Email and PM issues here in Canada

[aidanmoore]

Hello Administrators,

Sorry for posting here, but I'm unable to reach anyone via PM, and my email attempts to administrators are bouncing.

I can receive PM's from members, and I can post to forums, but I cannot send PM's. They remain in my Outbox and do not progress to Sent.

I tried sending an email to administrators@photomacrography.net and recieved the return below.

Any help appreciated!

Mail Delivery System <Mailer-Daemon@nzfor734.hostpapavps.net>
10:28 AM (14 minutes ago)
to me

This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

...
(ultimately generated from administrators@photomacrography.net)
Domain photomacrography.net has exceeded the max defers and failures per hour (5/5 (100%)) allowed. Message discarded.



---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Aidan Moore <aidanpsmoore@gmail.com>
To: administrators@photomacrography.net
Cc:
Bcc:
Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2019 10:27:40 -0400
Subject: Fwd: message stuck in "outbox"

Hi there,

Not sure what I'm doing wrong. I tried to reply to a PM from macro_cosmos and my private message reply remains stuck in the outbox and is not sent.

I am user "aidanmoore " and I've logged in before sending.

Any suggestions?

Thanks very much

[Pau]

Hello Aidanmoore,

If a PM is at your Outbox it has been sent but it only moves to Sentbox once it is opened (supposedly read)

I've sent a PM to you, please check if you have received it

What is intriguing is the inability to send an email to the forum admins.

[rjlittlefield]

Regarding the PM's, there's a FAQ that provides some more detail about that:

https://www.photomacrography.net/forum/ ... hp?t=33423

Question: There's a PM stuck in my Outbox. What's wrong?

This behavior is confusing but normal. When a PM is "sent", it goes simultaneously to the sender's Outbox and the recipient's Inbox. The PM will remain in the sender's Outbox until the recipient logs in and reads the message. At that time, on the sender's side the message will magically migrate from Outbox to Sentbox. You can think of it as a somewhat bizarre form of read receipt.

So, the message that appears stuck in your Outbox just means that your recipient has not read the PM you sent.

In most cases the forum software will also send a notification email to the recipient of a PM, to notify them that a PM is waiting. But some people turn off that notification. In cases where a PM goes unread for a long time, it's probably a good idea to send an email through the forum also. That will work unless the recipient has specified a non-working email address, which also happens from time to time.

Regarding your emails to the forum admins, we did in fact receive two of those, the first time-stamped Tue, 10 Sep 2019 06:41:39 -0400 and the second Tue, 10 Sep 2019 10:27:40 -0400 .

The error message that you received:

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

...
(ultimately generated from administrators@photomacrography.net)
Domain photomacrography.net has exceeded the max defers and failures per hour (5/5 (100%)) allowed. Message discarded.

is actually referring to a failed attempt of the administrators' group account, trying to forward your message to each of the administrators personally. That failure, in turn, is probably caused by incoming spam from anonymous parties, which the forum also attempts to forward but fails due to spam rejection by one or another of the administrators' individual Internet Service Providers.

Bottom line, your PMs are just waiting for your recipients to log in and read them. Each recipient may or may not have received an email notification of PM available, depending on a plethora of issues including their account settings, spam filters at their ISP, and potential failure of the email send from photomacrography.net .

I hope this explanation helps at least to calm your fears, if not to remove the annoyance of getting scary messages that are ultimately caused by incoming spam and/or overly aggressive spam filters. We are all victims of the spam plague.

--Rik