I have an email address ONLY for notifications. No filters, no forwards, used to receive all the notifications for publications as soon as they where published. I have not received any for over a month!!! I figured people where on vacation and not publishing.
On FB a buddy of mine announced 6 published caches and nobody among my circle of geocachers got any notifications.
The caches are: GC3R1JT, GC3R1JV, GC3R1JW, GC3R1JX, GC3R1JY, GC3R1JZ.
There obviously is a notification issue at Groundspeak. They can claim we are fools and don't know how to verify Spam filters, or fowards or that the the problem is too widespread that we simply ignore it because they don't know how to debug, but THERE IS A PROBLEM. It is obvious that MANY members have the issue of not receiving Publication Notifications. Instead of putting their head in the ground like an osterich, they should look at their email logs, pull a query on emails that should have been notified (based on the multiple examples given in this thread) and compare with their email server logs. This is Programming 101 here!!!!
Do we need to talk about Business 101? Like the primary source or revenue for Groundspeak is membership fees? And what happens if you are unable to deliver a promised service? People start asking why they would want to spend $30USD on a service that has become flaky.
So what does it take for GS to step up to their engagement of service? Denying that there is a bug because some people got a notification is a lame excuse. And blaming the end-user that we have spam filters and don't know how they work is even lamer. Maybe, just maybe, out of all the people who made the effort to notify you on your forum of a notification bug, there *might* be an issue on Groundspeak side? Before brushing us off, why not confirm that for each notification that people did not receive, you do your homework, look at your SMTP logs, compare with the list of users that should have received the email notifications. Get some facts to prove that X number of users where notified successfully at Y time, on Z date. You just might realize that you do in fact have a bug and could even fix it!!!!
Whether it be your mail server, your notification list email generator, your cache publishing workflow, your ISP, your event scheduler, etc. you need to be above of your operations. You need to be able to confirm and prove that every event was sent correctly. You need to be able to identify which events where rejected or not successfully completed. If you're not there yet, then stop charging people and stay in the "amateur run-by-donations" playing field. Otherwise, act like a reputable company and honor your service commitments.
