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GC.com email throttle?


addisonbr

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I have a cache that gets a lot of out-of-town visitors and the trackable inventory can get a little messy. I try to go through it once a month, looking for trackables that haven't been logged in a few weeks. I send the owners a polite note letting them know that I unfortunately had to mark their items as missing, give them a little history of how the trackables in this cache almost always eventually turn up, and then I click it as missing.

 

The system is currently barking at me and won't let me send any more of these notes to cache owners. I've been trying for several minutes and I keep getting a message "You must wait before sending another email." It won't tell me how long I have to wait, I only know that it's been several minutes so far and I'm getting a little bored.

 

It's not a disaster, I could always stop sending the explanatory notes out when I mark the bugs, but I think owners like them. On the other hand, I can't sit here for hours if I am going to have to wait 10 or more minutes between emails, so I suppose I'd just have to bag the whole approach.

 

Does anyone know if this is, in fact, a throttle, and if so, how long I am supposed to wait between sending messages to bug owners?

 

Thanks!

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Yes, this is a designed throttle. It's been around for many years. As you might imagine, it's a useful protection against people who abuse the site's email system for promotional, commercial or disruptive purposes. I am very sorry that you got trapped by the throttle, since you were trying to do something admirable as a good cache maintainer.

 

I do not remember the exact parameters of the throttle or, if I knew them, whether I am allowed to tell you.

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I do not remember the exact parameters of the throttle or, if I knew them, whether I am allowed to tell you.

I appreciate the reply. If it turns out that this is information that doesn't need to be kept truly secret and a lackey or reviewer can contact me with some further details, it would definitely make my maintenance efforts less frustrating. Or, a private reply telling me otherwise would also be helpful so that I will know not to wait for an answer.

 

Thanks for any guidance!

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I may be misunderstanding what you're saying is happening to those travelbugs so please set me straight if i am.

 

Over the many years that we've been caching, and with probably around 40 or so regular in size containers out, i've rarely had any problems with travelbugs coming and going. I'd say that maybe 10 cachers have asked me to check on their bugs in the 9 years that we've had caches hidden.

 

Don't mean to sound callous but, i can't imagine having so many problems that things got "messy" or that i would ever run out of emailing room on gc.com. Could the problems be a result of the cache placement itself? Bad location or too many mugglings? To be honest, i would definitely think about archiving a cache of mine if it was causing this much trouble for other cacher's travelbugs...

Edited by Mudfrog
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Snug as a Bug?! We found it the other day and found one TB out of I think 20 something listed, we loved the cache and little area to sit anyway. I don't thin too many muggles go there, I think it's more because it's one of the most favorited caches in NYC so it probably draws most attention to cachers and some cachers who just don't know that they HAVE to pass on TBs. Unfortunate.

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I may be misunderstanding what you're saying is happening to those travelbugs so please set me straight if i am.

 

Over the many years that we've been caching, and with probably around 40 or so regular in size containers out, i've rarely had any problems with travelbugs coming and going. I'd say that maybe 10 cachers have asked me to check on their bugs in the 9 years that we've had caches hidden.

 

Don't mean to sound callous but, i can't imagine having so many problems that things got "messy" or that i would ever run out of emailing room on gc.com. Could the problems be a result of the cache placement itself? Bad location or too many mugglings? To be honest, i would definitely think about archiving a cache of mine if it was causing this much trouble for other cacher's travelbugs...

When you have a cache located in a place that gets a lot of tourism, it is not uncommon for someone to grab a bug, then log it when they get home two weeks later. Also not uncommon for a visitor to forget they even grabbed the bug. The OP probably marks them missing to get them out of inventory so people won't be looking for them there for the next several weeks.

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I may be misunderstanding what you're saying is happening to those travelbugs so please set me straight if i am.

 

Over the many years that we've been caching, and with probably around 40 or so regular in size containers out, i've rarely had any problems with travelbugs coming and going. I'd say that maybe 10 cachers have asked me to check on their bugs in the 9 years that we've had caches hidden.

 

Don't mean to sound callous but, i can't imagine having so many problems that things got "messy" or that i would ever run out of emailing room on gc.com. Could the problems be a result of the cache placement itself? Bad location or too many mugglings? To be honest, i would definitely think about archiving a cache of mine if it was causing this much trouble for other cacher's travelbugs...

Yes, I think this is a misunderstanding with what I'm saying.

 

This is what it says on the cache page:

 

Please read this quick note about travel bugs and geocoins... [This cache] gets a *lot* of visitors - on average, more than one per day - and a lot of the cachers are visitors exploring far from home. Often a bug or coin gets dropped off in the morning and is picked up again hours later, by someone who may not be able to properly log the traveler out for a little while. I update the inventory monthly, clearing out everything that hasn't been seen for more than a few weeks. But in several years of maintaining this listing, I can say with confidence that there will always be anywhere from 5-20 trackables listed in the cache that have already moved. Please do not let this affect your enjoyment of the hunt! It's just the way it is for high-velocity caches like this one - the online logs simply do not keep up with how fast the inventories turn over in real life.

 

Also, keep in mind that this is a small container - although the cache page may indicate a huge warehouse (as I write this there are 21 trackables logged into the cache), the reality is that there are fewer than 10 cubic inches of space to work with. So be prepared for the possibility that not all of your trackables will fit.

 

Now let me flesh that out a bit. Because of its location (it's the nearest bug-ready container to many of New York's Midtown hotels), the cache gets a lot of visitors. "More than one per day" doesn't really describe it well - for the past year or two it has averaged something around 100-150 logs per month. Which is a lot. And a huge percentage of those logs come from folks traveling to New York from pretty far away - there are a lot of tourists from Europe, for example. And many of them don't log their travels until they get home, which can sometimes be a couple of weeks or more after they've visited a cache.

 

As a result, the trackable inventory for caches like Snug as a Bug is nearly impossible to keep accurate in real-time. Travel Bugs and geocoins will often never even spend the night in the cache, being deposited in the morning and grabbed again within hours. If I mark a trackable as "missing" too soon - before it's actually, in any real sense, "missing" - it can monkey with the online history of the bug, or create more work for the person who grabbed it (because Snug as a Bug will no longer show up in the drop down menu for where the trackable was grabbed from). Which isn't to say that I ignore the history on the cache page. I go through the listing once a month or more, and anything that hasn't been seen for at least 4-6 weeks or so I will mark as missing, to alert the owner of the trackable that there might be a problem. They almost *always* get logged before I have to do that though - in several years of maintaining this cache, it has been visited by over 1900 trackables, and I've only had to mark maybe 2% of them as missing.

 

So I hope that helps you understand what's going on here. I personally think it's a fine location, and a good place to drop bugs off. The bugs aren't getting muggled; it's a function of the velocity of cachers visiting this cache, and of our attempts to maintain a place for visitors to swap trackable items.

 

But the net result is that trying to send friendly emails to bug owners when I do my monthly maintenance seems to cause me to run afoul of the commercial filters for the email system. Which is a bit of a bummer; I'd rather not abandon the practice, as I usually get nice replies from owners for the information. But not knowing how long I have to wait between notices isn't the funnest part of trying to let folks know what's going on.

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When you have a cache located in a place that gets a lot of tourism, it is not uncommon for someone to grab a bug, then log it when they get home two weeks later. Also not uncommon for a visitor to forget they even grabbed the bug. The OP probably marks them missing to get them out of inventory so people won't be looking for them there for the next several weeks.

This is exactly right. Sometimes people seem to get pretty angry when they show up at the cache and the items in the online inventory aren't present in the cache, and they gift me with nasty logs. It's a little unfortunate, but it's not clear what exactly I should be doing differently.

 

I should note that RoandJoe weren't nasty in their log :)

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YES,, i can see now why things can get messy. I didn't try to look up the cache and definitely didn't realize how many visitors it gets. Sounds like you have your work cut out for you but on the otherhand, i would bet good money that your efforts are surely appreciated! B)

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Does anybody know how long the wait is?

It still states "You must wait before sending another e-mail", but does not give any more information anywhere. Why?

 

I use to contact cachers when receiving a "trackable not seen in cache" note (and waited for four weeks) to ask if they accidentally took it along, but forgot to log it. It is very successful, about 80% of the trackables turn up again with the comment "... oh, yes, just found it in my backpack, sits there since weeks, totally forgot about it, was too busy with finding caches".

For highly frequented caches this requires to contact a lot of cachers, which is cut short now.

With all these changes in the last time, I get the feeling that Groundspeak is more interested in finding new customers than take care of the existing ones.

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Does anybody know how long the wait is?

It still states "You must wait before sending another e-mail", but does not give any more information anywhere. Why?

 

I use to contact cachers when receiving a "trackable not seen in cache" note (and waited for four weeks) to ask if they accidentally took it along, but forgot to log it. It is very successful, about 80% of the trackables turn up again with the comment "... oh, yes, just found it in my backpack, sits there since weeks, totally forgot about it, was too busy with finding caches".

For highly frequented caches this requires to contact a lot of cachers, which is cut short now.

With all these changes in the last time, I get the feeling that Groundspeak is more interested in finding new customers than take care of the existing ones.

 

Actually they are taking care of their current customers by reducing the chance that someone can spam a ton of members. Sucks if you have a legitimate reason for sending a lot of emails, but the emails system is otherwise easily abused without the throttling.

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I can appreciate that, although as someone trying to help other cachers it would be helpful to me if some information about the throttling parameters could be shared. I like letting people know what's going on with their trackables, but I feel a little foolish sitting at my computer hitting refresh forever, waiting to figure out when the system will let me send another email.

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Security through obscurity FTW.

 

Makes sense. If I were building a spam bot, I would love to know the precise details of the throttling system. Then I could build my bot to work around those parameters.

 

There are way more pluses to this than there are negatives. Sometimes it is good to keep things close to the belt.

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Security through obscurity FTW.

 

Makes sense. If I were building a spam bot, I would love to know the precise details of the throttling system. Then I could build my bot to work around those parameters.

 

It seems to make sense only superficially. If you were to make a spam bot, you could easily figure out the details of the mechanism through trial and error. No security gained, but you're losing the benefit of public knowledge as an aid to identify the flaws.

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There are way more pluses to this than there are negatives. Sometimes it is good to keep things close to the belt.

That's possible. I'm not sure I can recall being spammed by people taking advantage of the system, but it's not 100% clear to me if that's because it's not really that much of a problem, or if it's precisely *because* the throttle is set up how it is that I don't get spam. It's very hard to say for sure.

 

But as one example of a solution I'd prefer, and which I would have added to the Feedback thread if it hadn't been shut down so fast, is that perhaps after a certain amount of emails (5 in 5 minutes, or whatever) instead of getting cut off with an ambiguous time frame, you get some sorts of CAPTCHA boxes you have to fill out to send more email. Would probably interrupt or thwart most spammers, while being a 2-second nuisance at worst for people like me who are genuinely trying to help other cachers.

 

It might not work, CAPTCHA isn't perfect. But then again, it might.

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And I believe there have been requests for the ability to add a personal note when sending TBs to 'the unknown location'.

This would obviously relieve the situation, but nothing has been done.

Oh, I'm sure the suggestion has some 'internal tracking code'* applied to it.

 

I guess all that can be said is 'No good deed goes unpunished'.

 

* This is a secret code for 'Don't expect to see any results from this suggestion'.

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Yes, this is a designed throttle. It's been around for many years. As you might imagine, it's a useful protection against people who abuse the site's email system for promotional, commercial or disruptive purposes. I am very sorry that you got trapped by the throttle, since you were trying to do something admirable as a good cache maintainer.

This problem (for me) seems to have reared its head again. I was trying to send about a dozen notifications today to people that I was marking their TBs as missing (my monthly housecleaning), and I got a message that the system seems to be incredibly displeased with me:

 

Sorry, you have overexceeded your email quota.

How does this work?

We respect the privacy of our users. As a result, we allow you the ability to email other accounts through online forms without exposing your email address. In order to reduce abuse, there are a limited number of emails you can send per session, and we may record the IP address from which your message was sent. Commercial emails are not allowed through this tool.

This feels more final and serious to the messages I usually get. Normally, after I've sent a small handful I simply get a message to take a break and come back later, so I do. And I got one of those today. But after coming back and sending out a few more notices, now I got this like perma-block.

 

For how long am I in the doghouse, does anyone know? What is a session?

 

Am I doing something that Groundspeak would prefer I not do (notifying cache owners that their bugs have gone missing)?

 

Thanks for any guidance.

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Sorry, you have overexceeded your email quota.

How does this work?

We respect the privacy of our users. As a result, we allow you the ability to email other accounts through online forms without exposing your email address. In order to reduce abuse, there are a limited number of emails you can send per session, and we may record the IP address from which your message was sent. Commercial emails are not allowed through this tool.

This feels more final and serious to the messages I usually get. Normally, after I've sent a small handful I simply get a message to take a break and come back later, so I do. And I got one of those today. But after coming back and sending out a few more notices, now I got this like perma-block.

 

For how long am I in the doghouse, does anyone know? What is a session?

 

Am I doing something that Groundspeak would prefer I not do (notifying cache owners that their bugs have gone missing)?

 

Thanks for any guidance.

Are you trying to send the emails without checking the "I want to send my email address along with this message" option under the email input box? From the sound of the more serious message, it sounds like there might be a tighter restriction on emails sent without including the sender's email address. Just a guess, but maybe the less serious message is used when the "I want to send my email address along with this message" option is checked.

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Just yesterday I got the same message about having exceeded my email quota. This struck me as very odd, since I don't use the feature that often, and when I do I get a copy of the email sent to mysef, so it was a simply matter to go back and see how many emails I've been sending using geocaching.com's portal. The answer was 6 last month, 3 in August, 15 in July. At least in my recent history, I haven't sent more than twenty messages in any given month. How can that possibly be exceeding a quota? Anyhow, I contacted GS about it and received a reply today to sign out of my account, close my browser, and clear cookies. Now I can send emails again. If you aren't actually sending a lot of emails, you may want to try that. I still do not believe I exceeded any quota though, and think something else is up. Perhaps tGS is monkeying with the system right now. Or perhaps somehow my account is being used to send emails through GS and unbeknownst to me. Creepy. In the end, I'm just glad I can send emails again. Nothing like have a solid record of your communiques.

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Are you trying to send the emails without checking the "I want to send my email address along with this message" option under the email input box? From the sound of the more serious message, it sounds like there might be a tighter restriction on emails sent without including the sender's email address. Just a guess, but maybe the less serious message is used when the "I want to send my email address along with this message" option is checked.

Yes, I always have the first two boxes checked. The only box I never check is the one about sending a friend request.

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"Sorry, you have overexceeded your email quota."

 

I've been getting it for over a week! And I barely send e-mails, two or three since the start of September, none since International EarthCache Day, when I first got this error. I'm a premium member. I don't know what else to do.

 

I haven't changed any options. I don't get far enough to answer the question about sending myself a copy.

 

Please help!

Edited by Mrs.Hoagie
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