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MRH email private messaging is unreliable? MRH forum help
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MRH Founder 17,364 posts joef MRH Founder 17,364 posts
joef
On another thread, the following Off-topic comment got posted ...
Quote:
Quote:

I sent to you a message thru this forum over 3 weeks ago giving you my name, E-mail address and cell #.........you had stated before about having visitors......came back yesterday from my 3 week trip to Florida.

I'm sorry but I never received any message from you ... I have no idea how reliable this email forwarding system really is as this is not the first time that a message got lost or didn't get forwarded.

Michael

Georgetown & Allen Mountain Railroad

Rather than drag that other thread off topic with conversation around this issue, we're moving the posts here into a new thread.

Joe Fugate​
Publisher, Model Railroad Hobbyist magazine

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Rick Sutton Prolific poster 4,356 posts
Rick Sutton

Email forwarding

Agreed, totally unreliable. In fact, I think it should be disabled as it causes more confusion and hurt feelings than it provides anything useful.
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michaelrose55 Super User 3,458 posts
michaelrose55

Email forwarding

Quote:

Email forwarding

Mon, 2017-08-14 13:09 —  Rick Sutton

Agreed, totally unreliable. In fact, I think it should be disabled as it causes more confusion and hurt feelings than it provides anything useful.

Shouldn't it be fixed???

Michael

The Breitenbach - Rosenheim Railroad V4
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Virginian and Lake Erie Super User 9,215 posts
Virginian and Lake Erie

Sometimes it works just fine.

Sometimes it works just fine. I agree with Michael and the elves get it fixed. Also if sending someone an email message it might be wise to address a post on their blog to them asking them if they got the message, if not a phone number might be a good idea.

Rob in Texas

MRH Blog / Prep for an Operating Session / Delving Into the Past / The Club Blog / Youtube / etmrc.org
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joef MRH Founder 17,364 posts
joef

Why it fails

The reason the private messaging email fails is simple -- spam filters. The MRH private emailing is simple enough -- it just sends an email. But more than a few email providers just eat the email that's sent -- and I mean EAT. They don't even deliver it, they just trash it immediately. Other email providers will deliver it, but send it straight to your spam folder. Long story short, it's email in general that's become unreliable these days. If you MUST get in contact with someone, DO NOT rely on email. You need a PHONE NUMBER or a mailing address. It's sad but true. We have more than a few emails that we can't get delivered ... yet the recipient blasts us for not responding -- yet our emails are getting eaten as spam when we try to respond so we're stuck. Without a phone number, we can't respond and our name becomes mud because we "did not" respond. Like I said, email today is NOT reliable if you MUST contact somebody, and MRH's private emailing system CANNOT DO A THING about that. Thanks to all the true spam today, email has become a much less useful way to communicate, unfortunately. Definitely not as reliable as the phone or snail mail. This is especially true for commercial emails like ours. Some outfits like HOTMAIL just refuse to deliver *any* of our emails because they're from a commercial site. Yes, it cuts down on spam. But it also means legit emails just don't make it, too. Very frustrating.

Joe Fugate​
Publisher, Model Railroad Hobbyist magazine

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michaelrose55 Super User 3,458 posts
michaelrose55

Joe, all of that may be true

Joe, all of that may be true but... I use my own mail server and have direct access to the spam folder and there is no communication from MRH. I'm a member of several other model railroad forums as well and MRH is the only one that has this problem. All the others manage to deliver messages without any issues.

Michael

The Breitenbach - Rosenheim Railroad V4
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Bremner Prolific poster 1,217 posts
Bremner

spam...

Michael, do you use Sorbs blacklist as a filter? I did a little snooping and MRH's mail server is on that blacklist. Sorbs is a company that makes you pay to get off of the blacklist....

am I the only N Scale Pacific Electric Freight modeler in the world?

https://sopacincg.com 
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Rick Sutton Prolific poster 4,356 posts
Rick Sutton

PM vs email

I was very active on recording engineer forums for many years until my recent retirement. Those forums had PM (private messaging that was delivered when you logged on to the site) and email messaging to those that authorized it. Both worked every time. I sent and received messaged in the hundreds possibly thousands without a single problem. Never had one sent to spam. PM was the normal method used by the regulars.....no email involved/no spam filters in the path. I relied on it for many business transactions. At the same time, using the same system on my end, I have had problems with MRH messaging. It is not exclusively a spam filter problem on the user end or I would have experienced it from other forums. There is something wonky on the MRH side. That's why I believe it should be dropped or changed to a different type of system like PM.
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joef MRH Founder 17,364 posts
joef

MRH is popular -- a double-edged sword

As far as website's go, MRH is quite popular and highly rated by Google. We get a LOT of traffic. But what happens is our site has constant attempts at being exploited because of its popularity. That includes email exploitation. For instance, we found out recently someone had hijacked one of our email addresses and used it as the FROM address in a mass pornography email blast. Things like this have put the MRH site and its emails on many blacklists, and getting off those blacklists is a hit or miss operation. We also are not a big IT shop that has full time people who can stay on top of this stuff. In a sense, our popularity is too large for our staffing. As a result, we get hacked a lot and we're suffering the consequences, such as being on email spam lists. Being on these lists PREVENTS the emails in some cases from even being DELIVERED, much less ending up in your local spam folder. Long story short, no tool in the world will fix what the hackers have done to taint email for us. We would have to completely change our URLs and email addresses to fix it -- and that would only be a temporary solution. We would get hacked all over again because we're just not capital-rich enough to be able to afford the full time staff to deal with hacker crap. If there is a class of people who I hope get what they richly deserve, it's hackers who violate legit web outfits like us just trying to make our way without charging an arm-and-a-leg for everything. To me, a hacker ransacking your web resources is no different than some scoundrel coming into your house and urinating on your carpet. The sense of violation is very similar. Anyhow, time to get off my soapbox.

Joe Fugate​
Publisher, Model Railroad Hobbyist magazine

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rickwade Prolific poster (deceased) 6,447 posts
rickwade

A caution about posting your email address

Spam Bots cruise the web looking for and capturing email addresses for spam and other malicious purposes.  If you post an email address it's best to create a graphic with the address distorted so the Bots can't read it.  Here's an example:

ureemail.jpg 

Rick

img_4768.jpg 

The Richlawn Railroad Website - Featuring the L&N in HO  / MRH Blog  / MRM #123

Mt. 22: 37- 40
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Warflight Prolific poster 3,008 posts
Warflight

Hackers... and exceptions...

When I first signed up for the Bachmann board, back when i first got back into model railroading, I ended up having to make exceptions in my e-mail in order to get e-mail from them. I couldn't even get an order confirmation on some parts I ordered... no doubt for similar issues. So when I found MRH, and signed up, before doing anything, I made those exceptions for MRH in my e-mail as well. I get PMs from MRH, and as Joe can attest, he can e-mail me just fine. But, I had to make it happen. (using Hotmail, but I'm told pretty much all e-mail providers have a way to make exceptions for certain sites that may be blocked... hell if I know how on most of them, but how hard could it be? It's gotta be easier than most of the modeling we do!)
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Rich_S Prolific poster 1,011 posts
Rich_S

@JoeF

I second what Rick Sutton mentioned about Private Messaging. This is the only forum I belong to that does not have private messaging. All the other model railroad forums will tell you if you have a private message when you long into the forum. Some will even send you and email alerting you to a new private message.

Joe, Instead of dealing with emails, I'd suggest looking into setting up some type of Private Messaging here on the forum. I know if I was hosting an operating session, I would not want to post my email address or contact information in a forum post, I'd rather communicate that information to fellow modelers via a Private message. Just like Rick Wade mentioned, spam bots are always searching the web looking for email addresses and with the popularity of this forum, I'll bet it's hit quite often by several different spam bots.

 

Cheers,

Rich S.
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Chris Palermo patentwriter Frequent poster 969 posts
Chris Palermo patentwriter

Blacklisting

Quote:

For instance, we found out recently someone had hijacked one of our email addresses and used it as the FROM address in a mass pornography email blast. Things like this have put the MRH site and its emails on many blacklists, and getting off those blacklists is a hit or miss operation.

Unfortunately this means that MRH's email service probably never can be relied on and it is not really MRH's fault. Receivers' servers will continue to ask their security servers whether MRH is spammy, and those servers will reply Yes so the message is dropped. My business went through a similar experience about 3 years ago and the subject sending domain associated with the business is still blacklisted in selective servers. The operators of these servers often are non-responsive or, in the case of Google, refuse to update their records, believing that their data is authoritative and inviolate and that a business reporting "we fixed the problem" cannot be believed. The only effective response is to migrate the sending email server to a different internet domain name that has a clean reputation.
At Large North America Director, 2024-2027 - National Model Railroad Association, Inc.
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joef MRH Founder 17,364 posts
joef

That's why I say email isn't a reliable way to communicate

Quote:

The operators of these servers often are non-responsive or, in the case of Google, refuse to update their records, believing that their data is authoritative and inviolate and that a business reporting "we fixed the problem" cannot be believed.

That's why I'm saying email is not a reliable way for a business to communicate if contact MUST be made. The whole business email / mark you as a spammer system is BROKEN, for this very reason. If you get blacklisted, you're pretty much toast forever.

It's virtually impossibe to get off some blacklists -- and they don't trust you when you plead to get off and claim on a stack of Bibles you are legit. The only sure way is to go hire a specialist firm and pay big bucks to have their lawyers talk to the blacklister's lawyers and convince them you are legit. It's a total racket.

We get emails every so often asking for a response and they don't give us any way to respond except via email. We try to respond and it just bounces, never reaching the person.

It gets very frustating when they keep emailing us asking us how come we're so unresponsive? Finally, they generally send a nasty-gram that says something like, "Well you MRH guys are the biggest unresponsive jerks alive -- I will NEVER have anything to do with you guys ever again. What a JOKE. Good-BYE!!!"

We just have to sit here and endure it because our emails aren't getting through. Sometimes, I can use my personal email and get through, but even then it sometimes still bounces.

If you must get a response from us when contacting us via email, please include a phone number!

The phone and snail mail are still reliable, but not business EMAIL.

Joe Fugate​
Publisher, Model Railroad Hobbyist magazine

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Dave K skiloff Prolific poster 4,030 posts
Dave K skiloff

My opinion

Forget emails and go to PM's as has been suggested.  You've said it yourself - email is unreliable.  At least members could contact each other privately and you don't have to worry about emails or spam filters.

Dave
Playing around in HO and N scale since 1976
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John Peterson Regular poster 378 posts
John Peterson

Private Messages ...

PMs would be the preferred solution I would think.  Seems to work well on the other forums that I am on.  When I log in, there is an indication that I have a PM, also, I can set it up to where I get an eMail notification if I get a PM (I do not use this option, as I generally log into my various forums on a daily basis ...).

 

 
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Warflight Prolific poster 3,008 posts
Warflight

The problem with PMs...

From what I understand, very few subscribers actually use the forums, and I would suspect even fewer would use any messenger service the forum would provide.

The good news, however, that said, is a HELL of a LOT of people read the magazine! I mean, forum use is just the tip of that iceberg!
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Neil Erickson NeilEr Moderator 5,770 posts
Neil Erickson NeilEr

White list

My BlueHost server allows me to "White List" servers so they will always go through. Check with your provider. I can't think of a time that I'd sent an email through the Contact feature and it didn't get a response. Sometimes simply adding MRH as a contact will resolve the problem as well. Just a couple ideas. 

Neil Erickson, Hawai’i 

My Blogs
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Rich_S Prolific poster 1,011 posts
Rich_S

@JoeF

Quote:

That's why I say email isn't a reliable way to communicate

Joe, I agree with you, but why aren't you looking into Private messaging? Private Messaging is not email, Private Messaging only exists on your forum server and is a way for user to communicate without posting a public message on the forum.

 

 

Cheers,

Rich S.
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Rick Sutton Prolific poster 4,356 posts
Rick Sutton

Warflight

Valid point about magazine only readers not being able to use PM. But, in my opinion, PM is a perk of being active on the forum. It's the forum where we meet and introduce ourselves to each other and as such PM is a way for forum users to communicate one on one. PM is sort of a second level of forum life and as such should only be available to forum participants. The forum and by extension PM would be available to ALL MRH subscribers but only accessible through the forum.
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joef MRH Founder 17,364 posts
joef

This is what's available

Remember our site uses DRUPAL, right? Drupal 6 to be exact. This is the private messaging module in Drupal 6. There is another PM module but it's decrecated and considered a huge security risk and our site hosting provider will not allow us to use it. The latest version of Drupal is Drupal 8. Our hosting provider is a Drupal specialist that provides hosting for high-traffic Drupal sites like us. They do NOT recommend Drupal 7 because it has speed issues. Drupal 8 is still too new and does not yet have a rich library of extension modules developed for it, so our hosting provider says we need to wait some more before upgrading. So unless someone wants to develop us a nice new Drupal 6 private messaging module for free that does what you describe, we wait for Drupal 8 to get there. Hope Drupal 8 gets a private messaging module that does what you describe or it will work the same in D8. The current PM module will stay enabled because we use it and it works good enough for us to keep it active. Others also report decent results using it. Still others say they never can get it to work. As Warflight says, my guess is those folks who have no success getting PM messages need to add mhmag.com and model-railroad-hobbyist.com to their email white lists and then they would get the PM emails. So it's a big darned-if-you-do, darned-if-you-don't quagmire. "Just fix it" isn't an option for a magazine like us that's basically a break-even business. We use Drupal because it's very good FREE open source content management web software. If there is a free module that does what you ask that's secure, we'll implement it. In this case, the answer is: there is NO secure free module that does what you ask.

Joe Fugate​
Publisher, Model Railroad Hobbyist magazine

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Virginian and Lake Erie Super User 9,215 posts
Virginian and Lake Erie

I don't worry about spam

I don't worry about spam bots. When I get e mail if it does not sound legit I delete it with out opening it. It seems there are lots of places that sell their email lists for profit so it is possible to catch lots of spam. I can thin that with the click of a button. I am real pleased when I get an email from someone one here and respond unless I miss it or if I have not checked the email for a few days. Everything has risk involved, with the web we have multiple countries involved and it is I think really an interesting thing to read posts from someone in another country. Imagine if the world were run by model railroaders we would not have the conflicts we have now.

Instead it would be what is the best scale? ready to run or kit, point to point or continuous run, steam or diesel, car cards or switch lists. Just having some fun with this. Maybe we could have some type of an email encoder that would do what Rick suggested above so we could contact each other.

Rob in Texas

MRH Blog / Prep for an Operating Session / Delving Into the Past / The Club Blog / Youtube / etmrc.org
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UPWilly Prolific poster 1,961 posts
UPWilly

Works for me ...

I have fourteen separate personal email addresses acquired through response from the MRH email process. I do not recall any that I have not received a response from. I can wait for Drupal 8 to be implemented.

 

Bill D.

egendpic.jpg 

N Scale (1:160), not N Gauge. DC (analog), Stapleton PWM Throttle.

Proto-freelance Southwest U.S. 2nd half 20th Century.

Keep on trackin'
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