Comments on: Email Breakdown - It’s Actually Happening

By: David Horn

David Horn — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 21:36:17 +0000

Only thing I could suggest is to implement something a bit like My Ebay, where both the user and the company use some sort of system based on your own server. Like a souped up PM system.

By: Jason Dunn

Jason Dunn — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 22:25:41 +0000

Yes, the Vaja contest is one of the contests I was talking about - it turned into a complete and total nightmare, with several people never getting a SINGLE email from the Vaja person, and the Vaja person never able to get a SINGLE email from the person, yet I’m stuck in the middle able to communicate with both people. Totally baffling, and completely frustrating. It happens on Pocket PC Thoughts contests too where we’ll email someone info about their prize, they’ll email us back two weeks later asking why they hadn’t recieved info about their prize…or the developer won’t be able to get in touch with them and they get unhappy with us because they can’t get their prize. It’s honestly almost enough to make me not want to do contests any more.

By: ale_ers

ale_ers — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 19:17:34 +0000

I guess I am one of the contest winners you speak of since we have been corresponding about a vaja case won through zune thoughts. David brings up a good point when he speaks of email being a problem when he is trying to receive payment. He doesn’t want to appear pushy and he doesn’t know if people are avoiding him or is there is a problem.

I figure something similar happened with my case. Someone leaves the company or changes their email address and emails go unanswered.

I have since received an email from vaja and they are checking on my case. And sure enough, I found the email in the Junk Folder.

By: David Horn

David Horn — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 01:32:18 +0000

Ah, you misunderstand me. Lack of sleep, I’m afraid! I’m working on my final-year university project, and have only slept 6 hours in the last 72. In fact, it’s 3.29am in the UK as I post this…

I didn’t mean to use the word “blacklisted”. The point I was trying to make was that an email originating from Google’s SMTP servers is likely to be treated more kindly in the future than email from Joe Bloggs’s home-brewed server.

I’ll let you know how things go - I already use Gmail for my personal email account anyway because the spam filtering is so good, although it doesn’t get a lot of the Russian messages. Incidentally, with the 2600n printer, I tried the XP drivers in frustration. It didn’t work and needed a system restore to fix. What annoys me is that my Granddad’s inkjet printer (bought at the same time as the 2600n) works absolutely fine. Doesn’t even need the driver CD. HP has really dropped the ball on this.

By: Jason Dunn

Jason Dunn — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 22:04:18 +0000

Hmm. So your theory is that 100% of the email problems you’re having is from your SMTP server being blacklisted? I’ll be interested to hear if that bears out, because I have a feeling many of my problems are related to me using words like “contest” and “winner” in the email, and so much spam uses those terms that they virtually guarantee that your email won’t get there. Please let me know how it works out for you.

By: David Horn

David Horn — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 21:36:06 +0000

An excellent post. This needs to be fixed, as I am experiencing the same problem at PocketGamer, and quite a lot of my emails over the last twelve months have been just checking that things have been received.

This is a particular problem when chasing advertisers for payment, because you can’t tell if they received your email or not but don’t want to appear pushy over the matter.

Your approach is a good solution, but my intention is to switch from using SMTP on our web server to simply passing the responsibility on to Google. You simply alter your DNS settings and Google takes care of everything, so you still have your name@domain.com email addresses, but it runs on Google’s servers. I have no aversion to paying for this, and as an added bonus email is backed up; you still have mail if your server goes down, and your email is unlikely to be blacklisted as spam.

David.