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Last night, my daily digest for the Hi-rail, O27 and Traditional 3-rail O Gauge Forum never showed up in my email box.

That’s the first that has happened since 2016, when the problem clearly was on the AOL side, a situation that was somehow resolved. Again, the digest has been delivered flawlessly for several years now.

This time, I am concerned that the problem is somehow linked to Hoopla rebranding itself as Crowdstack. Why?

Because after that rebranding happened Jan. 20, on the mornings of Jan. 21 and Jan. 22 the daily digest landed in my spam folder, along with every reply notifications I got for prior forum postings. I retrieved them, using the AOL tool to make sure they wouldn’t be marked as spam again. On the morning of Jan. 24 and throughout the day, everything came through without a problem. And my reply emails are still coming through.

But the digest is nowhere to be found. I’m afraid the recent change may have prompted the Verizon servers from rejecting it. 

Any information and verification would be appreciated.

Last edited by Jim R.
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Sorry, Rich, but that’s not the complete answer. The daily digest did show up just now — about 9 1/2 hours later than usual — in my inbox. And the reply notification emails have been coming through fine as well, again in my inbox, since Thursday.

I have already ensured these are not going into my spam folder, as they were for two days earlier this week.

So something in the rebranding has upset the routine. I’ll see if the digest arrives overnight at 3 a.m. CST, as it always has. Again, it could be the way the emails are now being processed through someone else’s servers. I’m just trying to narrow in on the actual problem by collecting technical information. 

Jim R. posted:

Sorry, Rich, but that’s not the complete answer.

Jim, my answer IS the complete answer as far as the forum server is concerned. This server sends the mail on a very precise schedule, every day at the same times.

What happens to the mail after it is sent from here is not something I can control or help with. Evidently it is being held up somewhere in the path to your email inbox at AOL. Either AOL is delaying it or your local ISP is delaying it.

Last edited by OGR CEO-PUBLISHER

Just as a follow-up to this earlier problem, I’ll add that it seems to have worked itself out. However, there has definitely been a change that may have been related to that glitch.

The daily digest, for years precisely delivered at 3:01 a.m. Central time, is now precisely being delivered at 5:30 a.m. Something in that schedule change disrupted the normal interaction between the various servers involved last week. With no technical information, however, I won’t be able to figure it out or proceed further.

Which is fine. The point is now moot.

John H posted:

Please explain what whitelisting is, and what is the crowdstack email address so I can add it to my address book. My email is with Frontiernet, but to access it on line I have to go through Yahoo, and that password is not working.

I'm checking back on this topic to say I just received an email about John H's (no relation ) reply above.  So it took over 6 hours.  And I haven't received any other emails regarding the thread.  Before last week, I would have immediately received an email every single time someone responded.  

I've done a little investigating about this and have found some pertinent information.

Yahoo is temporarily deferring email from the forum server "...due to user complaints." How about that. It's hard to get email from the forum server if you lodge complaints with your email service about getting the emails!   

This will cause mail delivery to people with Yahoo email addresses to be delayed. AOL uses Yahoo mail servers on the back end, so that's why those of you with AOL addresses are having problems, too. It also sounds like a lot of you are finding your email notifications in your spam folder. All the complaints about missing or delayed emails in this thread (with one exception) are from people with either Yahoo or AOL email addresses.

One way to help this is to be sure you have whitelisted email coming from crowdstack.com. Also, add the email address "alerts@crowdstack.com" to your address book. JohnH, "whitelisting" is a procedure where you specifically tell your email provider that emails from the domain crowdstack.com are not spam and you want to receive them.

Unfortunately, we can't do anything about Yahoo/AOL deferring the email, we just have to hope they decide to start delivering it when they receive it.

Thank you Rich for looking into this.  My problem has been what MikeH describes; late notifications or none at all.  I've checked Spam daily, but it is always empty.  Yes, I'm using Yahoo, and I understand that it is out of your hands.  I will sign up for the daily digest and see if that is of use to me.  I guess a solution would be to open an email account with another provider just for OGR messages, which is fine if I see I am missing out on topics.

Thank you again, Rich!

Thanks Rich! I suspect there is a “rest of the story here”. I’m sure OGR forum users weren’t complaining to Yahoo. I suspect it has something to do with Crowdstack and Yahoo.  Maybe it’s another Crowdstack customer sending spam. Maybe it’s a commercial dispute. Nothing you can do at this point. Maybe we should all complain to Yahoo about the delay. It’s very annoying. Yahoo is not delivering all the mail and the ones they do deliver are still coming days late. This is the notification system for a lot of us and triggers our use of the forum. Sometimes I just read the emails unless I need to respond or watch a video that was posted. I’d hate to have to change my email address at this point.

George

Rich Melvin posted:

Those of you having problems with AOL and Yahoo might consider getting another email address from another provider, just to use for this forum. As much as I dislike Google, I don't think we've ever had any trouble with Gmail.

Your local ISP can also provide you with an email address.

OK, I just did this and it works just fine. I have a Gmail account too, so I switched my account email to that. I left my display email as my Yahoo account. I already received several notifications in Gmail.

BTW, I was using the Gmail account for a second OGR profile that was setup a while ago for a digital subscription (long story, it's inactive). I had to first change that email to use it. Unfortunately, I only had an AOL mail address to change it to. I still haven't received the verification email!

I looked this up. Yahoo is notorious for this. They do this with any platform that sends high volume emails. I found that they were doing it to folks who use ZOHO CRM for their business marketing. They basically send timeout messages back to the platform. Also, Yahoo won't do anything about it. It is a Crowdstack problem to solve, and it's not easy. 

At least this is working for me now.

George

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