One and One hosting - Problems with emails and placing orders on the site

[PC Int]

Received this from 1and1 after I made a number of suggestions to them, including reducing the amount of delay, or no delay applying to first email sent (thank you Mike), plus other ideas, including a plea to put this policy on hold ...

Unfortunately this policy will remain in place for the foreseeable future, as the change was implemented to help prevent spam. As 1&1 is a German company we are not able to implement outbound spam filtering, as this violates federal German law. Additionally we are not able to exempt specific mail accounts or emails, as the mail servers treat all mails equally. We apologize for any inconvenience.

. . .

I know it's not a Sellerdeck issue, but a possible solution would be for SD to support sending emails using SSL. 1and1 servers that are not classed by them as "relay" servers are not subject to any anti-spam delay but do require SSL. [I know, their policy makes no sense, but this would be a workaround.]

Paul Tanner
Original illustration art
illustrators magazine
illustrated books for collectors and art lovers

[Neil Bayton]

Hi,

Just a reminder that SellerDeck Cover comes with Emergency Hosting so cover customers can move to our hosting FREE for a period.

To all non cover customers I would be willing to offer an incentive should you wish to move to SellerDeck Hosting. We always recommend our hosting as it's 100% compatible, it also means just the one phone call should there be issues?

Give Sales a call on 0845 1891859 and mention you are a 1&1 customer to take advantage of 3 months hosting for £1.

N.B Valid until February 28th

[Mike Hughes]

1and1 servers that are not classed by them as "relay" servers are not subject to any anti-spam delay but do require SSL.

I'm not sure I understand what servers 1and1 class as a 'relay' server. Did they expand on what is / isn't considered a relay server?

SSL SMTP doesn't look too hard to implement, but if our web servers are classed as 'relay' servers then it sounds like it's not going to fix anything.

I've started talking to them about this problem also. They don't seem to be communicating the 19 second delay that broadly as my initial contact is denying there's any such thing and is offering a refresh of the mrvnet smtp server to see if that solves the problem. I guess it's a process I'll have to go through before we can really get down to the details.

Mike

[John Ennals]

I've just been in touch with SellerDeck support. There is work underway to change the way that the email system works to make the receipt display independently of the email transmission but it is not straightforward. Therefore it will be incorporated into a future release but not anytime soon.

This has helped me make the decision to ditch 1&1, I hope it helps others too!

John

[Mike Hughes]

I'm not sure we're hearing the whole story on this.

While waiting to hear back from 1and1 I've been looking into a couple of things:

1. The sendmail patch Norman developed ages ago and which I did use for a while many years ago. The thinking being that changing that to use SSL is relatively easy.

2. While exploring this, I also checked my membership form submission that uses php and 'mail' to send an email confirmation and this is INSTANT with the email arriving immediately.

Which is making me wonder if sendmail will also be instant (even without SSL) and what it is about the sellerdeck email implementation that is causing the problem.

Mike

[Mike Hughes]

OK. I seem to have found a fix for the problem.

Use Norman's sendmail patch from the very bottom of the page here: http://www.drillpine.biz/actinicstuff/archive.html

Follow the instructions and it's all fairly straightforward. No need for SSL or anything like that.

Tested on V11.0.4. and emails get sent straight away.

This is the second time this patch has helped me and it is donationware so I'll now have to think of a suitable present to thank Norman for it.

Mike

PS. I've no idea what it is that Sellerdeck are doing that triggers the delay. It might be the dns lookup as a test I did just using the IP address instead of mrvnet.kundenserver.de looked as if it might have been a bit faster.

Anyway, I'll leave that for sellerdeck to investigate.

[Ricc]

Well ive decided to take Neil up on his offer and migrated my hosting over to Sellerdeck hosting. Should have done it a while ago as i hate to think the orders ive lost with the recent issues with 1and1.

[Ricc]

Would this cure the page hanging at the confirm checkout?

[Mike Hughes]

I haven't specifically tested the receipt page hanging but everything points to the email delay being the cause of this so, yes. This should fix the page hanging during checkout.

Mike

[guccij]

Tested on 12.03 and it works. No hanging at the checkout or receipt page and the emails are sent immediately. Thanks Mike. And Norman of course

[Ricc]

My migration to Sellerdeck hosting has gone wrong and I'm now without a website for the weekend. I've had to point my name servers back to 1and1 to salvage my weekend sales. Will try this fix when things are working again.

[John Ennals]

I rang SellerDeck this afternoon to ask about switching to SellerDeck hosting and was hugely disappointed by their "sales" department's response. Then had a very good conversation with Teclan. I'll try Norman's fix as suggested by Mike (sincere thanks to both of you) and will say goodbye to 1&1 during February because of their dreadful attitude to their customers.

John

[Ricc]

It doesn't mention V10 on the versions, should i go for the V11 patch?

[guccij]

You'll find which one is right for you by searching actinic.pm for the first line mentioned in the patch. If it's not in your actinic.pm file, then it's the other set of instructions. For 12.03, it was the first set.

[Ricc]

Cheers for the info.