Blocked emails & website downtime

[pennymachines]

Sorry folks, we're likely to be offline shortly and then it may take between 6 to 72 hours before you can view these pages again.

Over recent months several people did not receive the auto-generated emails required to activate their accounts after joining the Forum. Investigation revealed that notification emails generated by the Forum, Arena, Market etc. were being blocked to a number of email accounts. This is because the IP PennyMachines.co.uk shares with a number of other sites has been blacklisted, thanks to the unscrupulous emailing activities of one or more of those websites. To remedy this, I'm forced to move PennyMachines.co.uk to a dedicated IP.

That's annoying on several counts:
the email disruption already caused,
the extra $24 a year it will cost to fix this (before it fails again for some other reason!),
the site may be unavailable to some visitors for several days (while the DNS propagates to the new IP).
It wasn't my fault (for a change).

[pennymachines]

I'm still struggling to fix this problem. Unfortunately, this means a few more hours of downtime soon.

[pennymachines]

OK we're back online. Sorry about the two day glitch: apparently the IP address was bound to the wrong server through a routing issue... No, I don't know what that means either.

[pennymachines]

Message from Badpenny is that emails are getting through now - so that's all fixed... for the time being...