Am registered on the forum of the US website Antique Radios, but now it tells me my account is inactive and to contact Administrator using this link.

I use the given link only to receive an email saying use instead alanantiqradios.com

So I did that and then I get this:

Reporting-MTA: dns; ded5829.inmotionhosting.com

Action: failed
Final-Recipient: rfc822;alanantiqueradios.com
Status: 5.0.0
Remote-MTA: dns; gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com
Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 550-5.7.26 This mail is unauthenticated, which poses a security risk to the
550-5.7.26 sender and Gmail users, and has been blocked. The sender must
550-5.7.26 authenticate with at least one of SPF or DKIM.

What on earth is this? I am not using Gmail, nor is the recipient using Gmail.

Anyone a member and can get onto Admin and get my account reactivated?

A check of the email addresses via the emailhippo email checker says:

alanantiqradios.com : invalid domain

alanantiqueradios.com : NoMxServersFound
(There are no mail servers defined for this domain, according to DNS. Email addresses cannot be valid if there are no email servers defined in DNS for the domain.)


Also when I copy/paste the addresses, the gets turned into a period.


I think that basically there's bad configuration of the email servers somewhere in the chain. I don't know how gmail gets involved, but because of the misconfiguration it's decided that you sent spam and so it blocked you.

invalid domain

Thanks. Yep, something's screwed up.

Also when I copy/paste the addresses, the (at) gets turned into a period.

Brad does that on here to thwart email address harvesting robots, etc.

The that you can see in your posts is an image. It is a spam prevention measure that these forums have always had. By superimposing the image of the sign over a fullstop it tricks Internet robots into thinking it is a URL rather than an e-mail address. It's not a 100% successful method but works to a large degree.

As for Gmail, the less said about that service the better. Those error messages are usually dependent on where the sender is sending from. I can send to a Gmail address successfully from one of my e-mail addresses but not the other one, yet both are hosted on the same Australian mail server, owned by the same people and both domains have been owned by me for a very long time.

Alan Voorhees has lived in the Phillippines for several years but as far as I know still owns the US forums. I don't think he's as active as he once was though I don't know his current status.

Marc is a site moderator there. He may know what the boss is up to and how to reach him.

Those error messages are usually dependent on where the sender is sending from.

In this case I, the sender, have nothing to do with Gmail (and that's the way I like it).

I don't think he's as active as he once was though I don't know his current status.

In that case, I hope there's somebody at the wheel.

On an unrelated note I just bumped into a thread there which stated that all members had to update their accounts to show a location and had until the end of last year to do it. I don't have an issue with this as these forums have had that as a requirement for donkeys years and so have the British forums. The odd thing is, the account update was required of each member even if they had their location stated - an odd rule which I am baffled as to how it can be achieved. So you erase the information then place it back in? Seems pointless to me. Anyway, my account's been quarantined and I am not going to bother trying to get it back. I only go there and to the British ones every few months to catch up on what's being said so I must have missed what amounts to poor communication.

After deactivating all the non-conforming accounts, I have reactivated hundreds of them. I worked on them past midnight and then resumed this morning. For a while, I was getting emails faster than I could go through all the steps required to fix the profiles and reactivate the accounts.

All he's done is create a lot of work for himself. It's fine if he has the time.

All he's done is create a lot of work for himself.

.... and a ton of needless frustration for the members. Sounds like he maybe ought to pass the role onto someone else.

I am just wondering if he has passed the rule on locations as a way of filtering out excessively idle members. To be honest, it's something I've never worried about and for this reason I didn't apply the location rule retrospectively when it was adopted.

If I was to do something like this - and don't worry, I won't be - I would take the time to e-mail all members several times as well as a posting on the site to warn everyone and give plenty of time. There's no way I'd ever get the time to administer the process Alan has given himself and that is just how it is in my line of work and this is why I spent time early on automating certain functions here so there is little need for human intervention, such as the methods the site's software uses to determine who is a real person or not, when signing up for an account. That alone saves me hours and hours of admin time.

I am just wondering if he has passed the rule on locations as a way of filtering out excessively idle members

Why on earth bother? If you want to deactivate accounts -- for whatever reason -- then do so based on some simple factor such as last login date. Sounds like a massive own goal.

All he's done is create a lot of work for himself.

Yeah. Personally I don't care where members are or if they give a location. My only concern is that they provide value and behave themselves.

I depend on my spidey sense to detect bots and spam accounts. They almost always follow a pattern of account naming and behaviour once you're used to it. Of course we now have the coming wave of AI bots which are more knowing. We'll see how that pans out.

Artificial intelligence is exactly that - artificial. The problem with intelligence is that it is not perfect. In the simple computer world, assuming a computer has been programmed correctly, is not faulty and has not been taken over by a hostile individual, it cannot get a transaction wrong. I've always been of the belief that allowing a computer to think for itself is a bad move.

The episode of Get Smart, where Kaos creates Groppo for the purpose of destroying Hymie and Max takes over control of Groppo and instructs him to destroy Kaos headquarters - this is AI at work.

I have been a moderator on that forum for quite a while & not had a lot of technical issues with it. There have been a lot of undesirable occurrences with the last few Microsoft updates & changes to "Edge" & one wonder why they like the Australian bureaucracy, That finds it unacceptable to have any thing that works some thing works & has to mess it up so it doesn't.

Whist "AI" might have it frailties' Anything would be better than the human Government & Bureaucracy that we currently have.

I have been a moderator on that forum for quite a while

Great, so can you reactivate my GTC account, please?