Is Dreamhost Ignoring Emails

I've been testing my new Dreamhost account and it seems that whenever I try to send an email from the same object in SL more than once in the span of a minute, Dreamhost totally ignores the email.

Sometimes, they won't even accept emails from SL at all for several minutes! Has anybody seen a similar pattern?

I've noticed something else. If I edit my .forward.postfix file and/or my .procmailrc file, the emails seem to get parsed just fine. Then they'll stop parsing until I edit the file again and change it somehow.

This is driving me crazy!!! I've spent four days trying to get this to work reliably and it's been an utter joke.

I did a little more testing and it doesn't seem to be related to Second Life. Even with my personal email account (not my Dreamhost account), if I send an email to my Dreamhost account immediately after another it just ignores it.

I've emailed Dreamhost support but I still wanted to post here since I know some of you use Dreamhost as well for your scripts. Have you noticed anything similar?

It may have been an intermittant problem that was resolved or even something on LL's end (did you test to a non-dreamhost account). I just tested with about 3 minutes of sending an email every two seconds, which only resulted in a bunch of spam from "object".

/edit - Just to check - you aware that llEmail will pause a script for 20 seconds, correct?

Yes, I was aware of the 20 second llEmail script delay.

What I've found is that when I set up my ".forward.postfix" file to forward incoming email to ".procmailrc" which then forwards to a PHP program... then the first email in a while will make it through to the PHP script... but subsequent ones after that will not.

But if I don't try forwarding stuff, the messages come through just fine and fast.

So the delay must have something to do with the forwarding stuff. Do you have your account set up to forward emails from your objects to a server script?

Here's a follow up.

I changed the way my .forward.postfix and .procmailrc files were done (now using a local copy of PHP) and things appear to be fixed. There is a slight delay sometimes before emails reach Dreamhost's servers but they all appear to be making it now and running the appropriate program.

If anyone is interested, I may post a thread using all I've learned to give the *EXACT* steps required to use Dreamhost as an XML-RPC relay for SecondLife. I've even written a crude "secondlife.inc" library that handles XML-RPC and email parsing.

Yes, the initial setup of the forwarding bit is a little unstandard, but I have had pretty good results since then (except that few weeks when they decided to block all traffic from LL - that sucked).

In general, I found it was definately better to actually have a local copy of anything you need to use as the actual servers that recieve the email (and thus run the email triggered scripts) have a rather large lacking of utilities and libraries - I have 1/2 of a standard /usr/lib and /usr/bin compiled into my local directories). On the plus side, at least we can compile and have more than enough storage for everything.