The Avalon Contact Form is not working

[Bill Ryan]

Dear Friends (and Guests!)

I've placed this in a public thread so that everyone can see it. As of about 24 hours ago, any messages sent to us via the Contact Form (the link at the bottom right of any page says Contact Us) will NOT reach us, but also won't bounce. So it may seem as if the message has been sent, but it will have failed and we'll never see it.

The reason is a new bug too complex to explain here, and we'll see if we can fix it soonest. Meanwhile, any emails sent to the mods at staff@projectavalon.net will definitely reach us, so please use that instead. THX.

[ThePythonicCow]

I suspect that this same issue will also affect other email messages sent from the ProjectAvalon server in the last couple of days, and counting, such as:

• messages telling members that threads they are "subscribed" to have received an additional reply
• messages telling members that another member has replied to one of their posts
• Happy Birthday messages, and
• (unfortunately) the "Action Required to Activate Membership" sent to newly arriving members.

I see all such messages in the server's email error log, starting a day or two ago.

The failure, so far as I have been able to discern, is that the email server (gmail, I'd guess) to which the Avalon server submits outgoing email is rejecting our outgoing email, "FAILED: 535 Authorization"

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
any messages sent to us via the Contact Form will NOT reach us

So far, unless I missed something (quite possible), the only lost Contact messages have been an essay in Russian on freight transportation (huh?), Viagra advertisements, and test messages from Bill and myself.

[ExomatrixTV]

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cheers,
John 🦜🦋🌳

[palehorse]

Isn't that related to the Yahoo and Google's new email sender requirements? Effective since February 1st. I saw that weeks ago, and it is not only for bulk senders but apparently to everyone.

If a website send an email to their gmail/yahoo users, these 2 companies require that the domain name (DNS) have entries like SPF/DKIM and DMARC to be registered with the DNS (TXT and CNAME entries will work).

I am no expert on that, I just had to create couple entries with a DNS (TXT and CNAME) using mailgun for a friend and it worked.

They want to verify the domain, since it require changes at DNS level, things will temporarily stop working for a lot of people.

ref.:
https://blog.postmaster.yahooinc.com...cure-less-spam
https://www.mailgun.com/blog/deliver...-updates-2024/

[Bill Ryan]

Posted by ThePythonicCow (here)

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
any messages sent to us via the Contact Form will NOT reach us

So far, unless I missed something (quite possible), the only lost Contact messages have been an essay in Russian on freight transportation (huh?), Viagra advertisements, and test messages from Bill and myself.

Yes, this is the problem in more detail.

For reasons this bear of very little brain is not equipped to understand, Tommy told us that when he managed to fix the longstanding Avalon 'https' problem, he had to configure the contact form to return its messages as sent from noreply@projectavalon.net.

Below is a screenshot of one of the many spam messages we routinely get, all via the contact form. But you can see that the spam seems to be sent by noreply@projectavalon.net.




We get a LOT of these, and the mods simply take a deep breath every day and delete them all. But 36 hours ago Google (who host our email service via Gmail) told us that the 'user' noreply@projectavalon.net has been suspended for spamming.

That means that the contact form won't deliver messages to us any more — unless we can find a neat fix. Some of the contact form messages are legitimate, of course, and this additionally means that replies to our routine Happy Birthday messages will also not reach us, as they are configured in the same way.

Whether this affects our membership application system is something I need to look at closely once I've had another cup of coffee, or maybe two. If it does (and it might!) then this all becomes very urgent.

Because we have no idea how Tommy created this apparently-necessary workaround (and we can't reach Tommy at the moment), we're a little hamstrung with the whole thing just now. Of course, one obvious solution is to move the entire email hosting to Fastmail, which is high on our To Do list (if we can!) as Google now charges us $100/month for all this inconvenience without offering any human to talk to about any of this.

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
Tommy told us that ... he had to configure the contact form to return its messages as sent from noreply@projectavalon.net.

Ok - it's making a wee bit more sense to me (and I haven't even had my morning coffee yet ).

If you're logged into the forum (presumably in your case as "Bill Ryan"), and you click the "Contact Us" button, that will bring up the form, to compose your message, and showing "Your Details" (with fields for "Your Name" and your "Email Address") already filled in with your name and Email address, taken from what the forum database already has for you.

If you're a guest viewer (not logged in) and you click the "Contact Us" button, that same form comes up, with the "Your Details" fields left blank, and with an extra "Human Verification" section where you can click a button to demonstrate that "I'm not a robot". When that happens, you can then provide your Russian essays and Viagra advertisements, for the pleasure and delight of the Avalon staff and (apparently) Gmail's spam detector. The "From" address on the resulting email to forum staff will show "From: <nobody@projectavalon.net>", even though "Your Details" were left blank on the contact form.

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
Whether this affects our membership application system

If my memory of what I saw in the server log files yesterday serves me correctly, yes, new member applications are also not working because of this problem. If so, then I agree that this becomes "very urgent". Perhaps after some coffee, I will track down those log files and verify this.

I just started a deep scan of the entire forum (running against my local backup, so as not to burden our server) looking for traces of code and data related to the above. Unfortunately, I write PHP and Javascript about as well as the average bear, so even if my deep scan finds the trapped victims in this earthquake, my medical talents might not be sufficient to revive them. This deep scan will take a few hours.

If only my "mixed metaphor" talents were useful here ...

Posted by palehorse (here)
If a website send an email to their gmail/yahoo users, [Yahoo and Google now] require that the domain name (DNS) have entries like SPF/DKIM and DMARC to be registered with the DNS (TXT and CNAME entries will work).

Excellent observation. That too we'll need to examine and fix as needed, ASAP.

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by palehorse (here)
I just had to create couple entries with a DNS (TXT and CNAME) using mailgun for a friend and it worked.

For the record, putting "DNS TXT CNAME mailgun" in a search engine got me this relevant explanation:

• Mailgun Help Center: Domain Verification Walkthrough

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by Bill Ryan (here)
Of course, one obvious solution is to move the entire email hosting to Fastmail

Fastmail is my preferred email provider for the personal accounts of old school geeks like me who appreciate Fastmail's rich client technology. I've been using email for nearly a half century, and managing incoming email from upwards of a thousand senders since the 1990's.

But now that I glance at the afore mentioned "Mailgun", it occurs to me that Fastmail might not be the best choice for a web server such as Avalon, which needs to be more concerned with not getting a bad reputation for sending spam, while having less technically sophisticated requirements for automatically filtering incoming email. Avalon should do, or pay to have done, a better job of validating outgoing email addresses, and fitting in with the increasingly complex spam suppression technologies used by the Web's major email services.

In other words, the spam burden has moved from the recipient to the big servers and bulk or public website senders. Old school geeks and email providers, such as myself and Fastmail, keep at least one foot firmly planted more in the past.

I don't immediately see anything on the Fastmail site regarding "email recipient address validation". I see substantial such material on the Mailgun site, and I have little doubt but that Mailgun has many competitors. See further such lists as Top 15 Email Verifier Tools (medium.com) or 7 Best SMTP Service Providers with High Email Deliverability.

[ExomatrixTV]

Last few days I notice when I post something (a comment) on Project Avalon Forum I get a warning that I posted it "twice" (when I know 100% for sure I did not!) ... like the signal that Avalon Sever received is double? meanwhile I only clicked once! (not twice). I this a new forum bug or something else?

From Bill:
No-one else has reported this, though occasional we do see duplicate posts (and delete them) which have evidently somehow happened accidentally. Do feel free to post something in the Forum Technical Q&A section.

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by ExomatrixTV (here)
Is this a bug or something else?

Off hand, I have no clue, and no correlating evidence that I've noticed.

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by ExomatrixTV (here)
Last few days I notice when I post something (a comment) on Project Avalon Forum I get a warning that I posted it "twice"

Once I get my super-duper firewall back up and working on the Avalon forum, I will easily be able to examine the related log files and see whether:

1. two post requests were sent to the forum (TCP/IP packets over the Internet), or
2. somehow the forum got "one" request and reacted as if it got "two."

Then if I knew the time, to within a minute or two, when such a "double send" happened, I could narrow down the problem to the "client" side (on your end) sending twice, or the "server" side (inside the Avalon server) confusing one request as two. I could do this now, but since I haven't been focusing on and optimizing those "incoming packet" log files yet, it would take me some more effort than I'm figuring this is worth right now.

[Sue (Ayt)]

I have stopped getting "private message" notifications, and also "reply to thread" notifications. I notice that these are also sent with "noreply@projectavalon.net" as the return address.
Maybe someone reported "noreply" as spam, or maybe someone is using that as a spam mailer return address?

Could the automatic sending codes just be set to something else instead of "noreply"?


(This notice below is what started the email problem)
-------------
This User suspended for spamming alert is to inform you that Google has suspended an account in your domain that might have been compromised and is being used to send spam from your domain.

The alert details include:

User: noreply@projectavalon.net

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by Sue (Ayt) (here)
I have stopped getting "private message" notifications, and also "reply to thread" notifications. I notice that these are also sent with "noreply@projectavalon.net" as the return address.

Yes - as I noted in Post #2 above ... though your statement of that problem is more clearly worded than mine ... good.

Posted by Sue (Ayt) (here)
Maybe someone reported "noreply" as spam, or maybe someone is using that as a spam mailer return address?

Whether Google's gmail is blocking all email that Avalon sends it, or just blocking email purported to be sent by user "noreply", is not clear to me yet. Also the "SPF/DKIM and DMARC" issue that Palehorse noted above might apply.

Posted by Sue (Ayt) (here)
Could the automatic sending codes just be set to something else instead of "noreply"?

If this is primarily an issue with the spam coming from user "noreply" being blocked by our downstream email server, Gmail, then I would propose that we no longer allow non-logged in website guests to send email out from the Avalon server via the "Contact Us" button. That's probably how most of the "noreply" spam originates.

There are other complexities here which I should first discuss with Bill in a PM, which I will go off to do now, as soon as I gather up a few more loose bits of evidence.

[Bill Ryan]

Posted by ThePythonicCow (here)
There are other complexities here which I should first discuss with Bill in a PM, which I will go off to do now, as soon as I gather up a few more loose bits of evidence.

Well received, with many thanks — i have to go into town in a moment but I'll definitely be taking a real close priority look at this (as best I can!) when I return this afternoon.

[Miller]

I try and turn laptop updates off when possible as I'm pushed for hard drive space, but I noticed a small blue/orange icon in the bottom right corner yesterday which, when clicked on, turned out to be a chatbot!! I asked it if it was collecting data and of course it said no but gave me instructions on how to delete it. I've decided not to because the next update is likely to reinstall it. But my point is that perhaps Microsoft Updates are including software which is interfering with the software here. Just a thought . . .

While writing I'm getting a lot of "couldn't access page" notifications, although pressing the back browser sometimes works while pressing the "reload this page" circle doesn't. Then again, this could be to do with my lack of space but thought I'd mention it in case it's relevant.

Cheers . . .

[lake]

This may very well be unrelated but I consider no reason not to mention it!

Approx 5 days ago I saw that a forum I just 'check' on was no longer accessible.
This is the Max Igan forum (the 'Crowhouse' page is still fine but the forum domain thecrowhouse.community is gone).

At first I just thought "They are having a problem and will sort it" .... but they have not done so.

It is only a 'small' forum (but most are these days) and I guessed it would be back soon.

But days later and checking the DNS .... there are no records!
The IP Address is .... well there is no accessible IP for the domain!

This morning I saw in the comments of a Bitchute video by 'Max' this:



Now some of you guys will know much more than I but the only way to remove the DNS records would be via the:

• Server, server admin does it
• Hosting firm does it
• DNS authority does it

Google changed their 'rules' beginning this month and I just wonder about the possible connections between things?

[Miller]

@lake - Helvetic has posted a video on the Continuing Search for the Truth thread which may shed some light on your post above (towards the end). He's been experiencing a lot of troll trouble too.

Posted by Helvetic (here)
Max Igan | Terrorism is Made in Israel | Feb. 20, 2024

Source: thecrowhouse.com


Source: https://www.bitchute.com/video/ZjX7RLrja989

Would have pm'd link but not sure what's working atm . . . In fact it might be worth the mods having a skim through this as well, in case similar starts happening here. Max Igan thinks its to do with his support of the Palestinians.

[John Hilton]

Posted by ThePythonicCow (here)
The failure, so far as I have been able to discern, is that the email server (gmail, I'd guess) to which the Avalon server submits outgoing email is rejecting our outgoing email, "FAILED: 535 Authorization"

I don't understand why you would forward email to gmail. Why not use the server's own email handling process?

I'm not an expert but this is what I do on all of my websites. I create the form in html and that calls up a PHP routine, which I wrote, using method "Post". You already have PHP enabled (this forum uses it extensively) so implementing an email form should be trivial.

It's my bedtime so I'll catch up tomorrow.

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by John Hilton (here)
I create the form in html and that calls up a PHP routine, which I wrote, using method "Post".

We do similar - using Dovecot (an SMTP server) rather than PHP's builtin email handler, to send outgoing email on its way. You might want to check out this article for a comparison of the advantages and disadvantages of using a separate SMTP server on your website, rather than PHP's built in email facility: PHP Mail Vs. SMTP.

But ... then ... where does the email go next? Modern day email runs on a confederation of major email service providers, such as Gmail, Zoho, Proton, iCloud, Yahoo, AOL, Fastmail, Tuta, Microsoft, Rackspace, Yandex, and Outlook. Those major providers don't directly accept email from random small web servers around the planet ... that would lead to insurmountable floods of spam. They only accept email from (1) each other, and (2) their various individual authorized and paying customers (so long as that customer "behaves").

The ProjectAvalon.net Dovecot SMTP server has to be a customer of one of these big boys, or else it could not send email to essentially anyone on the planet. The 7 Best SMTP Service Providers with High Email Deliverability link that I posted above in Post #9 provides a list of "big boy" email service providers that are more focused on servicing significant outbound email traffic from websites, such as perhaps your site or Avalon, than on servicing individual or business accounts that "just want to use" email.