I just wanted to write a quick post about an email problem I’ve discovered recently.
My website runs on AWS, but emails to my normal email address get directed by DNS to a mailbox hosted by another company. I use Gmail as my mail client, so it picks up the posts from that mailbox. Emails that are sent directly work fine, but I recently noticed those sent from my web server were failing. There are several parts of the site that send emails so I know what is going on and can respond. None of those have been working for some time. That issue is now fixed.
Some of the things that generate these emails (like comments) get picked up in my daily/weekly workflow, so I didn’t really notice a dramatic change, but some only get to me via these emails from the site, so they were hidden in the mail queue of doom.
By the time I had discovered the problem I had several thousand emails sitting in the queue. I started to work through them, but realised it was too big a job. I picked a random sample of mails and could see there were a mixture of topics including questions, messages of support and offers I simply could not refuse. 🙂 I decided the only way to move forward was to delete the lot. It would have taken me weeks to get through the backlog.
So in this post I would just like to say a few things.
- To those people that wrote to send their support for what I do on the site, thank you very much, and I’m sorry I’ve not been able to respond personally. I normally reply to these messages with a quick thank you, so I hope you don’t think I’m an arrogant prick and just ignoring you.
- To the people who sent questions, I’m sorry your question was never answered. Please remember, I have a full time job and I do this for fun in my spare time. There is one of me, and literally thousands of you. I closed my forum because the workload was too big to cope with. If I have to choose between spending time producing new content, or answering your questions, I’m going to pick producing new content. Sorry. 🙂
- To those people offering me business opportunities. No.
- To those people offering me various services of a questionable nature. No.
I hope there was nothing super important. Once again, sorry!
Cheers
Tim…
PS. Before you ask, I am going to check my mail queue from time to time in future, just in case something like this happens again… 🙂
