to resolve the problem based
on the information you have provided. We will then send you an update
once the issue is resolved. Depending on the problem it may take
longer than 24 hours for a response. Please hang in there, when messages
are moved here your problem is given top priority. Please note that
callback support is not available for messages moved here.
Thanks!
The Dreamhost Ticket Moving Robot!”
pls fix it as soon as possible…. it is quite a critical problem for us… we paid such service all the time…
you are waisting our time & money actually… because the problem lasts too long…
whats the deal dreamhost? pointing fingers won’t fix this.
yeah, i am having this issue. Email notifications from my wordpress sites are not being received until a day later.
welp, boss just told me I have to find a new mail host.
still 12 hrs delay
I’m still receiving emails that are 6 days old that are forwarded to my gmail. This is bad.
Thank you DREAMHOST !!! I am very happy with the level of your service.
I’m still seeing big delays, but….thank you for updating this post to let us know what’s going on. Very helpful.
“You can pry my mbox out of my cold dead hands.”
Jesus DS, are you twelve? If you don’t think it’s a problem go somewhere else. Why are you constantly here preaching?
I would take each of your points and break them down, but it wouldn’t do any good so I won’t. Just go away.
Stuff like this happens.
IMO the absolute worst part of this whole mess was that dreamhost failed to notify customers of this problem.
No, dreamhost, it is not my responsibility to read your blog. If something fails in your service that affects my business (and yes email is critical to online business) then, in the interest of your customers, please put the word out! Isn’t that why I give you my alternative contact address? So you can let me, your paying customer, know when something goes wrong?
I understand stuff happens.
I’d rather have a host that has slightly more problems but is on the ball explaining and notifying customers of problems than a host that has fewer problems but waits for customers to find out about said problems on their own when their customer’s clients are like, “Didn’t you get my email?”
The insult to injury was the arrival of the dreamhost November newsletter to my contact email today.. with no mention of this problem.
Not to be a dunce- but can someone tell me what to put as the Port where I actually change the POP settings to make my Gmail fetch from DreamHost? I am really confused because I keep getting error messages. Actually I don’t even know for sure if I am doing it correctly. I am changing the settings by adding an account in Gmail settings, and something keeps going awry
yea! it seems to be fixed. finally!! at least emails are now going through right away. i don’t think i’ve yet received all of my back mail, however. hopefully over the next few hours I will.
I’ve been getting last weeks messages throughout the day. Most recent was a few minutes ago, so I guess the backlog isn’t done yet. New messages are coming in promptly.
You guys are awesome! I was right about to ask what’s up with the forwarding slowness and saw this page. Thanks for keeping us up to date and resolving the issue and preventing data loss.
My god, I just received an email from 9:29am on November 29th…
Same as Rob above, just received an email from Nov. 29. So snailmail would have been faster. Much faster.
But as sahzah above says, why did I not get any notification from dreamhost until I logged in to my panel and requested support — I was about to file a support ticket!!
No mention in the dreamhost newsletter, no email at the alternate email address, no email at the forwarding email address, nor any mention on the main page of the panel. I’m modding Dreamhost down 5 points, and removing them as my permanent email address. The real problem was the way Dreamhost handled this.
Just to second what many have said - THANK YOU for working hard to fix this, but PLEASE do a better job of notifying us.
Now, folks, learn a damn lesson. Set up a POP3 account and use Gmail to PULL your spam..er..email instead of forwarding it all. If you do that.. we wont have this problem anymore.
I assume that we do not need to change anything, meaning a POP3 pull is not required now or later (ref comment from Zach above), because of this issue being resolved, right? Anyone?
The reason people (myself included) don’t want to to do a POP3 download pull from Gmail is that you cannot set the frequency, correct? There’s going to be a 15 minute delay. Forwarding, when it’s functioning correctly, is virtually instantaneous. Email should be instantaneous. Any thoughts on that, POP3 preachers?
@Jay
I just tested it. Seems to take anywhere between 1-5 minutes. Nothing noticeable. If you need something faster than e-mail, IM would work better. I bet the 15 minute polling is if you’re not logged into gmail. When I was logged it it seemed to be actively checking, I’ll need to setup a home POP3 server and check the logs, see how often it really is.
And that ‘near instantaneous’ is if nothing goes wrong. If one server in the chain falls or … say one server grey lists another. Then you’re SOL as everything get stuck in the queue. (Ask those people that are getting Thursday e-mails on Wednesday).
You should use SSL and Port 995. I don’t know why Gmail doesn’t automatically change the port when you check SSL.
Andre: only if this issue never happens again.
If *anything* disable forwarding only and have it store on dream host’s servers, so in the catastrophic failure that gmail goes down again, you can at least login via webmail or *ghasp* a real e-mail client. You may have to wade through some garbage, but at least you’ll have those critical e-mails.
Thanks again DH for getting the elusive whitelist from gmail (I can’t imagine talking google into white listing you was easy). But I’m sure once you showed them this thread and how many business e-mails they can aggregate into ad space, they probably swayed.
Thanks so much for working on this guys. I really appreciate your dedication!
@Jake, i agreee DS is a fuckin moron.
@DS, you’re still #1 dipshit. you are the master of life on a forum, preaching your nerdy pimply computer bullshit talk and a failure in life. good luck living your life alone and organizing all your kiddie porn from the dark geek trenches you forever dwell in.
Oh wow. “nerdy pimply computer bullshit talk”. You know that “nerdy pimply computer bullshiat talk” is what runs that black box that is the internet. Despite not being pimply or it not being bull shiat, I still stand by everything I said above.
Second, All I’ve done was try to explain how and why this whole situation came about. It did get frustrating after a while because people clearly don’t understand how the internet works.
Finally, how mature of you: your website listed as ‘fuckyouds’ and attacking me. Big man of you there. How about you attack the truthiness of any of my statements instead of me personanally.
I”m still seeing an hour or more delay in the forwarding
Things are acting screwy again. I’m seeing a 30 - 45 minute delay in forwarding to Gmail. Forwarding was back to normal and instant yesterday.
Things are really not ok. Test messages today are NOT forwarded Sigh
It’s slow again.
Still experiencing slowness–an hour or more–please keep trying to fix!
Forwarding is still slow.
Nice and slow again. Emails taking many hours to get through.
Did this problem affect OUTGOING mail as well?
still slow
Seems to be on time for me … atleast for now…
Still slow for me on Dec 10
email sent an hour ago to me have not forwarded. nor have those that were sent a week ago.
this problem has prematurely been labeled resolved.
As a patient and long-suffering customer of many mail clients, including DH, it would be great for DH to post a truly transparent, honest, and proactive BLOG posting about this whole gmail mess. As we all try to play one system against another, I can only see this kind of situation happening again and again…DH needs to come clean about what really happened.
Once again for me…things are STILL SLOW!!! COME ON DREAMHOST!!! Give us an update…the last one is NOT TRUE!!!
THE PROBLEM IS BACK!!!!
this isn’t resolved - none of our email is forwarding to gmail.
am i mistaken? Am surprised if I’m noticing this but nobody else is. Any help? Have sent a support request to dreamhost but haven’t heard back
HELP!
well i have never left a note before i’m just looking for the game organ trail thank-you and have a nice day
I’m getting email from a list hosted at dreamhost (tech@hal.vu) with daley off 2 or 3 hours…
Strange - were is the delay? Delivering the mail to Dreamhost oder delivering it from Dreamhost to GMail?