As of January, 2010, we will not longer be supporting incoming emails to the tournament domains. That includes email addresses like info@tournamentevent.com, applications@tournmentevent.com, etc. We will continue to send emails out from do_not_reply@tournamentevent.com as we have for the past couple years, however.
Why is this change necessary?
In the past 30 days, we have processed over 32 million pieces of spam to the soccer tournament domains that TourneyCentral hosts. While many of these spam messages made it through to your spam folder, many did not. As you can imagine, it takes a lot of resources to manage these emails that come from spammers and constant vigilance to block them when we can. Unfortunately, the costs have gotten to the point where we would have to raise our rates to provide the same level of service (payroll, servers, software fees, additional bandwidth, etc) or decide to discontinue supporting emails. Since we already write the messages to the Message Center, we have decided to quit sending out to the domains. If you are using an email with your tournament domain as a contact address, you may want to change it in favor of a Gmail-based address or similar setup.
Will I still receive notices of team applications, referees, questions, etc?
Yes. We are building an admin tool that allows you to assign one persistent email (gets everything) and one email for each of the various functions, (Advertising/sponsorship, Applications, College, Housing, Referees, Apparel/Store, and Tournament Director) If you require more than one person receive the notice, we recommend you sent up a Gmail.com account and filter it further.
I used to get emails and then they quit coming. What is going on?
This is also the problem we are looking to solve. Unless you ask us, we will not change any setting on your email distribution, so the problem is most likely on the RECEIVING end, not the sending. More and more ISPs are taking it on themselves to filter out what they consider spam at their SMTP server BEFORE it even hits your account. In short, your ISP is deciding what is and what is not spam without your consent or knowledge.
Typically, here is how it goes. You may have sent out a marketing email to 300+ teams, asking them to come back next year. 2-3 teams saw that, didn’t want the email, but instead of telling you, they reported you as spam to their ISP, which happens to be yours as well. (RoadRunner is a good example, so is AOL and Verizon) Based on those customer complaints, they looked at the IP address of our server (209.235.192.52) and saw that we are sending out a lot of email (we do, that is true) So, they reason that we must be a spammer and they start blocking us.
How do I fix this? I need to get these emails!
Call them. Complain loudly. Then complain some more. Insist they open up a ticket and check their DNS configurations. Send a question to yourself from your tournament web site to make sure they have fixed the problem. Make sure it drops into your Message Center in the admin modules. DO NOT GIVE UP. Your ISP will do everything they can to blame TourneyCentral.com, but we can’t fix that problem. It is not in our best interest for you not to get your emails!
TourneyCentral needs to fix this with the ISPs.
No. They see US as the problem. YOU, on the other hand, are their customer. If TourneyCentral were to call them, from their point of view, it would be like letting the fox in the henhouse because he claimed to be one of the chickens.
In any case, we are fixing it by moving away from email as the primary communication tool and into a Web-based Message Center.
We will publish more details here as we move toward these changes as well as post a message in your Admin Modules.
