Update: As we have managed to work around this issue, Hotmail is no longer blocked. =)

Recently, email from our server was not being delivered to most hotmail addresses; this causes quite a few problems since passwords are generated and emailed out to users, and applicants are notified via email when they are accepted into a guild.

We spent many, many hours over the past few weeks attempting to resolve this issue, changing our mail server, searching the web, contacting Microsoft..eventually it came down to this one unhelpful email we received from Microsoft:

From: Microsoft Customer Support
"We have identified that messages from your IP are being filtered based on the recommendations of the SmartScreen filter. SmartScreen is the spam filtering technology developed and operated by Microsoft. SmartScreen is built around the technology of machine learning. SmartScreen's filters are trained to recognize what is spam and what isn't spam. In short, we filter incoming emails that look like spam. I am not able to go into any specific details about what these filters specifically entail, as this would render them useless."

This means that, for whatever reason, their SmartScreen filter thinks that the email we send out is spam and they outright block it. Despite us only using our mail server to send out the email to our users about password resets and accounts, they will not undo this for us; they are content to leave us blocked.

So, we have no more outs other then to block hotmail as an option for email to use with our service. Attempting to create an account or apply for a guild with a hotmail email will now show the error:

"hotmail not allowed, see here"

with it linking to this blog post to explain why we must block it.

We apologize to all of the guilds who were frustrated by this issue in the past few weeks. If anyone has any questions or comments about this feel free to send us an email at staff@mmoguildsites.com or leave a comment here.

As we mentioned in the earlier system message, the site is up and running on the new hardware now.

The transfer went pretty smooth, with one exception: sessions were enabled incorrectly when we first brought the site back up, we noticed a few minutes after and fixed the issue, but anyone who accessed the site at that time then got left with an invalid session and would receive an error when trying to view your guild site.

If you or someone in your guild was affected by this and is seeing an error message when attempting to view your guild site, fully close your web browser and re-open it and the issue will then be fixed.

Other then that, everything looks good and we are back to work on the theming update now and hope to have another preview of it ready by next weekend =)

We will be doing the transfer to a new data center that was mentioned on our blog earlier this sunday. (see the previous blog post for more details)

Downtime for this will be longer then a normal update, around 2 to 4 hours. We will begin the transfer around 2am EST Sunday January 13th.

As we mentioned in the previous blog, if you are using a domain name you own, such as enmity.com, you will have to update the DNS settings for your domain name to point to our new servers IP. If you use a subdomain to access your site, such as enmity.mmoguildsites.net, you do not need to take any action.

To update the DNS settings for a domain name you own, you will want to change the DNS settings for your domain name from 209.200.247.61 (our servers current IP) to 67.228.46.170 (our new servers IP).

*note: do not do this until we make the transfer on sunday. Once the site goes down for the transfer you can make the change.

If you have any questions about this don't hesitate to send us an email - staff@mmoguildsites.com.