IT / Techies / Interweb

[aclivity]

Is there a problem with the interweb?

Recently strange things have been happening to me - not of the Aliens / Corks / Finless variety, but of the internet and email variety.

1. Emails take ages to get to me. I've received a couple of emails from YD - telling me that threads I had subscribed to had new posts. I went to check - last post added early in November. It's not limited to my home email account; work emails have also been delayed recently, although not as much (i.e. 24 - 48 hour delays, instead of 3 week delays). It's not just YD emails, either, an eBay 'outbid notice' took 2 weeks to arrive.

2. I received an email with the following message:

Originally Posted by email to andy

If the message will not displayed automatically,
follow the link to read the delivered message.

Received message is available at:
www DOT aclivity.co.uk/inbox/andy/read.php?sessionid-27578

It's that URL that interests me. www DOT aclivity.co.uk is my personal domain, which I registered purely as a means to have multiple @aclivity email addresses. It saves me having to tell all the people I like what my new email address is every couple of years as / when I change access method or ISP. Currently the domain is set to redirect to a website.

So what is that URL telling me? I tried typing it into the address bar - as a personal rule I do not click on links in emails but C&P into the address bar if I am remotely interested in the contents of the link - and nothing was found (404 error), so I'm wondering if it was one of those URL's that says one thing and actually directs elsewhere. I've since deleted the email so I can't check this.

Is anybody else experiencing weird email problems, or can anyone offer advice?

Andy

[Mdemon]

I think the Lycos MakeLoveNotSpam thing was in fact an alien plot to take over the world. I think you may be suffering from the aftermath...

If it makes you feel any better, my broadband connection has just gone clunk...

Pesky aliens...

[Conor]

Have you tried a 'view source' on the email?

[Adrian Kelland]

Originally Posted by Conor

Have you tried a 'view source' on the email?

Indeed I get a few of these too.

Some purporting to be from admin@sh0br00ke.org. bloody cheek, thats me

[aclivity]

Originally Posted by Conor

Have you tried a 'view source' on the email?

I thought of that a couple of seconds after purging it from the webmail account. If any more of that sort appear, I will remember to do that!

I should add that it's not ALL emails that appear to take a wrong turn on the Internet, only occasional ones. Luckily nothing important has gone missing yet.

[aclivity]

Originally Posted by Adrian Kelland

Indeed I get a few of these too.

Some purporting to be from admin@sh0br00ke.org. bloody cheek, thats me

A couple of months ago I had some from admin at mydomain - I think these are a sort of spam that tries to get you to open the email; do they call it 'phishing'? If you were in a company called DOMAINNAME and you got an email from the admin@DOMAINNAME you may be tempted to open it?

[Conor]

I tend to avoid clicking on anything that looks dodgy and check the source before doing so if it doesn't.

I'm not an admin, but in advance of someone who knows posting, I would say the delay you have seen could be simply because the mail got held up when on of the servers it passed through crashed etc. I can't say I have seen any delay more than about 20 mins or so

Conor

[Adrian Kelland]

I've seen delays of days, even weeks. It could depend on timeout setting of the various Mail Transfer Agents that may be involved.

[abucksdiver]

"Phishing" is where you receive an email that looks as if it comes from you bank/eBay/PayPal/other financial place, and askes you to confirm your account details... usually including your account and PIN numbers...

Where an e-mail is made to appear that it comes from your boss/Domain Admin etc. to "encourage" you to open it, it is known as "Social Engineering".


Andrew

[Bantam]

SMTP Mail delays are usually caused when one of the transient servers is overloaded and the queue becomes too big.

One of the numptys here once decided to do a marketing spam mail and ended up sending 2000 e-mails of 120k each (240Mb). We only have a 2Mbit connection here so it took 16 minutes to send them all, assuming full bandwidth usage. Of course, in reality, my packetshaper will shape that back so it was probably only using 200k so blocked the mail server up for about 5 hours.

Also, there's something called the retry loop. If, for whatever reason, a mail server cannot connect to the next hop, it puts the mail into the retry loop.

Usually, as a rough guide, this is similar to the following;
Try. Wait for 1 minute, Try again. Wait for 4 minutes, try again, wait for 4 minutes, try again, wait for 8 minutes, try again....

and so on and so on. The time between attempts rises every other time until it gets to 24 hours in some cases.

Most servers will try for about 3 days to pass the mail on before it bounces it with an undeliverable.

Also, with Virus filters and spam filters now there's quite a few bottlenecks on the internet for mail.

You also have to remember that compared to 12 months ago, there's approximately 100% more e-mail traffic on the internet.

Mark.