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<p>Hello fellow listserv members.</p>
<p>About 56 hours ago, some internal system at Namecheap got a wrong
answer. And the e-Trademarks listserv got shut down. Now it is
working again, after 24 emails back and forth and an escalation to
higher-ups at Namecheap. That's the executive summary. here are
the details, for those who have the time and energy to read all of
this.<br>
</p>
<p>Namecheap has some internal system that tries to identify
outbound spam from its customers. There seem to be at least three
triggers in this system.</p>
<p><i><b>A first trigger, </b></i>it seems, is the event of a large
number of emails being sent at about the same time, that have the
same subject line. There is some internal system at Namecheap
that watches for such events, and when it happens, the system
triggers an alarm, and the Namecheap customer finds that their
outbound emails are shut down.</p>
<p>Never mind that this behavior is exactly what a listserv (an
email discussion group) is supposed to do. If the listserv were
to avoid ever sending a large number of emails with the same
subject line, it would mean the listserv is broken.</p>
<p>The listserv function is a particular advertised feature for the
level of service that I am paying for at Namecheap. The level of
service at Namecheap that I selected, and am paying for,
specifically provides for the customer being able to operate a
listserv. So at this level of service it ought not to be the case
that normal listserv behavior would be wrongly tagged as spam.</p>
<p><b><i>A second trigger,</i></b> it seems, is the number of emails
sent per hour. The level of service that I am paying for at
Namecheap permits as many as ten thousand outbound emails per
hour. The event that happened that led to the listserv being shut
down was the sending of 1227 emails during an hour. (It was the
monthly reminder to subscribers of their membership in the
listserv, that happens every month on the first day of the
month.) You will note that the number 1227 is smaller than the
number 10000.</p>
<p><i><b>A third trigger, </b></i>it seems, is related to some
internal monitor of something like the level of the processor
workload for the part of the hosting platform that handles
outbound emails. Our listserv is hosted on some particular
physical machine that also serves a couple of dozen other
Namecheap customers. They call this kind of service "shared
virtual server" service. Namecheap has some system or device that
inspects all of the outbound emails on that particular physical
machine, to try to figure out if they are spam. And this system,
I guess, does not scale well. It gets completely overwhelmed
sometimes and then all of the outbound emails from all of the
Namecheap customers who are hosted on that physical machine get
clogged up or something.</p>
<p>As I say, it looks like this spam filter on the outbound emails
was poorly designed and does not scale well. Something like
that. Perfectly normal listserv behavior like a few hundred or a
thousand emails somehow overwhelms the spam filter system.</p>
<p>What probably needs to happen is the Namecheap people doing some
kind of throttling inside their software that provides the
listserv function. Instead of sending out all one thousand emails
at once, which I guess overwhelms some downstream processor, they
probably need to make some adjustment in the software that
provides the listserv function, so that it dribbles the emails out
over the span of a few minutes instead of all at once. Or, better
yet, they would need to rework the software that they use to
monitor for spam so that it can scale well enough to deal with
normal listserv behavior.</p>
<p>There have been four times in the past few months that Namecheap
shut down my listservs (including e-Trademarks) and eventually
turned them back on after a lot of struggle. These four times
were:</p>
<ul
style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px 0px 0px 1.5em; padding: 0px; list-style: disc; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: "Libre Franklin", "Helvetica Neue", helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-color: initial;">
<li style="box-sizing: inherit;">May 1, 2024, case number
PRB-650-91372</li>
<li style="box-sizing: inherit;">February 21, 2024, case number
JET-420-91825</li>
<li style="box-sizing: inherit;">November 6, 2023, case number
LZW-313-84957</li>
<li style="box-sizing: inherit;">January 9, 2023, case number
KHX-716-74404</li>
</ul>
<p></p>
<p>For now, the Namecheap tech support people tell me that they have
taken some internal step to keep such shutdowns from happening
again. My guess is that this is not some across-the-board
internal step that would protect all of Namecheap's customers
(that use the listserv function) from ill-advised shutdowns of
service. My guess is that this is sort of a sticky note on the
computer screens of a bunch of people in the legal-and-abuse area
of Namecheap, and the sticky note says something like "for this
particular physical hosting server, and for this particular
customer who is one of the many customers hosted on this physical
server, when this alarm sounds, do not automatically shut down the
user's outbound email function." <br>
</p>
<p>Anyway, hopefully the listserv will continue to function for some
time, until the sticky notes dry out and fall down from the
computer screens. <br>
</p>
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