Not recieving e-mail's from mail.elderscrollsonline.com [unresolved please help...]

tarikaone · July 2015

Hey guys, I've having real issues trying to access my account. I originally joined with the beta then bought on launch day but cancelled my subscription after a few months. Yesterday I decided to buy the steam edition, but after a day of downloading I can't login because I am not receiving the activation e-mail that's supposed to be sent with a new unknown device. I also tried resetting my password just in-case I was entering it wrong, but it seems either the e-mails are just not getting sent, or they are getting blocked (have no idea how I'd be able to tell).

Either way this is sort of my last resort, at-least this way if someone replies I know I'll get the message. If any mods are reading, could you please look into it. I recently filed a support ticket 150727-004531, and can provide extra information if needed.

Just to add to my woes a few minutes ago I received an e-mail from noreply.forums@elderscrollsonline.com to congratulate me on 1 year as a forum member, which can only mean there is something wrong elsewhere

Steve

ZOS_GaryA · July 2015

Hey there @tarikaone,

This issue usually happens if you have an uncommon email provider, as the filtering/spam rules are different for all custom URLs. Make sure you have donotreply@mail.elderscrollsonline.com added to your safe-senders list to ensure that the mail bypasses any filters. If this doesn't help, stay in touch with support and they'll be happy to continue assisting you!

tarikaone · July 2015

Hey Gary, thanks for your reply. I spent an hour or two with my hosting provider this morning going through the logs to see if the server was rejecting the mail (I pay for my own hosting). Interestingly nothing has been bounced on our end, it is definitely elderscrollsonline.com that is just not sending the e-mail.

Proof of this is that e-mail related to forum activity is getting through, it's just that account reset and untrusted computer activation codes are not. I have also white-listed the appropriate e-mail address to no avail.

To avoid confusion, I am unable to login to the game as I never receive an activation e-mail, and I can not login to the support system for the same reason. My only avenue of contact seems to be this forum at the moment

Hoping that I can have this resolved soon.

ManicDee · July 2015

Me too. Email is set properly in account details.

Issue resolved by workaround. Support ticket 150729-006399 relates: apparently they were just having extraordinary load due to IC being published to PTS.

Followup: I now have a dozen access codes in my in-box, apparently the ZOS mail server *is* RFC compliant, it just had a lot of work to do. I'm sorry ZOS!

On my end, it appears that my ISP does "grey listing". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greylisting

The gist of it is that the ISP's mail server will compare the source address with its internal "grey list". If the source doesn't appear, it will respond with a "mail server temporarily unavailable" error, then add the source to the grey list, and then close the connection.

This works on the assumption that a legitimate sender will retry later (e.g.: between five minutes and half an hour) and the message will be accepted, while an illegitimate sender will have been added to a blacklist in the meantime. The grey list entry expires after a certain amount of time, so leaving the retry too long will result in another temporary failure message.

I worked around the grey list by going to Account Management and simply requesting access codes be sent to me until one got through.

I suspect that ZOS's email servers will treat a temporary failure as an actual failure and not retry. RFC5321 SMTP temporary failures are 4xx series error messages, and indicate that the sender should try again later. If the mail transfer agent is not retrying after a 4xx series error message, it is not compliant.

The side effect of grey listing is that there will be no report of a delivery attempt in the mail server's logs since no delivery was attempted: the connection was aborted in response to the EHLO.

for those following at home:

ZOS mail server: "Hello! I am mail.elderscrollsonline.com!" (in SMTP, this is encoded as "EHLO mail.elderscrollsonline.com")

ISP mail server: [checks grey list: ZOS isn't on it] "I don't know you, go away!" (in SMTP, "455 Server temporarily unavailable" but the 455 could be any three digit number starting with 4) [writes ZOS onto grey list]

ZOS mail server: "Oh, okay, bye!"

[time passes]

ZOS mail server: "Hello! I am mail.elderscrollsonline.com!" (EHLO mail.elderscrollsonline.com)

ISP mail server: [checks grey list: ZOS is on it] "Hey! How you doin'? I can support a whole bunch of features, what do you want to do?" (220 … followed by a bunch of supported features)

ZOS mail server: "Here's a message for ManicDee …"

[the parties engage in a conversation, they finish up, ZOS wanders off to conduct other business, and ISP delivers the message to me]