No longer getting email notifications of MP sales

[Vulpinus]

I have always received email notifications of sales from my MP store. These have stopped, with the last one being just before midnight GMT on 5th November.

Has this happened to anyone else?

There were sales on the 6th, and plenty more since which are in my orders history. Fortunately the ANS is still updating my database. Just no emails. I have not changed anything, anywhere, and I still get all the other emails from SL.

 

ETA: Not getting emails when I buy something either. All my account settings are correct and the notification boxes ticked. Nothing is going to the spam trap. Time for a ticket methinks.

[Ela Talaj]

Happened to me several times. There are sales but MP sales emails just disappear for a while (a few days or a week) and then reappear. Sure complained to the Lab about it and equally sure nothing was done so I learned to be patient.

[Vulpinus]

Yeah, looks like we're not alone in this. I was eventually told by support (after jumping through a few hoops that I had already jumped through) to file a bug report, which I did. It's been linked to at least one other similar report.

At least the ANS is still working. I would not be impressed if sales were not reaching my database.

[Darrius Gothly]

I won't pretend to know the precise cause of your problem Vulpinus, but I am very familiar with the most common cause of this failure ... your Email Provider.

These days of rampant Spam, the filters that chop out the garbage before it reaches our inboxes are always growing, irmproving and being tweaked. Sometimes those "tweaks" turn into an unintentional ban placed on high volume senders .. such as the Marketplace.

Open a prior sales notice and inspect the Email Headers. (There are tons of articles explaining how to do this for almost every email client and web site in existence.) Look for the path that the email took to reach your computer. The last step (which is the  topmost routing header) to find the email server it went through. The owner of that server is almost always the one that has blocked the sales notice and sent it to the digital dustbin.

Then contact them. Explain that you receive a large number of REQUESTED emails from the Marketplace. Provide the headers for as many notices as you can (and will fit in your support ticket). Ask them to double check that they have not placed a ban on the Marketplace by accident.

And THEN you can sit back and wait for it to be resolved .. confident that you have spoken to the real culprit. For once, and almost always in this type of issue (emails from SL not reaching us), Linden Lab is NOT the one at fault.

Well .. not usually at least. You did check that your profile still shows to send sales notices, right? (just asking! *smile*)

[Ela Talaj]

I went thru all that with my provider (comcast) and they were not filtering out any emails for me or at least so they said. Besides I don't have high volume sales on MP. I mostly sell rather expensive items and don't run promotions so I usually have no more than 1-2 sales a day. Seems to me there is some dead-end queue in the MP and from time to time sales notifications get in there and never get out.

 

[Darrius Gothly]

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Ela Talaj wrote:

I went thru all that with my provider (comcast) and they were not filtering out any emails for me

or at least so they said

. Besides I don't have high volume sales on MP. I mostly sell rather expensive items and don't run promotions so I usually have no more than 1-2 sales a day. Seems to me there is some dead-end queue in the MP and from time to time sales notifications get in there and never get out.

 

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The people you can speak to in a normal 1-4 hour support call to Comcast, Time Warner or any of the other big name providers are not only unaware of how their Spam Filters work, they don't even comprehend that Spam Filters exist at all. They have a script on a screen and follow it as closely as possible. You have to push them into handing you up the chain to someone that can actually look at and understands the issue.

i realize it feels like you are somehow being singled out, that your email is the only email being stopped. However it's important to remember that providers like Comcast never see an individual, they look at the aggregate 100's of thousands of users that use their email services. Furthermore they never actually target a single specific sender, they target behavior and numeric limits. The fact that one or more legitimate senders got caught in their latest net is completely invisible to them .. until someone says "Hey! Wait a second!"

The real test is to set a temporary email address for your account and then see if you start receiving sales notices again. If you do then switch back to your original address. If after switching back the mails stop then you've identified the issue directly. If they continue then you've succeeded in a "mystery fix' and can continue on hoping it doesn't mysteriously unfix itself in the future.

This is, without a doubt, one of the least understood and most difficult to "sell" technical problems. Easily more than 99% of the time the problem is with an intermediate email relay or endpoint email server that incorrectly marks the mails as Spam. And no, they don't all wind up in your Spam box .. no matter what they say. A very high number of emails simply go into the wastebucket .. because they have somehow qualified as the most pernicious form and don't deserve to be forwarded along at all.

Here is a simple fact about it though. If one or a small handful of people suddenly stop receiving emails, but many others still are receving them then the problem is not with the Sender but along the chain to the Recipients. If it WAS a problem at the sender then every email would stop, not just those to a select few (or one).