Intermittent undeliverable email

You are using a mail proxy that does not identify itself properly.

I need to know the IP addresses of the sending email server without it you will continue to have issues.

Emails were sent by Robert Delaney and Norm Bevc to the officers lists and to the
e.g.
From: Mail Delivery System [mailto:noreply@cisco.com]
Sent: Saturday, January 26, 2019 9:53 AM
To: Bevc, Norman@EDD
Subject: Undeliverable: We need speaker today!!! Challenge yourself!!!!

The following message to <members-9010@toastmastersclubs.org> was undeliverable.
The reason for the problem:
5.4.7 - Delivery expired (message too old) 'timeout'

I noticed that the toastmastersclubs websites were not accessible the Saturday morning the weekend before.
Perhaps the servers are down on Saturdays?

We decided just to go back to using email lists for now. They are government employees at a different agency than mine and they only intermittently have this happen. Other staff at the same agency don;t have this, but they are not officers and so send much less email.

Intermittent errors are the hardest to diagnose.

We are trying the old way of not using the mailing lists.This has different challenges!

As far as the mail proxy, it is set up by the hosting provider and I can only assume they set it up correctly. (I have not had any of these types of issues with any email other that FTH. In fact, FTH has been fine for years and only started having this issue in the last week or so.) As far as IP goes, I believe it is a server pool so that the email goes out from whatever server is free at the time, so there no constant IP address.

But, enough about me. I started this discussion because someone else is having the same issue. I mainly wanted to raise awareness that there is more than one person with this issue. My goal was to help FTH find the issue, not just try to find something wrong with my server. For example, if many cars are getting flat tires on a stretch of road, you could look at each tire and say it has a rip, but you would be better off looking at the road to see what is destroying the tires. Maybe looking at FTH might have more long term value than trying to solve each individual incident.

1. Check to make sure your custom domains are set up correctly for email.
MX record and A record for mail.toastmastersclubs.org must be set in the DNS.

2. You need to check for member email addresses that used to be good, but are no longer valid in your Membership Management.

3. Make sure that your email system is not grey-listing *outgoing* email to destinations unknown to your email system system.

4. Put our server address in your contacts for your email system. This effectively whitelists it.

5. We only have one server. It is *seldom* down. All of my updates have to be done on the "live" server, because we have no other recourse. I have methods to keep coding errors to a minimum (contain problems), but sometimes issues still get missed.

6. Keep in mind that email systems are always changing and always tweaking their security. For example, more are using specialized firewalls such as Barracuda. We do what we can to keep up, but it is an ongoing challenge, and do not have the time, money or resources to invest in monitoring services like large companies do.

7. Be careful to not so quickly point the finger at the FTH system (or us). Historically, we know that most issues are user related. (not always, but most of the time) That does not mean that we are tone-deaf and unwilling to assist, but keep in mind that we are volunteers and we are human, too. We do the best we can with what we have to work with.

8. If you really want to help us investigate issues, we usually need more than the typical "we have a this problem". Particularly, with email, we will sometimes need you to do some tests that we dictate so that we can check for specific behavior. Our list server has some testing functionality built into it to allow for this with specific emails.

Your email server IP address may be blocked by our fire wall we will need to see the full email header from the bounce email.

I know we’re all volunteers. The email system in question is not my agency so I cannot interact with their IT and those who reported it don’t understand that part of it. So we’re stuck.
Most Toastmasters are not technically inclined so I’ve recommended we go with whatever is easier for the user unless someone in IT from the affected agency volunteers their time to troubleshoot it.

Recently the club decided they don’t like long email lists so are back to using the FTH email or pay for another service.

I wish you guys were paid and integrated with the main Toastmasters website including membership management. As long as we have a shoestring we can keep tying it back together.