[RESOLVED] New Account Email Confirmations are not being received [RESOLVED]

We have gotten reports in the last 24 hours that people creating new accounts using Microsoft or Google based email addresses are unable to complete the registration process.

The issue is that the confirmation email that provides a link to create the account password is not being received by the new player. So far we have noted outlook.com (hotmail) and google.com email addresses being impacted.

We had just completed a move of our website from a cloud based solution to a dedicated data center within hours of this being reported. I have a ticket open with our engineer who is looking into what may be impacting us.

There are a number of possibilities, including an RBL (Realtime Black List) service including our new IP, changes needed to the SPF (SPAM prevention) configuration that ID's us as being a safe sender, etc.

I will update here when we have an update. Thanks to all the players who jumped in to assist new players who were wondering why they could not complete registration by offering help and testing to confirm it was not just those people impacted.

 

We have identified the root cause of the issue and are working with the affected email providers to resolve it.

In short:

The email providers (like Gmail) put a block on us sending emails through them because a bad actor decided to try to do a Denial Of Service attack on our mail system. The effort didn't affect our operation at all, but the resulting email traffic got Gmail etc a little upset.

We have taken steps to prevent this from happening again. We also have identified the culprit; they have been banned, blocked and will be reported to the proper authorities..

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. We are escalating within the ESP (Email Service Providers) support structures to get ourselves off the blacklist as soon as possible.

I will post more when we get updates from the affected ESPs.

 

As of today we are still awaiting Google to unblock our outbound emails to the gmail.com domain.

I have followed up with them today, and will continue to follow up with them throughout the week until it is corrected.

 

The issues we've been experiencing as a result of a DoS attack last week have been resolved (was not an open relay, nor was it a result of the recent data center migration)

The bad actor did not impact our infrastructure, but the excess traffic that was passed on to Gmail caused Google to take defensive action blocking us from sending email to their domains.

We banned the player quickly and stopped the impact as soon as we were aware of it. In addition we made changes to our infrastructure to prevent a player from leveraging this type of attack in the future. Sadly Google's facility to engage on issues of this type is minimal and one sided. We followed the process and provided all data they asked us for, but they did not respond in any way. Even after a follow up on Monday, this morning we found that gmail was still rejecting any emails from our servers.

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Resolution:

We have made additional changes and are routing our mail through a different server we control. As of this writing all tests have resulted in successful email delivery to Gmail.

Any players who have tried to create accounts, or change passwords should re-try those actions again. Please be sure to check the gmail spam or junk mail folders if the mail is not delivered to the inbox in a timely basis.
If the email *is* delivered to a spam or junk mail folder, please be sure to mark the mail as "not spam" and or whitelist our email addresses.

If there are any questions on this issue, please reach out to us via support@shroudoftheavatar.com with the attention to Ravalox.

Thank you very much for your patience during this time, and sorry for any inconvenience.