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Jan 2024

We've been receiving reports that outbound emails from our system stopped being delivered since sometime late last night. This affects thank-you emails to buyers, sale notification emails to sellers, and other notices generated by our system.

Our Sysadmin is working on fixing the problem now. We're not sure yet what the cause is, but on the rare occasions this has happened before, the missing emails were just backed up on our mailserver and eventually got sent once we cleared the problem preventing them from actually going out.

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, click the Copy Link button for it there, then paste that link into a personal reply to the buyer. For buyers who purchased digital codes, you can copy the code they were issued from your Transaction Log and paste that in reply to the buyer.

We apologize for the trouble and inconvenience, and thank you for your patience and cooperation while we get this problem sorted out. We will followup here to confirm once the problem has been resolved.

  • created

    Jan '24
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    Jan '24
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I confirm this is still an issue. Emails are not being delivered after an order is placed. I had a major release planned to go out today, but will postpone it to the issue is solved.

I can confirm this also. It's been happening since around 5:00 a.m. Mountain Time starting yesterday, Jan 10, according to my download log. "Download Info" field is vacant since then. So it's been out an entire day. Even manually reactivating download links doesn't work. The only option is to reactivate and copy the links into an email to the customer.

I have been seeing this as well. Any idea when this will be resolved so we can update our customers?

I can confirm the issue is affecting my account as well (since yesterday).

I can confirm this as well and have not been able to send emails since yesterday.

Thanks for letting us know. This is occurring for us. Please update us when fixed. Thanks!

I can also confirm that this issue has not been resolved yet. I am saddened by the fact that there are so many problems with e-junkie. It would be a great platform, but there always seems to be some issue. Recently, it was not possible to make payments with PayPal. It would be great if they could fix it as soon as possible because it reflects poorly on my business

thanks for the support, I'm waiting and in the meantime I will deliver my links via email.

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.

Very glad to hear you figured out the problem.

I'm in the process of sending all the failed download emails per the instructions you provided. As such, I'd prefer that you not mass email all the failed emails or these customers will receive them twice, which looks a bit spammy. Let me know if you need additional info that might help avoid this double send.

Thank you very much! The problem has been resolved, there is no need to send old emails, I have already sent everything manually to customers, thanks!

We're getting some reports suggesting it's possible this spam-related outage may still be causing some spam filters to falsely flag messages from our system as Spam. If any buyers are not finding the original email with their link -- and assuming they didn't purchase during our recent email outage -- you can advise them to check their Spam/Junk Mail folder in case their message wound up there, and mark it as Not Spam if so, which will help retrain their spam filter to recognize our messages as legitimate.