Pobox queueing released messages?

[aynrandgirl]

Pobox appears to have an odd policy: you have to manually ask for them to allow your DNS to point to their servers, you can't just add a domain in the web interface and point your DNS afterwards. Seems clunky and time-wasting to me.

[janusz]

Originally Posted by aynrandgirl

Pobox appears to have an odd policy: you have to manually ask for them to allow your DNS to point to their servers,

Odd? You cannot just point your DNS at somewhere and expect the "pointee" to handle your domain.

[aynrandgirl]

Originally Posted by janusz

Odd? You cannot just point your DNS at somewhere and expect the "pointee" to handle your domain.

I agree, I surely wouldn't want them to handle email without first having a paid account.

Notice I said "manually". You have to send a support ticket and wait for them to get around to your request. If I have a paid account at Pobox, setting up electronically and then changing DNS at my DNS provider should be sufficient.

[aynrandgirl]

I was thinking the reports of Pobox unreliability were exaggerated. A couple of days in my trial and both their main and webmail sites appear to be down (as of now).

[EdinwolfPA]

Originally Posted by aynrandgirl

I was thinking the reports of Pobox unreliability were exaggerated. A couple of days in my trial and both their main and webmail sites appear to be down (as of now).

I just logged in to my Pobox account and everything seems to be up and running for now on Tuesday, December 24th about 3:00am EST.

Pobox updated the the member home screen (after you log into your account) so maybe that was the problem However, you never can tell at Pobox- as they rarely give customers any type of explanation when there are problems......Pobox just gives out account discounts when they have problems....

You also may want to keep an eye on their Twitter Page as well https://twitter.com/pobox


David

[Berenburger]

Originally Posted by EdinwolfPA

Pobox updated the the member home screen (after you log into your account) so maybe that was the problem However, you never can tell at Pobox- as they rarely give customers any type of explanation when there are problems......Pobox just gives out account discounts when they have

Generally, Pobox is very responsive to support calls at pobox@pobox.com and on Twitter.
And their home screen: much, much better.

[odedp]

Originally Posted by David

Agreed: Pobox's basic forwarding account is superb (imho) Though I don't have an account now (when I did) I found that it worked superbly well with Fastmail.

I'm a pobox user since 2001 and definitely agree with what David has said.
I have a basic account which forwards my incoming emails to my email accounts.
I can't recall any problems. Their service works flawlessly for me. Not to mention pobox's spam filters which are the best I have ever seen (can't remember when was the last time I found spam in my inbox...)

Oded.

[janusz]

Originally Posted by odedp

Not to mention pobox's spam filters which are the best I have ever seen (can't remember when was the last time I found spam in my inbox...).

Can you remember the last time when you missed a message wrongly classified as spam?
More seriously: is there any way to see and/or modify what Pobox rejects as spam?

[odedp]

Originally Posted by janusz

Can you remember the last time when you missed a message wrongly classified as spam?
More seriously: is there any way to see and/or modify what Pobox rejects as spam?

I rely completely on pobox's spam filters!
I get a daily report which lists all held messages. I can release any message from this list. ("Held" messages are messages which pobox isn't sure if they are spam or not)
I can also see (but not release) all bounced messages. So if I locate a message which was bounced by mistake (false negative) I can still write to the sender and ask him to resend the message.
I remember having some false negatives when Pobox started spam protection.
During the last years spam protection works flawlessly for me

[EdinwolfPA]

Originally Posted by EdinwolfPA

However, you never can tell at Pobox- as they rarely give customers any type of explanation when there are problems......Pobox just gives out account discounts when they have problems....

You also may want to keep an eye on their Twitter Page as well https://twitter.com/pobox

Originally Posted by Berenburger

Generally, Pobox is very responsive to support calls at pobox@pobox.com and on Twitter.

For the most part that is true, however IF the recent access problems experienced by the OP was caused by the home page update, there is no mention of that anywhere that I can see (such as there will be a brief downtime at Pobox due to an update, etc)

David

[EdinwolfPA]

Originally Posted by aynrandgirl

I was thinking the reports of Pobox unreliability were exaggerated. .

Here is the blog post about the December 2012 Mailstore outage at Pobox:

http://blog.pobox.com/2012_12_01_archive.html

David

[EdinwolfPA]

Originally Posted by aynrandgirl

I was thinking the reports of Pobox unreliability were exaggerated. .

Here is the e-mail I received from Pobox regarding the October 18th, 2013 problems......

Dear Pobox Customer,

A fraction of Mailstore accounts have been experiencing severe speed issues today, resulting from a hardware upgrade on Monday. As a number of users indicated that the problem was blocking all access, we are migrating your account.

Until all your mail is migrated, you will only see your Inbox, and mail that arrived after 10 AM Eastern Daylight Time (-0500 GMT) on Friday, October 18th. None of your mail has been lost! It just takes some time to move users around, and it will show up soon. If your folders are visible, your migration is either underway or complete.

If you could not access your mail at all today, we apologize for the extended outage, and not making this change sooner. If you could read your mail, we apologize for the temporary removal of access to your older messages our current change is causing.

With our humblest apologies,
Pobox Customer Service
pobox@pobox.com
http://www.pobox.com

---------------------------------------------

David

[aynrandgirl]

Originally Posted by William9

LuxSci premium spam filter is provided by an enterprise service of McAfee. When using this premium service, MX records are configured to point to the McAfee service, then the filtered messages are to delivered your LuxSci account. No noticeable delay. I've used the service for years and it works very well. My experience with this service is nearly zero spam in my inbox. Conversely, I rarely have to release non-spam from the quarantine.

Luxsci premium spam filters can silently discard email though, and you can't turn it off, according Luxsci CS. There's no way to request quarantine rather than discard if the sending host is on their blacklist, according to them.

I've had Tuffmail do that to me when a legit email got sent from Dreamhost, which is flagged by Spamcop.

Tried more sending tests to Pobox. Emails took an amazing six minutes from receipt to showing up in my inbox, according to Pobox's own timestamps. That's really bad. Processing email shouldn't take that long even if they're running i386 boxes on their backend. It's almost like they're batch processing email. Nah, that's so 25 years ago. I suppose if I was out and about on my mobile i'd never notice the delay.