Email delays

[MaxBurn]

For thread reply notifications or private message email notifications I am seeing delays close to twelve hours. Got a PM at 0613 this morning but got the email at 1700.

[Dad]

I got this notification at 2 AM.

We just went through an email issue not long ago. I'll contact IT and ask them to take another look.


thx

[Dad]

The email delays are due to our site being attacked by several countries. They hit the registration system with bad email addresses. The email system sends a confirmation email then bounces back. This stresses the system and delays the email coming to you as it is put in a que to send.

To give an example, our normal registration runs about 80 a day. In the past month it has been running 800 a day and almost 10,000 in the past few days. That's a lot of email.

Not only does it slow down the email is tries to crash the site by using bandwidth and server processor speed.

After a few days of going through the last 20,000 registration IP's I found a pattern and have banned these IP country regions. One of them was in California where a server system must have been hacked. Too bad... they can't use their ISP to join HTalk anymore but the safety and security of Htalk and our membership is far more important than a few new registrations.

Hopefully the email will get back to normal soon.

[MaxBurn]

They must be registering accounts to post spam?

Always interesting to see how bad the spam stuff is.

I don't know if you have a capatcha in there but do you have the option to show (a particularly horrible) capatcha to those IP blocks rather than blocking them?