TOPIC:

Hello Support Team,

Our Club's VPE noticed that her emails are not being sent out. She was recently on vacation and had an auto-response to her email which I believed caused the bounced too many times issue.

I logged on to the admin Membership management page and her email was changed to noemail-1553979648@toastmasters. I changed it back to her original email address but that didn't seem to work.

What is the solution to this issue?

Thank you

Club 5631
5631.toastmastersclubs.org
Torrance Chamber of Commerce Toastmaters

Junji Choi

There is an on vacation option in the member profile so they will not be sent emails

" I changed it back to her original email address but that didn't seem to work."

What does this mean? (didn't seem to work)

The record in our bounce log db table is purposely deleted at the time when the bouncing email address is cleared out to allow the email address to be manually re-entered and used if the issue is ever resolved.

Hi Brian, thanks for the vacation option information.

Steve, I replaced the noemail-153.. with her email address from the Site Admin/ Membership Management but she said her emails are still not being sent out. I just checked again, and her email address on record is back to being noemail-153...

It may be that her email provider is still bouncing emails from the server despite the autoresponder being off now.

We are allowing 3 bounces to an address ... On the 4th bounce, the email address is cleared out (e.g. noemail- in the member records or just deleted) wherever it is found in the system. If it is successfully cleared out (vs bounce but not found in the db), then the count in the bounce log tracking record is also reset to zero to allow the address to be re-entered and used again in the future if the issue is resolved.

However, if the email address is still problematic, but re-entered anyway, it will get "bounced out" again. (bounced out is my term for this)

It may be that your VPE needs to use an alternate email address. From our perspective, the email either goes through or it doesn't (bounces), and we are only going to allow so many attempts before we give up and stop trying anymore. You can have your VPE try to whitelist the FTH server or email addresses in her email system, but your VPE will need to work that out, and you would need to manually enter the email address again. Also, we are not going to try to go out of our way to troubleshoot an email address issue for an external email system that we may not know much about and do not really have any responsibility for.

We cannot just send emails that always bounce ... that will eventually impact the FTH email reputation.

Thank you Steve, our VPE has contacted her email provider. I will keep you guys posted about this case.

Steve and Brian,

Our VPE contacted her email service and they whitelisted FTH server and it worked! However, she just realized that although she is receiving emails again, her emails are not being sent out. Her E-mail address (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) is not on our email black list either.

What could be the problem now?

Thank you.

We are not blocking her email server.

I do not see any email from her since April 1, 2019

What email address is she emailing to and what are the bounce messages?

Hi Brian,

She is sending it to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

She isn’t receiving any bounce messages. It’s that nobody is receiving her emails.

The server is not seeing her emails is she sure she has spelt the email address correctly?

Yes, she has CCed my personal email to the emails she sent out. I received it on my personal email but didn’t receive anything from the TM server.

Brian wrote:

We are not blocking her email server.

I do not see any email from her since April 1, 2019

What email address is she emailing to and what are the bounce messages?

Brian, this is kind of incorrect. She was still in our bounce log.
I reset her bounce count to zero. She should be fine now.
This is *exactly* the scenario I was trying to discuss w/ you via our email discussion.

She was still listed in our bounce log... so no email would be processed.

I have reset the bounce count for her address... Have her try now.

If her email address starts bouncing again in the future, she may be blocked again.

Hi Steve and Brian, it's working now!

For future reference,
it seems as though an member should go to their TM page and exclude themselves from the Club Email List during their vacation rather than have an autoresponder. Is this true?
Our VPE had an autoresponder sent that stated she's on vacation. I believe that counted as an "bounced" email. Please correct me if I'm wrong,

I wish I could give you a more decisive response.

However, as Brian also knows, the whole area of email in general is a complicated, convoluted, inconsistent mess. This is not due to FreeToastHost. There is very little consistency between different email systems (e.g. MS Outlook vs Gmail vs Yahoo, etc.) and we do our best to make the system correctly decipher incoming emails given what we know about the major email systems.

We have code dedicated just to deciphering bounce messages that I developed in the last year after doing a lot of research on the topic. However, it would not surprise me if we discovered some email that did not follow the structure my code expects given the degree of inconsistency we are dealing with.

Given the above, the vacation hold settings probably are the best bet. However, I really cannot tell people that they should not use auto-responders, because those are pretty well established. Maybe use both?

HI Stevie,

Ah, that makes sense. I have a lot of respect for you and Brian for dealing with the mess and keeping the FreeToastHost running smoothly. Thanks a lot for the help on this issue.

Have a great weekend!