techno.blog("Dion")

Seeking Alpha has email subscription services, and lots of people are signing up for email alerts.

This has been great, but with success you often get pain.

As our user base has grown, some mailing providers have noticed, and a couple wondered if we were spam. Yahoo! did this once, but luckily we work with them as a partner, so the mail.yahoo.com team added us to their whitelist quickly.

Then gmail.com starting to tarpit us:

2006-12-12 13:13:15.143259500 delivery 32151031: deferral:
X.X.X.X_does_not_like_recipient./
Remote_host_said:_450-4.2.1_The_Gmail_user_you_are_trying_to_contact_is_receiving/
450-4.2.1_mail_at_a_rate_that_prevents_additional_messages_from/
450-4.2.1_being_delivered._Please_resend_your_message_at_a_later/
450-4.2.1_time;_if_the_user_is_able_to_receive_mail_at_that_time,/
450_4.2.1_your_message_will_be_delivered._n67si8542875pyh/
Giving_up_on_X.X.X.X./

When this happens, you are in trouble. Our email queue keeps growing and growing as they defer and defer and defer.

What adds to the problem is when some people use gmail to check their mail.

Eg. if you have a domain and forward mail to gmail as a copy, for web mail, as a spam helper, etc.

This means that you have a recursive issue that gets out of hand.

Trying to contact “the right person” is really hard. Everything is walled off behind a web form that feels like no one will ever look at it.

If anyone happens to know a nicer Googler who knows a guy who knows a guy who can look at the blacklist and let us through. Let me know!