A customer recently reported problems when forwarding mail sent from a “@cs.com” CompuServe address to a Yahoo or Gmail address. Yahoo completely rejects the forwarded message and Gmail puts it in a “spam” folder.
This is caused by a misconfiguration at cs.com, and happens whenever anyone, anywhere, forwards @cs.com mail. It’s not related to our service in particular. However, we’ve reported this to cs.com in the hope that they’ll fix it.
Until they do so, there’s no way to avoid this problem except by having the sender send mail directly to the final destination address, or converting the forwarding address to a mailbox. (This problem is another example of the general rule that “a mailbox is usually more reliable than a forwarding address, because forwarding involves two places where things can go wrong instead of just one”.)
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The PHP developers recently released versions 5.4.29 and 5.5.13 that fix several bugs. We’ve updated PHP 5.4 and 5.5 on our servers as a result.
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We recently explained how to avoid DMARC mail delivery problems with the “Gravity Forms” WordPress plugin.
We’ve added a support article explaining how to avoid DMARC mail delivery problems with the similar “Contact Form 7” plugin, too.
If you use either of these plugins and you’re seeing mail rejected with errors about “DMARC”, the links above will help you fix it.
If you use the Gravity Forms WordPress plugin, be sure you don’t set it to send mail “from” the e-mail address of the person filling out the form. If you do, you’ll have trouble due to recent “DMARC” anti-forgery changes some companies (including AOL and Yahoo) have made.
To avoid problems, make sure that Gravity Forms (and other such forms) send mail “from” the Web site domain name the form uses. For instance, if your Web site is at www.example.com, you could send mail from “notifications@example.com”. Here’s a helpful page that explains how to properly set up the Gravity Forms address with DMARC in mind.
By the way, this is just a specific case of the general rule of “don’t send mail from addresses you don’t own”. The simple way to think of it is that you’re not (say) AOL or Yahoo, so your Web site shouldn’t send mail claiming it’s from aol.com or yahoo.com addresses. AOL and Yahoo don’t want other people doing that. Always send mail only from your own domain name.
We’ve updated the MySQL database software on our servers from version 5.5.35 to 5.5.37 for security reasons.
Customers should not notice any changes, as the update merely fixes bugs and doesn’t introduce new features. But as always, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.
We recently upgraded Mailman to fix a problem for Yahoo and AOL users, which has worked well.
Today we found a problem where since the initial upgrade on April 24, people who tried subscribing to a Mailman list by sending an e-mail message (instead of using the more common Web interface) weren’t properly added to the list.
This was caused by an incompatibility between our mail system and one of the Mailman software changes. We didn’t receive a report of this problem until today because few people try to subscribe this way.
We’ve resolved this: Any delayed subscriptions have been correctly handled and the incompatibility has been fixed. We apologize to anyone affected by it.
In recent days, Yahoo and AOL made technical changes that prevented their own users from sending messages to most mailing lists. (That’s a simplified summary; your favorite search engine will show the gory details if you search for “Yahoo DMARC mailing lists”.)
If you use the Mailman software to run discussion lists, like many of our customers, this is a problem. To fix it, the authors of the Mailman software are making a new version to work around the Yahoo and AOL change.
That new version hasn’t been officially released yet, but we think this is so important that we’ve upgraded our installed copy of Mailman to a “pre-release” version of the fixed software.
Yahoo and AOL users should now be able to send to our customers’ Mailman lists without trouble.
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We’ve upgraded the default version of the Perl scripting language on all our servers to the 5.14 series (specifically, to version 5.14.2 plus Debian security patches).
Most of our customers don’t use Perl, but those who do should not notice any problems. Don’t hesitate to contact us if you need assistance.
We’ve upgraded the default version of the Python scripting language on all our servers to the Python 2.7 series (specifically, to version 2.7.3 plus Debian security patches).
The older version 2.6 series of Python was also updated from 2.6.6 to 2.6.8 (plus Debian security patches).
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Over the last couple of days, mail from yahoo.com addresses has been “bouncing” a lot more than usual, often with error messages about “policy” or “DMARC” problems. This is especially true for messages involving mailing lists or forwarding from other addresses.
If you see this happening, it isn’t because of anything wrong on your end, or our end. It’s happening all over the Internet.
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