Lair Of The Multimedia Guru

2019-12-25

email problems

A few days ago i noticed a missing mail from james in my ffmpeg-devel folder. Checking my local logs, checking the servers logs it appeared as if it was sent to me and that i never received it locally. I saw some bounce but mailman doesnt seem to keep track of bounce details. James said it might be a fluke and i put it asside. But shortly later another 2 mails that reached the Archives and others did not reach me. So i opened an issue on gandi.net about this which iam using for my mail. A long while ago i switched to gandi as gmx was just a pain if something did not work …

Until this issue was looked into by gandi, i used a 2nd email address to receive mails from ffmpeg-devel reliably. I also as a precaution changed my password and then later went over most of my email setup to check for any potential bad configuration. In the meantime another mail, one from Andreas failed to reach me over gandi but received me over gmx. So i reported that to gandi with all the headers. On the 24th gandi after a bit of back and forth found the email. It was in a Junk folder that one can see in their webmail but which is inaccessible via POP3. There in fact where almost exactly 1000 mails in the Junk folder.
So i switched from POP3 to IMAP and fetched all, sending them through my own spam filtering i have locally. I have to shockingly say that a substantial number of these “Junk” mails, as in 5-10% where miss-classified and where not junk. Mails from the IETF list, from the debian lists, from ffmpeg, some buisness/finance related mails and many IRC logs, just to list what i remember now off the top of my head. The recovered mails seemed to cover a Timespan since july 2019. I do not know if mails prior to july 2019 “expired” in the Junk folder or if that was when this issue started. From my memory gandi did longer ago reject mails on reception so the sender would always get an error and know. Also it feels as if their spam filters where orders of magnitude more accurate in the past. I was a bit foolish to fail to guess that the well working mail service that gandi had wouldnt be “improved”.

Either way, the things of note are

  1. If you sent me a mail of importance and i didnt react, send it again, especially if it was prior 2019 mid july
  2. Avoid POP3, use IMAP, make sure you fetch all folders the times where companies cared about features working are over. In the past if one fetched mails via POP3 from a webmail thingy that had a spam folder one could get these mails with a “SPAM” header or SPAM keyword added to the subject.
Filed under: Off Topic — Michael @ 13:47

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