Beware of Lost Sales

[Lawrence]

Well in a nutshell, your sales departments are likely rejecting emails. See the attached image.

I've just woke up today (It's been a long day) only to find out that some 100 emails with a potential of $3,000 per month in sales were rejected even though I allow ANYONE to submit a ticket through my sales department.

The one log that I thought I wouldn't have to check since the department was already configured had issues that started some several months ago. All in all, I was actually able to recover $200 per month in sales increases, but that's $2,800 estimated (Low balling it) in sales that I've completely missed out on.

With this loss in sales, I'm rather upset with HostBill right now as it has officially hit me hard with potential gains. It's also embarrassing that I have unanswered emails that haven't been answered in months.

I would officially like to revoke any and all endorsements I have of HostBill. I will continue to host these forums in hopes that HostBill improves, but I will never recommend this product to anyone until positive changes occur.

The attachment demonstrates just my sales department tickets for the past 2 days. 9 tickets rejected, of which are about $200 in sales gains. Check your tickets and make sure you good folks aren't losing any potential income.

[Lawrence]

Very tricky of HostBill to implement a log rotation about the same time this starts occurring..... It's starting to add up.

It's a good thing I've never rotated my logs, otherwise I'd have to go through the database to find all these email rejections.

[Lawrence]

So as a temporary solution, I have to check the emails delivered and create "Temporary" accounts for these users. The drawback is that these individuals cannot register, but I can communicate with them. I've verified my settings and the departments are definitely open.

This was also affecting another one of my departments. I've done a dry save (No settings changed, just saved) and it seems to be working now. Clients that're not registered on my website can now send emails to that specific department.

I'll likely update my sales department so it works just like the other one soon. It seems like the database gets goofed up after a while, or the code is changed in a way that you have to re-apply the changes. Once you configure something, you shouldn't have to re-configure it unless there's an over-haul in the billing software.

[beautiful]

scary

[Patrick]

One thing you didn't mention is what version of hostbill this was?  The latest?

[tallship]

Sales is working fine for me. I had issues with crappy regex in HostBill code, since I brand email addys with capitalization in spots - it would reject mails. So I changed that.

I'm not having any issues at this very time with my sales department - just my technical support department - worse than not being able to handle potential customers is losing existing ones.

What I did was setup an actual email account and import from that account - and then I set up forwarders and a filter where those forwarded emails land in another folder/account, which I IMAP - those folders under those accounts in my MUA clients fill up, but now I don't even see ANYTHING in "Extras ==> System Logs ==> Emails Sent" or "Extras ==> System Logs ==> Ticket Import Log"

I'm so disgusted about all of this that I didn't even bother to report it here in the forums, let alone open a popularity post in the fake bug reporting system.

But now that someone else has actually figured out that this has been going on for a while now, I'm going to follow this thread to see if A.SS.Hat fixes it.

[Lawrence]

I hope it gets fixed. It seems during updates, not many, IF ANY database queries are ran. The only thing that changes is the version number in the database.

I guess Kris doesn't know how to update the database when he creates HostBill updates. We shouldn't have to run dry saves on our configurations every update.

[Enterprisevpssolutions]

WTF I have a few of these as well. Now I have to contact all of them back to see if they still want services this is crazy I am going to go and save all the setting again who knows what else is broken.

[TommyK]

Not good, didn't find any in my logs. On a similiar note though;

When people send to my queues and send to more addresses at the same time, they do not get imported.

[tallship]

I spoke too soon.

I'm experiencing this problem in the sales department as well.

I know I prefer to actually login and open/respond to tickets where support systems are concerned, but I am in the minority - most people simply want to respond to emails.

Currently, my support department requests end up in hyperspace most of the time, with nothing in the logs to show otherwise (emails from non customers do indeed show up in the logs and an email is sent back saying the client doesn't have an account though)

Sales is hit and miss, is supposed to accept email from anyone, but who knows how many aren't even showing up  in the logs?

This really sucks and makes HostBill virtually useless for support or sales. Worse, actually, since customers expect to have their support issues handled.

[Patrick]

I can tell you all right now on the old "official" forums i reported an import problem about a year ago.  Glad to see it was.......uh.....not fixed.

I still have a nervous feeling every day if emails are being denied, imported or lost.  We get so much spam in these accounts though it's really hard to go through them daily

[tallship]

I think the thing that we should do is simply consider it not working. Chronically broken, terminally fubar'd, etc.

That having been said, when an email hits one of those accounts, peel off a copy through a forwarder to another account so at least we don't actually lose it, and can attend to it.

This is a very messy kludge, but because HostBill doesn't work, hasn't worked, and probably will remain broken for the foreseeable future, it might be best to assume it doesn't work, and then on the occasions where it does, use the ticketing system.

This is simply bad any way you look at it. More modules (that dont'work) , more license versions, more features (that don't work), and exceedingly few bug-fixes in a product that within one month of releasing a new [fake] bugtracker, had hundreds of fixit-tickets that are mostly still unattended.

[tallship]

Very tricky of HostBill to implement a log rotation about the same time this starts occurring..... It's starting to add up.

It's a good thing I've never rotated my logs, otherwise I'd have to go through the database to find all these email rejections.

I don't see any log roation or archiving capabilities in the logs - only clearing the logs, which is unacceptable. What are you referring to exactly Lawrence?

It won't be that hard to archive those logs though, with a couple of SQL statements they can be fed into a table on a separate database, and that can be done with a cronjob that runs once every week or month or so.

I would like to see the capability to delete certain items on a line by line basis too, i.e., when a user creates an account and their password is in that log in clear text, or the kruft that accumulates from SPAM and the "Not Found" and "Unregistered" entries in the logs.

Basically, the logging in HostBill leaves much to be desired - it doesn't really show reliably who all is on the cc list, etc., and other annoying shortcomings.

I've found that both "Not Found" AND "Unregistered" entries end up there often because of the broken regex capabilities in HostBill - this alone is enough for NO ONE to want to purchase this software, since it is such a critical aspect of the business process!

Anyway Lawrence, go back and check those email addresses closely. Are there any capitalized characters in any of those emails addresses either sent to your ticket departments (Service@sld.tld, Service@Sld.tld, etc.) or from the sender (i.e., JoeUser@sld.tld, Joeuser@Sld.tld, etc.)

I'd really like to get to the bottom of this - it is critical that we know when people open sales and technical support tickets!

[psybox]

for us - the case is all lower and looks to be correct. However "none of receiver email matches any of your support departments" error appears in the logs. It does this mostly for sales, although I also see it randomly for some of the support departments also. I reported this a long time ago, but nothing was fixed.

[nibb]

I don´t think this is an issue with Hostbill but your server or install.

I don´t have this issue but I did checked this and I do have some "Not Found" and they are all correctly for invalid recipients.

In my case when you hover over it says "None of the receiver emails matches any of your support departments"

And its correct, this where spams or send to an invalid recipient.

What exactly is the error message you have when putting the mouse over them?

How did you set up the piping and which email server do you use?

There are tons of potential issues here, a bad hostbill config or install, or something broke in some update, or something in your server, or the piping configuration, some missing file or corrupted ioncube file, etc.

I never had this problem before. I did had a problem with auto replies flooding my systems in thousands per second, but this was actually not a hostbill problem directly, while they could had implemented some boot triggering, I stopped this on the email server directly but modifying how the piping to PHP after arriving.

What exactly is the Not Found in your case? Try checking also the originals email headers to see what is going on there.