The wonderful @charlt drew my attention to some emails from the eHealth Forum were not getting through. When looking into it, I noticed that for some reason emails to a variety of people have been bouncing over the past few days. This is inevitable to some degree (typically less than 10%), but it has been running at 60-70%;
I’ve updated and rebuilt the site (which should sort any glitches that have crept in) and added DMARC, which is an extra layer of authentication that our mail API service (mailgun.com) now supports.
I’ll continue to monitor this over the next few weeks. Do holler if you think that you might not be receiving emails any more.
On that note, email is becoming a less and less effective way to communicate due to the increasingly hostile corporate and cybercriminal landscape. Looking at how we can reduce the email traffic from the Forum whilst remaining an effective place to communicate will remain a key priority of the Forum.
This seems to be due to all Microsoft email servers refusing to accept ehealthforum.nz emails. I’m not sure why, but it sure does not look easy to resolve.
I’ve been trying to achieve that for Health NZ for years now! I gave it a good go a year ago, but got nowhere. If you’ve got any ideas of how we could achieve that please share them.
And this seems Microsoft-wide, so Health NZ would only sort about half. Any idea how we get on their whitelist???
A very good thought, but I don’t think so - they have caused us trouble before when a small flood of their crew joined us, thinking that we were them! In fact, we started off on forum.hinz.org.nz for that very reason.
But this episode seems much more technical. I’ve dropped a report on meta.discourse.org to see if it is just us or if others are experiencing the same thing. Of note, it is the sort of thing you don’t discover quickly unless someone complains!
Everything seems to have resolved now, and I now know a lot more about email deliverability (and Microsoft!).
In the end, it seems to be due to us sharing an email sending (SMTP) IP address with others to keep costs reasonable, and one of them has been a naughty spammer.
To prevent this in future would likely cost $1000 a year or so. Small fry for a large organisation, but a big problem for smaller fry.
