[E-trademarks] the listserv is again functioning

[Carl Oppedahl]

Hello fellow listserv members.

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.

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.

/*A first trigger, */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.

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.

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.

*/A second trigger,/* 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.

/*A third trigger, */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.

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.

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.

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:

  * May 1, 2024, case number PRB-650-91372
  * February 21, 2024, case number JET-420-91825
  * November 6, 2023, case number LZW-313-84957
  * January 9, 2023, case number KHX-716-74404

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."

Anyway, hopefully the listserv will continue to function for some time, 
until the sticky notes dry out and fall down from the computer screens.








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