UPDATE:

The second issue below, where emails from the website were going to Gmail spam folders, has now been resolved.

Apologies for any inconvenience,

Mark.

Dear HarmonySite administrator,

Please read the following email carefully - your group will almost certainly be affected.

As you are aware, HarmonySite provides a comprehensive email solution for your group's needs.  What you may not be aware of is that providing this sort of email functionality is fraught with difficulties - for the developer, that is, not for the users (you and your members).  When emails are sent from the website by your members, the system attempts to send the emails using a "from" address of the member's personal email address.  For example, if one of your members has an email address of fred@hotmail.com, and he wants to send an email from the website, the email he sends will be "from" fred@hotmail.com.  However, our HarmonySite server is NOT part of the Hotmail network, nor is it authorised by Hotmail to send emails on behalf of Fred.  So many of the servers that receive Fred's email may assume that the email is spam, as it's not coming from a Hotmail server.

There are various ways around this, to avoid having all the emails coming from our server using members' own personal email addresses marked as spam.  All these ways involve considerable research and programming effort.  And it's a moving target - the large email providers (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc) are constantly shifting the goalposts.  The fact that members can use their own personal email addresses to send emails from the HarmonySite server is something of a minor miracle.

We have recently been experiencing two issues with sending such emails from our server...

1.  Yahoo and AOL

Due to recent changes by Yahoo, it's now almost impossible for members with @yahoo.com email addresses to send emails via any other server besides the actual Yahoo servers.  This is specific to Yahoo, who have requested that all OTHER email providers in the world (Gmail, Hotmail, and everybody else) BLOCK any email that claims to be from a Yahoo user if it did not come from a Yahoo server.  Gmail, Hotmail and SOME others honour this request, but many mail providers haven't bothered to.

That means that recent emails sent "from" a Yahoo email address on our server were NOT being delivered to Gmail or Hotmail recipients, but may well have been delivered to other recipients.

The same applies to members with @aol.com email addresses.

I have come up with a way around this.  It is now possible for members of your group that have Yahoo or AOL email addresses to adjust their profile on your website and enter in their Yahoo or AOL email password.  With this password, the system can then send all emails from such members via the Yahoo or AOL servers, ensuring delivery.

Can you please ask all members of your group that have email addresses provided by Yahoo or AOL to do the following:

1.       Log into the Members area of the website

2.       In the box called "Update My Details", click the "Update my personal details" button

3.       Locate their email address on the page that opens (the "Member Details" page)

4.       Under their email address there is a new section called "Email Provider".  They need to select their provider from the list and then enter the password for their Yahoo/AOL account.

5.       Click "Save" at the bottom

Members who do NOT have Yahoo or AOL email addresses do not need to do ANYTHING.

If your Yahoo/AOL members do not do this, they run the risk of emails they send from the website not being delivered to everyone.

Note that more and more email providers may soon adopt the same rules as Yahoo and AOL, and so this may need to be repeated in future for members with other types of email addresses.

1.  Gmail

Google recently decided that our server had been sending out too much spam.  This was due to some hacked accounts on our server which were indeed sending spam.  The result of this is that members of your group with a Gmail address (or any email account provided by Google's servers) will need to look in their Spam folders for emails originating from our server.

I am working hard to try and find a solution to this.  I recently started using a new email-delivery provider for our server (MailChannels), but using their server created more problems than it solved, so last night I disabled that.  There will be a solution, I just haven't found it yet.  At the very least, eventually Google will see that our server is no longer sending spam and will not send emails from our server to users' Spam folders.

In the meantime, could you please advise any of your members that has their email provided by Google to REGULARLY check their Spam folder for emails from your group.  If they don't know how to do that, please let me know - there are various tutorials on the Net that we can reference.

I apologise for these issues.  They will be behind us soon.

Cheers,

Mark Virtue

HarmonySite

Australia

business: +61 2 8005 4277

mobile: +61 411 170517

mark@harmonysite.com

www.harmonysite.com