TOPIC:

I searched your forum and could not find anything exactly like we are experiencing on our club website, www.lunchoutloud.com. Our club number is 889564 and our official club name is Lunch Out Loud Toastmasters.

In the past couple weeks for some reason one of our officers is not receiving emails going to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. I am normally the one who changes/adds things to our freetoasthost site, but most of the other officers have admin access for their specific duties.

I would rather not list personal emails on this forum, but would be happy to send a message to someone if specific email addresses are needed.

I since something is going on with the freetoasthost mail server for our site, but am not certain. What I do know is that the officer who is not receiving emails from This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. is not seeing them get to their mail server.

Any help with this problem would be appreciated.

Pat Brodbent

I can see the emails going out from our server and being accepted by serveral of your officer email addresses.

WHO says they are not receiving?

Brian, I sent you a private msg with the email address. It is my email address and I have a tmp work around by adding a second email address on my profile.

Up until the last week or two I was getting emails from officers (at) lunchoutloud.com. I know there is the other half of the equation of the receiving email server for emails coming from officers (at) lunchoutloud.com, but one has to start somewhere in troubleshooting where the problem is.

I have logged directly into my mail server and have not seen any emails from officers (at) lunchoutloud.com in more than a week. My guess is they are either not leaving the mail server for freetoasthost or have recently been blocked by my mail server at hostgator.com.

Pat

Someone from your server company tried to hack into our server the IP range is blocked.

hacker WEBSITEWELCOME.COM - Tue Oct 21 15:44:48 2014

Brian, I need more details on who, when, ip range, ect tried to hack into your server. As you can imagine when I contact my mail server company they will probably need a lot more data than what you have posted below.

When did freetoasthost start blocking my email address? Is it customary to not let a user know his/her emails are being blocked?

Can I ask that you post more details or send me an email to the address I sent you? I can provide you another email if you wish.

Thanks,

Pat

Your mail server should now be able to send and accept email from us.

Pat & Brian,

I am experiencing this same issue. I am the Area 11 Governor and a member of several Toastmaster clubs, and I use the FreeToastHost site for all of them. A few weeks ago, I noticed that I was no longer receiving emails through the system. I used to get the agenda updates twice a week from the Vice President of Education (VPE) on the Bellingham Evening Toastmasters website 4470.toastmastersclubs.org, but I no longer receive those emails. I've also been sending meeting minutes to the members of Toastmasters by the Sea through the members email address on the FreeToastHost website tbts.toastmastersclubs.org, but I'm not getting a copy sent to me, where previously I was.

I'm assuming from this thread that FreeToastHost has decided to block several domains servers, which may have included mine. Can I get some help unblocking my email address? I prefer to provide my email address privately to reduce spambots from picking it up.

Thanks,

@ndrea Hamblin
Area 11 Governor
Clubs 626, 3262351, 1383833, 4470

Andrea, I have not had time to test that my original email address is no longer being blocked by the FreeToastHost system. The work-a-round I have in place right now was to change my email address in my profile on each of the FreeToastHost sites I use. Luckily I have many email addresses I can use that are through two different mail servers.

This work-a-round allowed me to at least get group emails that were sent to officers@, treasurer@, and members@.

If you have another email address you can use it will have to be from a different mail server than the one being blocked. The bad news for me as a current Treasurer was that I did not get many emails during this outage relating to member renewals.

I was hoping to hear back from Brian on how others, like yourself, might be notified when their emails were being blocked vs just blocking them without any notice.

Regards,

Pat Brodbent
Immediate Past M6 Area Governor
Treasurer - Club 889564

Pat,

Thank you for your quick reply. Changing the email address to one with a different domain server is a good suggestion for a temporary work-around. However, I would prefer not to do that. I own my domain name andreahamblin.com, and the address I use is specifically for receiving Toastmaster emails. If at all possible, I would like to have my domain name reinstated.

On another note, I wonder how many other people are no longer receiving emails and not even aware that their address has been blocked? It would be nice if FreeToastHost emailed these individuals so that they could proactively do something about it. I have several members that are not tech savvy. They probably aren't aware that they are no longer receiving system emails, which defeats one benefit of using the FreeToastHost system.

@ndrea
Area 11 Governor, District 2

We do not have the people, resources, or money to do such a proactive thing--you presume too much. We are a small group of committed volunteers with lives outside of FTH... none of us is on the TM HQ payroll.

We rely heavily on automated solutions. Anything that gets blocked is done via a rule in a config file on the server. Humans are seldom involved in the blocking part, just the unblocking part. There is no way we are going to send an email to a blocked email domain address--we are not going to compound a situation that the server has already flagged as a possible problem.

Because of that, the best we could do is some sort of automated check by the email handler to determine if a recipient is blocked, and sending a bounce message back to the sender. The check would have to happen for *every* email that is processed. However, that would then slow down the email and we would start getting complaints about the email speed. Also, this does not address blocked *senders*.

Bottom Line: If there was a good solution that we had already thought of, it probably would have already been implemented.

Steve, thanks for the reply. I understand the challenges of small teams and limited/no budgets. I get it!

Since you have mostly all automated rules that do blocking without any current follow-up to those being blocked this means you "could" have dozens, if not hundreds, of email addresses being blocked. In the clubs I work with the vast majority of members don't have the technical knowledge to figure out their emails are being blocked. In other words if they don't know where the problem lies they won't know who to call.

This environment creates a situation where one officer/member says they sent something and some officers/members saying they never received it. Now it turns into pointing fingers about personal email problems, spam filters/issues, ...etc.

You sound like a really smart guy and I would think there is a way to modify your current rule, the same rule that already checks all emails, and add another expression that copies any blocked emails to a file/queue/list. Now write another rule that runs once a day, maybe at 3AM, at a Low Priority sending a canned email saying your email address has been blocked and what they need to do to get it unblocked.

At the end of this rule copy/append the list to a file called something like "Sent-Appended-Email-List" with a date stamp on each email and clear this list for running the next night. Now you not only have automatically sent an email to those being blocked, but you have one file that keeps getting appended each night with those emails that have been notified.

Is this something that could work?

Thanks,

Pat

We are not going to send emails to domains or email addresses that are blocked--that is not open to discussion. You may know that you are not a spammer or hacker, but the server (or sometimes even us) does not know that. It only sees behavior that the rule tells it should result in a block. We are not going to tip off spammers/hackers that they are being blocked via an automated email to the effect--that would be doing them a favor.

I am very sorry that you were affected by this, but unfortunately, your case is what I would refer to as a "false positive". Some of those are likely going to happen, unfortunately. We will keep tweaking the rules and system to try to prevent the false positives, but some will probably occur. That may sound like I don't care--actually, quite the opposite.

I have a non-email approach in mind to providing the communication you are seeking, but it is not yet developed, and I am not going to pre-announce functionality that has not even designed yet. The key is to provide the feedback loop in a way that does not involve email.

Pat Please try your email now