The Week Email Broke

In the past few days I have been putting out technical fires almost non stop on several ends, most of them related to email delivery to my subscribers as well as folks on my respective mailing lists. It all started early this week, a few days after Yahoo changed its DMARC policy to stop fraudulent emails. In response many email receivers started bouncing emails with Yahoo.com from addresses sent from non-Yahoo servers. Then a week ago AOL announced the same change to its DMARC policy and I expect to see similar chaos across mailing lists and various email service providers.

What this has meant on my end specifically is that a ton of email addresses started bouncing and then suddenly email delivery intermittently stopped altogether on my remotely hosted servers. Meaning alerts were sent to my mail servers but they never got there – what happened to them and how they exactly disappeared nobody really knows. I have talked to (and sometimes screamed at) various network engineers, my website hosting firm, my connectivity providers, etc. – everyone has a different idea as to who’s to blame and quite frankly none of them seem to have a clue.

You know me to be quite pragmatic and this is my current take: Effectively email is currently broken as a reliable and effective way of communicating and conducting business. It’s impossible to know if a message will be delivered and when – sometimes it just get delayed by a few hours and sometimes it never gets there. Trying to figure out what exactly happens condemns you to countless hours of drafting support requests, making phone calls, and crawling around in your server’s logs, mostly without any further hints as to what has happened.

As I cannot let this ruin my business I started to look for alternative solutions, starting with how to deliver alerts to my subscribers as well as anyone following Evil Speculator. Twitter still works fine it seems but that won’t work for delivering alerts for CrazyIvan. In the past I had been using SMS for my alerts but at 5 cents per message it’s simply not an option plus there is a 140 byte message length limitation (the average CrazyIvan alert has around 300 characters – it adds up). I looked at Whatsapp and Viber and pertinent serviced and they seemed ideal but almost all of them (with the exception of Telegram) follow the walled garden model in that they control everything and there are no reliable APIs that are guaranteed to work a few months down the line.

When I lamented the current state of affairs with Scott he suggested Jabber which is based on the open source XMPP protocol. There are clients available for iOS, Android, Linux, OSX, Windows, pretty much any platform you can shake a stick at. Plus you can run your own service on your own server and have people sign up for accounts there without the hassle of spam or various phishing attempts. And that’s basically what I did – I just finished setting up a Jabber service on evilspeculator.com and have already tested sending messages to my Android phone. I was even able to run a C# test that sent a test alert to my mobile – how cool and it’s FREE! I’ll be using that piece of code for CrazyIvan and I expect to have that up and running by Monday.

So if you are a sub and have not been receiving any alerts then it’s most likely because – heck, nobody really knows. But what you should know is that the Mole is on the case and by next week I will add Jabber messaging to CrazyIvan and over the coming weeks to various other services I have been offering. All you will have to do is to sign up for a free account – initially you’ll have to request one via email but eventually the system will add Jabber accounts at evilspeculator.com automatically for any new subscriber.

A side effect of having to deal with all those technical issues is that I have not been able to trade much and my posting regime has suffered. My sincere apologies for that but as you can imagine it’s extremely distracting when your paying subs scream at you for not receiving their alerts. Actually almost all of them have been super patient and more than accommodating – many thanks for that.

I will do my best to restore notification services as soon as possible. Of course I will continue to offer email alerts and updates but obviously fixing delivery issues caused by a shift to a more stringent global standard is a bit out of my hands. The only portion I can control is my end and that is why I strongly recommend you sign up for a Jabber account at evilspeculator.com as soon as it is available. I am shooting for early next week. Until then please take it easy on the poor battered Mole –  he has been working hard to resolve this. And he is very much looking forward to restoring sanity and to returning to his usual evil schemes. Which is trading and keeping you guys out of trouble. Speaking of which, I hope to post regular updates tomorrow – until then.

Cheers,