Category Archives: IT news

How to fix incoming email delays

Waiting for computer

Do your incoming emails sometimes arrive late, delayed by minutes or even hours? I found it really annoying when it happened to me, especially when trying to sign up to websites that required a response to confirmation emails before letting me in. I’ve even travelled to a cancelled meeting because of email delays.

Here are the most common causes, and what to do about them.

POP3 connection

If you retrieve your email the traditional way using the “POP” or “POP3” protocol, your mail program probably only checks for new messages every 10 minutes or so. This is called “polling” or “pull” email. It introduces a variable delay, sometimes up to an hour.

How to tell if you’re affected: Check your mail program settings to see what protocol it’s using. Also, if clicking a “Send/Receive” or a “Refresh” button causes delayed messages to instantly appear, polling is a likely cause.

What to do about it:  Change to use the more modern “IMAP” protocol (or Microsoft Exchange) instead of “POP”, if possible. As well as effectively giving you instant “push” email delivery, this allows you to synchronise mail between different devices, organise messages into folders, train your spam filters and gives you a backup.

If  your mail provider doesn’t offer IMAP, you should be able set up a simple forwarder to send all your incoming messages to a provider who does (e.g. a free Gmail account).  It’s also possible to change your DNS settings (specifically your “MX” records) to reroute your mail without an extra forwarding step, but that usually requires a subscription to a mail hosting service (for example, G Suite).

If that isn’t possible, try setting the delay to a shorter value in your mail program settings. Check with your mail host first though, because some will block you if you poll too frequently.

Greylisting

Greylisting is a simple and effective anti-spam technique that works by initially refusing incoming mail from unrecognised sources and waiting for a redelivery attempt. The problem is, it introduces unpredictable delays in the process, which can occasionally be severe (a day or more).

How to tell if you’re affected: Ask your email provider if they use greylisting.  You can also examine timestamps in your email headers to deduce where delays are happening.

What to do about it: Ask your email provider to disable greylisting, or do it yourself if you have access to a hosting control panel. You will probably have to enable an alternative spam filter or forward your mail to a different account with a filter, otherwise you will be flooded with spam.

Misconfigured DNS

The Domain Name System translates your email address into an IP address and incorrect DNS settings are a frequent cause of mail delays, especially if you have a personal domain. Once such a mistake is corrected, it can take many hours for the DNS changes to propagate and even longer for email senders to attempt redelivery, which means you may continue to see random delays for a couple of days. 

It’s also really easy to misconfigure a mail server or client, resulting in a “forwarding loop”, “open relay” or other problems that cause mail senders to blacklist you for a while. A simple change like setting an out-of-office notification can trigger a problem that may not be immediately apparent, and may take days to fully resolve once fixed.

How to tell if you’re affected:  Test your mail settings at mxtoolbox.com. Also, send test messages to yourself from another mail account (perhaps a free Gmail account) and check for bounce messages. If you don’t understand them, forward the bounce messages to someone knowledgeable, using “forward as attachment” to preserve the headers.

What to do about it: If you have recently changed your DNS or mail settings, get someone to check them. Otherwise, contact support at your mail hosting provider. Be patient once problems are corrected to allow fixes to take effect. DNS settings are a complicated subject so you might need expert help but as a rule of thumb you should always have one (and only one) MX record and it should point to the hostname of the mail server, not your personal domain name.

Internet connection problems

If your internet connection is unreliable then obviously your email will be as well. Common causes are radio interference or a weak signal on Wifi or mobile connections, loose or corroded connections on wired cables, and misconfigured home routers causing two devices to try to use the same IP address.

How to tell if you’re affected:  Use a web site like speedtest.net (or their apps for iOS or Android) to check your connection. Email doesn’t need a lot of bandwidth but it does need a reliable connection. 

What to do about it: If you’re on a wireless connection, move around your house or office to find the strongest signal, often near a window or a door. Turn off or move away from other sources of interference such as cordless phones. If your Wifi signal is weak, install an extension router and connect it back to the main router with a cable or over the mains wiring using a “powerline” adapter. Note that you can’t simply plug in an old unused router, it needs to be configured properly (with a static IP address and DHCP disabled) otherwise you’ll get all sorts of weird problems, including messages stuck in your “Outbox”.

If you’re on a wired connection try connecting as close as possible to where the phone line enters the building and try temporarily disconnecting all other devices and extension wiring. If you’re fairly sure the problem is outside the building report it as a fault.

Does your browser sometimes show you the wrong website? Fix it quickly!

Do you sometimes click on a link in your web browser and find that the site you are taken to is completely different from the one you expected? It can happen quite innocently if a site has moved to a new address, perhaps due to a company takeover. It can also simply mean the old site has gone and the domain has been bought by a squatter, in which case you may see a page full of advertisements. More worryingly, it could mean that your internet router has been hacked – try swapping the router. But the problem I’m talking about here is a known limitation of old browsers on encrypted connections.

Green padlockYou may have noticed that many websites now make you use a secure connection  – with a green padlock, and https instead of http in the address.

The reason is simple – without encryption, anyone can snoop on your connection and see your passwords, which is disastrous if you’re shopping online or even just checking your email. Worse still, hackers can redirect your connection to a convincing “phishing” site without your knowledge. Encrypted connections prevent that.

The problem was, until recently every secure website needed its own separate IP address and security certificate, which was expensive and difficult to set up (IPv4 addresses are in short supply). That all changed in 2016 because Microsoft finally retired the old versions of Internet Explorer that required separate IP addresses, and because an organisation called Let’s Encrypt started offering free automated certificates. Problem solved.

Except that a lot of people are still hanging on to Windows XP (unwisely, because it’s now very insecure and a big target for hackers). Internet Explorer on Windows XP can’t handle secure sites on shared addresses (it doesn’t support “SNI“) which means it will show you completely the wrong site.

Solution

The solution is simple – use Chrome or Firefox (or even Microsoft Edge) instead of Internet Explorer. As a bonus, modern browsers allow you to install an Ad Blocker to make your browsing much more pleasant. Since ads can contain malware your browsing will be more secure (and faster) as well.

Update: There’s a useful article about migrating WordPress sites to SSL on the cloudliving blog.

Getting a Sony Vaio laptop working on Windows 10

Kudos to user “paloseco” for his very helpful post on the NotebookReview forum about upgrading a Sony Vaio Z series laptop to Windows 10. Also to users “ComputerCowboy”, “Treofred”, “psyq321” and others for the related instructions for hacking the BIOS and INF files. How did we survive before the internet allowed sharing of information like this?

Negative kudos to Sony for shamefully not supporting a laptop that is only (gasp!) 6 years old, effectively forcing most users to use insecure software.

Why we use WordPress or Drupal

This incident affecting the owner of a popular site who used “site builder” software from his hosting company is a good example of the downsides of this solution – you can’t (easily) upgrade the site, archive it or move it to another host.

If you use a well-supported content management system like WordPress or Drupal there are tools to help you upgrade and migrate. We recently upgraded another site that had stopped working because it used a mix of old systems (Joomla, Magento, phpBB, CiviCRM, WordPress) some of which no longer worked properly in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. We moved it all to WordPress without losing content, using standard plugins. Keeping it updated or moving it to a new host is no longer a problem.