Our Sysadmin informed us as of about 7:30 am MST (GMT -7) this morning that outgoing email service was restored for new orders, which is confirmed by our tests and many reports from affected clientele by now. We thank everyone for your patience, understanding and cooperation while we got the matter sorted out.
However, it appears affected emails during the outage were not backlogged, just getting rejected outright, so those won't be going out after all; we're looking into any way to regenerate those emails en masse.
Meanwhile, if you need to provide buyers with download links they haven't received, you can find their order in your E-junkie Transaction Log and click the Reactivate Links button for it there, which will also give you an option to Resend Email (this is the function we're hoping to adapt for the mass email regeneration). Or you could just click the Copy Link button for their order there and paste that into a personal reply to the buyer.
For buyers who purchased digital codes, you can copy the code they were issued from your E-junkie Transaction Log and paste that in reply to the buyer.
As to the cause of the outage, it took quite a bit of investigation to discover some spammers had figured out a way to abuse our Send Free Download Link/Code feature to send out masses of spam. That in turn resulted in a high rate of spam complaints, which got us onto spam blocklists causing many receiving mailservers to reject/bounce messages from us, then ultimately Amazon Web Services (AWS, where E-junkie services are hosted) suspended our ability to send email at all due to the high spam-complaint and bounce rate.
In order to get AWS to restore our email service, we first had to realize that spam was the reason for the problem, identify how the spammers were sending spam through us, discover that they were abusing our Send Free Link feature, figure out how to disable that function from emailing anything, then wait for the complaint/bounce rate to settle back down, then convince AWS that we'd got the problem sorted and back in check.
As such, for the time being our Send Free Download Link feature now will not actually send out any email, as we had to disable that function to block the spammers. However, you can still use that feature to generate a free link on-demand, then just copy the generated link you will see displayed there and paste that into a personal message to the recipient. Such free links will also be listed in your Free Downloads Log as usual, where you can also copy the link from the Transaction IDs there. Our Devs will be evaluating how to restore generating free-link emails in a way that spammers can't abuse.
Once again, we thank everyone for your patience, cooperation and understanding while we got this matter sorted out, and thanks to our DevOps staff for their tireless work investigating the problem and working out a solution over these past couple days.
