We're over on our new hosting service using WordPress now, so please start tracking us over at http://itts.ala.org/update/ . New RSS feed is available at http://itts.ala.org/update/feed/ , and you can again comment on our posts.
We'll be migrating over the old content this week, but all new posts are now over there, so click on through!
There was a backup of mail due to the outage earlier this week, causing some delays in delivery. One source is Yahoo. We have a large number of list subscribers using Yahoo accounts. One or more of those subscribers has, instead of choosing the unsubscribe option from list generated email, reported us to Yahoo as spammers. Yahoo is now temporarily rejecting our mail. The traffic was further increased by the messages Yahoo sends to inform us of the rejection.
We have contacted Yahoo to explain that these emails were sent to subscribers of lists (such as AL Direct, which went out on Wednesday). We've received a reply, part of which is quoted below. According to Yahoo, the situation should be self-correcting: our email server retries sending messages. We are also investigating Yahoo's best practices for bulk email, to attempt to lessen our resemblance to spam.
We'll know more later today, now that the server has finished processing the backlog.
Tim Smith
From Yahoo:
"If you are seeing a 421 error code in your SMTP logs indicating that the messages you are trying to send are 'temporarily deferred due to user complaints,' this means that we have observed unusual traffic patterns from your IP address and have been getting considerable complaints from our users regarding emails from your server.
This is not a permanent error; your system may automatically re-try at a later time."
Email coming from the outside to ALA was down from 4:30 p.m. yesterday (2/13) until 8:24 a.m. this morning (2/14). A system change was made by our consultants for the Sympa upgrade (scheduled for later this month) that caused the outage to occur. The setting was corrected this morning at 8:24 a.m. No email was lost.
If you have any questions or concerns, please let us know.
Today we're officially releasing the RFP to migrate our current Online Communities service to Drupal. You can grab a PDF of it here. Proposals are due by February 18 because we have a short turn-around time on this project and we need to get moving on it.
There's information in the RFP for contacting us if you have further questions. ALA staff and members who would like to help us publicize this RFP should feel free to link to this post.
More background on the project:
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