Notice Coming soon: Email delivery method change

Hey folks!

Some of you may have noticed that there is a significant delay in the time between when someone replies to a thread you are watching and when you receive the email notification of that reply. On the forum (alerts) and with Tapatalk and Pushover, the notification is instant - but the email takes between 3 and 5 minutes to get delivered.

This is actually not an issue with the forum - it's an issue with our web host, GoDaddy. GD uses a set of Relay Servers which basically funnel every single email that their service processes through the same servers. The result is that there is a multiple-minute email queue that is always there, 24/7/365.

Some of you may also have noticed that a lot of the GIRS Forum email alerts end up in your Junk or Spam folders - especially if you use Hotmail (anything MS), Yahoo, Gmail, Ymail, AOL, or Apple (me, icloud, mac, etc) for your email. This is also, you guessed it, a GoDaddy Relay Server thing. Not to get too technical on you here but what it comes down to is how the outgoing mail server is configured. Usually, this can be done by tweaking DNS settings so that the recipient servers don't suspect the emails are junk or spam - but because the Relay Servers are used for all GoDaddy customers, there is literally no way to solve this issue by changing settings. The current solution is to create filters on your end to make sure that emails don't get placed in junk...kind of tedious, especially if you aren't computer savvy...

I've complained to GoDaddy multiple times about these problems and they've basically told me there's not a damn thing that they intend to do about it. So, until we run out our contract and switch to a service that doesn't suck, we have to improvise.

I'm working on switching to an email service called PepiPost. I'll be testing this out on a different forum first before pulling the trigger on it here, just so I can work out the details/bugs and make sure that it will work here when it's implemented.

The only changes you should see are

1) emails get delivered immediately
2) emails don't go to junk

I'll update this post when I am getting close to pulling the trigger on this. Due to the change in DNS records, there might be a window where emails are delayed and/or not sent while the switch-over is occurring. This should not last long, but could actually be a few hours.

Thanks
Bud

 

This is done. Email are now being delivered immediately! No more GoDaddy delay!

 

It would also be mice to get some feedback on whether or not the email alerts people are getting are going to junk/spam folders. This usually is the biggest problem on hotmail and yahoo but sometimes gmail and AOL also - where the first line of defense is only "viewable" by looking at your online account, for those of you who download to an email client...