[E-trademarks] the listserv is again functioning

[asarabia2]

I would ask Namecheap for a discount.  Once companies start paying for 
their mistakes, they may get better at fixing them. Even if they don't, 
you get some compensation.

Another idea is for you to set up a gofundme once a year to help with 
the costs. I would  gladly contribute.

Regards,

Tony Sarabia

On 5/4/2024 1:09 AM, Carl Oppedahl via E-trademarks wrote:
>
> 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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