Mail checking very slow for anyone else?

[sysops]

Dunno, seems odd, if you have alternate email accounts and mail sent/received normally from them then it seems it may have been server or configuration related.

I have an intermittent problem with my email not sending immediately from my Hostgator account although I have my email client setup to authorize before sending and to attempt to download email before sending. It typically will send the email from 1-5 minutes after initially attempted.


Sometimes it sends immediately, sometimes it times out , weird. Contacted support and they said they see nothing on their end so, guess I'll have to deal with it. Not a big deal at this point since I don't do business correspondence thru this account.

For the record, I have 4 separate hosting based email accounts and none duplicate that particular problem. Hope I wake one day and mine also cures itself.

[karz10]

So I got a response about 1PM ET yesterday indicating they found nothing wrong, and by the time I could get that email, I checked and all was resolved again for me as well.

Not sure what happened, but I told them it worked for me too, now for the last 24 hrs, so hoping all stays well....

Karz

[karz10]

Ok, unfortunately, here we go again...

Submitted this ticket 3/16:

**************************
All my domains were down yesterday w/ Chrysler, but before that and since then, email is very slow..


Here is an example of DNS Report from DNSreport.com :

Getting MX record for mydomain.com (from local DNS server, may be cached)... No response received.

This should be treated as an ERROR (per RFC974), and the E-mail delivery should be retried later.

--------------

NSFAILNSA timeout occurred getting the NS records from your nameservers! None of your nameservers responded fast enough. They are probably down or unreachable. I can't continue since your nameservers aren't responding. If you have a Watchguard Firebox, it's due to a bug in their DNS Proxy, which must be disabled.


Please advise, here is an old ticket on similar issues: #EQU-24832-519

****************************

So then I got this response:

*****************************
Hello

We have restarted exim and pop services and they are working fine now. Please provide email account details for which you are facing problems so, that we can investigate on it.

Please let us know if you are having any more problems or questions.
*****************************

By this time, I was already on the phone with them and explained extensively what was going on, tested it w/ them, told them about the old tickets, and this thread, said they would get back to me yesterday, but they never did...

Karz

[karz10]

So, today I called and explained the situation, she said she would reassign the ticket to the person who found the fix before. I then followed up the ticket w/ the following email........

***********************************
To recap, after receiving this message yesterday, I was on the phone w/
Matthew for over 30 minutes helping him test my account. Mail was still not
functional during this time. He said he would update me in 40 minutes. I
called in an hour later for an update, he said they were still looking at
it. I helped him test it and look at it for over another 30 minutes, to no
avail. All through the end of the day, I did not have completely functional
mail.

Sometimes it will fly in checking the accounts and work fine, this is about
10 % of the time. 50% of the time, it will work, but work very poorly and
slowly, taking 6-10 minutes to check email, even if there are no email
messages. And about 40% of the time, it will not work at all. My email
client fails to check messages, gives a big red X as a failure. Then if I
click on an individual mailbox in my IMAP list of the mail client, it will
take over 30 seconds to refresh, or indicate that the server has not
responded for over a minute.

This is very similar to what happened last time, when Tim assured me
that they discovered an issue w/ the DNS that was fixed and said that they
would be able to fix it very easily if it happened again. I instructed
Matthew to talk to Tim about it, and he promised he would and get back to me w/ the resolution. That was yesterday, no one has contacted me, and it is still not working.

I called today, a young lady answered the phone, I explained this to her,
and she said she would reassign this ticket to Tim, and Tim would be in
touch w/ me soon. That just happened a few minutes ago, so he has not had time to contact me yet, but I wanted to put a recap of the problem in
writing for Tim's review.

Tim, if you may recall, here is the thread I tracked a similar problem
before (which I directed Matthew to yesterday, so he could see the outcome):
http://forums.hostgator.com/showthread.php?t=4212
........ with the resolution coming on page 2 and post # 44

Here are some old tickets regarding this:

[HGSupport #EQU-24832-519]:

[HGSupport #MRX-59077-846]
[HGSupport #ABT-91719-167]
[HGSupport #FPR-29042-836]:
[HGSupport #GHJ-76554-612]:
[HGSupport #STV-71622-934]:
[HGSupport #BCN-31627-715]:

Please call me if you want to discuss it, or test it w/ me, my number is
below. Also, as a side note, as usual, I have approximately 50 milliseconds
round-trip to the server, so it is not a connection issue. And, I have
tested it elsewhere, w/ the same intermittent results. For example, on
dsnreport.com I get these types of errors:

http://www.dnsreport.com/tools/dnsreport.ch?domain= mydomain.com
[ERROR: Timed out getting NS data from parent server. Probably not an issue
on your end.]

http://www.dnsreport.com/tools/mail.ch?domain= email@mydomain.com
Getting MX record for mydomain.com (from local DNS server, may be cached)...
No response received.

Again, it is intermittent, so even if the above links do not return an error
when you check it, does not mean the problem has completely gone away,
unless it tests well for an extended period of time.

Regards,
***********************************

Hope I can get the same guy and he can fix it this time, it's been over a day now w/ no results so far...

Karz

[karz10]

HG's response:
********************
Tim isn't working on Thur. or Fri. so I'll do my best to assist you.

I notice you have a dedicated IP with your account. Did this start happening around the time you switched to that or was it happening prior to this?

Have you tried setting your mail client to connect by the IP address directly?
Incomnig and outgoing mail server: 67.xx.xxx.xxx or 67.xx.xxx.xxx

It sounds like earthlink is having trouble reading our nameservers. Connecting by IP directly may get around this.

I'm sure you've already been through the change to port 25 to 26 and other settings with the length of history on this issue. Dns report current states everything is fine.

I'm escalting this issue to our level 3 team for further investigation. Please let us know if switching to the IP helps in any way.

Best Regards,

********************




MY RESPONSE:
********************
Hello, thank you for your response. However, I'm not sure it is relevant in
the big picture of what is wrong right now.

* No, it did not correspond to getting the dedicated IP, as I don't even use
that IP to connect to the mail servers, I have to use the shared mail
servers for my server, Chrysler. I asked if I could get dedicated IPs to use
as my mail servers, since those shared mail server IPs are so frequently
black-listed by various spam organizations, I wanted my own dedicated IPs
for my mailservers and was denied, saying HG did not offer that since
everyone on the server had to use the same IPs for the mailserver portion.

* No, I have not tried to set my mail server to connect to the IP address
directly, but even if I did, and even if that did allow me to check mail w/
more regularity, that does not solve the over all problem, which is the fact
that there is likely something wrong w/ the name servers, or routing to
them/through them, which affects more than just me synching w/ the email
server, it affects all other networks talking to both my mailserver and
webserver, which is the bigger problem here

* I don't know what you are reading, but the problem w/ Earthlink getting a
response from our mailserver has nothing to do w/ me. I do not use
Earthlink. The problem w/ Earthlink in past trouble tickets was that their
smtp-server would attempt to connect to our mailserver prior to sending
emails into our mailserver, and when this DNS-disconnect problem was
happening, the name servers would not respond fast enough (as I think their
parameters are a little tighter than most ISPs), and therefore their SMTP
server would bounce the message back to the user trying to send me mail,
saying they got no response from my server. So me connecting to the IP
address would have nothing to do w/ this.

-- Again, if dnsreport.com and other services, including other ISP's
mailservers, are not able to connect to our server, and timeout, and my
connection to the server is running 50 milliseconds or less roundtrip to the
server, and I still get server timeouts, then there is something wrong.
Either it's overloaded and not responding, or it is likely that there is a
tweak that needs to be done on your end. My suggestion would be to get in
touch w/ Tim as soon as possible, since after months and months, he was the
only one that seemed to have a clue the last time this exact same thing
happened.

Regards,

********************

Karz

[Serra]

So, basically, what you are telling support is that they can offer all of the suggestions that they want, but you aren't going to try anything because it has to be their fault and even if the fixes worked, it wouldn't matter anyway?

Wow, no wonder you don't get very good responses to your questions!!!!


Let me tell you what I read from their response. They think there is a problem with the name servers. SO, they asked you to test checking mail via the IP address (because they can't check this themselves, only you can check it) to see if that eliminates the problem. If so, then they can look at the name servers and see if there is a problem.

However, you refused to help them, so now they are left with no options to test and find out what is wrong on YOUR end. Keep in mind that NO ONE ELSE is having this problem, so YOU are likely some how involved in the cause.

You have to know that if you ***** out the support techs, they WILL NEVER HELP YOU FIX YOUR PROBLEM BECUASE THEY HATE BEING *****ED AT!!!!

If it were me, I would have tried the IP and see if it made any different, then at least you would know.

[karz10]

Originally Posted by Serra

So, basically, what you are telling support is that they can offer all of the suggestions that they want, but you aren't going to try anything because it has to be their fault and even if the fixes worked, it wouldn't matter anyway?

Wow, no wonder you don't get very good responses to your questions!!!!

Well, I'm sorry if that's what you gathered from that exchange. I was in a hurry when they wrote that, it was the weekend already, I have other things going on. I would have been more able to sit here for awhile and test that during the week when I'm working, I did not have time to test that, but tried to come up w/ some reply to them to help them continue testing other things if they agreed w/ my assessment. I did not say I wouldn't test the IP thing (although I'll admit I didn't say I would either), but if there was still an issue, I would have been willing to test it when I had time. What I was trying to say was that, "No, I had not tested it, and it was my opinion that it didn't address the bigger problem" and while you may have interpereted their request to indicate that if the IP test worked, then they would have looked at the other problems for additional causes, the way I looked at it was that they were making other assumptions that were incorrect, based on my intimate familiarity w/ the problem, too many wrong assumptions for me to list now, as I do not have time.

But for what it's worth, I'm happy to test whatever HG still wants to test, I just can't do it right now...as for the other comments, I'm not sure what you meant, if you are referring to the posts in this forum, my main purposes for this thread is to provide myself a record of this ongoing issue, help anyone else that may have not been able to put 2 and 2 together to realize that they may have also had a difficult to diagnose ongoing issue, as well as help HG staff see a history on this. While having a public expression of an issue may be some incentive to fix things, I have tried to be discreet and respectful about certain details of our exchanges, as I do appreciate the effort of any of the support staff. And have made the effort to come back here and post the fixes and the thankful replies to those that were involved in the fix. So I'm sorry if anyone feels that I'm doing anything negative to any of the support staff, because that is not the intent.


Karz