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Instant Notifications (FTF notifications) stopped!


Mrs.Hoagie

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On February 26th, my Instant notifications worked perfectly.  Though my logs are set to deliver to my primary e-mail, my FTF notifications (Instant Notifications) are set to arrive at my phone, my secondary e-mail.  It's been this way for nearly a decade, since I first got a smart phone.  All was well.

On February 27th, I stopped getting any new FTFs / Instant Notifications. ARGH!  I submitted a support request on April 1st (I was very sick this winter, and didn't notice at first). At first the customer support person told me that it was not possible to have Instant Notifications delivered anywhere but the primary e-mail.  Um, then why have the selection box for the secondary e-mail on each Notification?? 

A week later, I submitted the support request again, and this time was told it was a software bug introduced by the updates at that time, and I would be notified when it was fixed.  OK, makes more sense (but turns out, that's not true either).

Today it's been a month, and I went to submit another support request, since I have been unable to receive notifications for FTFs for more than a month.  Investigating, I discovered that it's not true that one can no longer have a secondary e-mail.  My own spouse uses Groundspeak in this exact way!  As do many other geo-friends.  Ugh.  I was lied to again.  Who do they have doing customer support?? Of course, it's partly my fault - I fell for their line.  No more!

So now it's May 1st.  In April, someone at Groundspeak reversed my primary and secondary e-mails, which just made things worse!  Now I'm getting my newsletters, cache logs, travel bug logs, and lots of e-mail that I want to read in my own time (at my primary e-mail address) now delivered to my secondary e-mail address.  Worse, in messing with my account, they turned on an FTF Instant Notification that I had currently turned off; I don't travel in that area at this time, and it has TONS of new caches.  I don't want to be notified of those at all!

As a stop-gap measure, I had to turn Groundspeak to spam in my Google e-mail account.  Otherwise I'm getting hundreds of messages every week from all those logs that I do NOT want to receive in real time!  Today I went through my account, set my primary and secondary e-mail accounts back the way I wanted them, and reset the Instant Notifications and their e-mail addresses, everything that Groundspeak "kindly" changed to attempt to figure out why they weren't sending my secondary e-mail any e-mails.  I then set Groundspeak back to "not spam" on my phone (Gmail account).

Now my question is, how do I get Groundspeak to send the Instant Notification e-mails to my secondary e-mail account, as I have configured on my account?  It works for my friends, even for my spouse.  But not for me?  And Groundspeak admits that they are not even sending the e-mails.  What can I do to get them to reset their blacklist of my secondary e-mail???

Thanks for any suggestions.  This has been going on TOO LONG.

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15 minutes ago, Mrs.Hoagie said:

And Groundspeak admits that they are not even sending the e-mails.

Really? They checked their logs and the emails aren't being sent out from their servers? If that's the case, then there isn't anything you can do or we can suggest that could help in any way. They'd have to fix the issue on the server side.

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What can I do to get them to reset their blacklist of my secondary e-mail???

It depends on whether or not the emails are being sent from the server or not. If the emails are being sent and you don't receive them, then there could be a blacklist in place. If the emails aren't being sent at all (which seems to be the case based on the portion above), that's a server issue on the Geocaching.com side. What email domain is this account on (ie. the portion after the @, like gmail.com)? There have been issues with Comcast addresses being blocked in the past.

If you send an email of your own to your secondary email address, do you receive it? If not, then the email account itself is the issue. Check for any spam or junk filtering, because that's usually the cause for a stoppage in these emails.

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24 minutes ago, Mrs.Hoagie said:

Investigating, I discovered that it's not true that one can no longer have a secondary e-mail.  My own spouse uses Groundspeak in this exact way!  As do many other geo-friends.  Ugh.  I was lied to again.  Who do they have doing customer support??

To be fair, front-line support staff are often somewhat non-technical and would forward any technical issues to second-level staff. That being said, it's usually expected that they should be fairly familiar with the product so they can answer questions about using the product, but that doesn't seem to be common for those at GCHQ. You'd think that they'd learn from experience by dealing with the same common issues every day, but maybe there's too much turnover in those positions for them to gain any familiarity.

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21 hours ago, Mrs.Hoagie said:

Worse, in messing with my account, they turned on an FTF Instant Notification that I had currently turned off; I don't travel in that area at this time, and it has TONS of new caches.  I don't want to be notified of those at all!

Imagine what it's like for someone that *does* live in that area that doesn't want to get notifications on TONS of new caches they have no interest in finding.

Edited by NYPaddleCacher
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Hello @Mrs.Hoagie - I am sorry that this issue has not been resolved for you. I am one of the engineers that helped to build the email service so I am hopeful that we can identify what is happening to your emails. I took a look at the settings on your account and can see that you have different instant notifications setup to be sent to both your primary and secondary email addresses. You mentioned that you would like to have your instant notifications sent to your secondary email address so I want to confirm that this is setup correctly?

https://www.geocaching.com/notify/default.aspx

I took a deeper look into the email system to get a better picture of what is happening on your account. Our system logs are showing that FTF (publish) notifications have been sent to your current secondary email address consistently for the last 3 months, including 10 emails as recently as April 30th. Can you confirm if you received these emails? If you have not seen these emails would you mind checking your spam folder? We have seen instances before where email service providers may flag the geocaching emails as spam and restrict the delivery of the emails.

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@The A-Team my domain is @thehoagies.com  I own the domain, but it is served by @gmail.com  So no, I don't think it's their problem.  Especially because my spouse also uses @thehoagies.com, the same domain. 

Yes, they told me the e-mails were NOT BEING SENT.  Supposed this was someone at a technical level. But who knows?  I do understand the trouble with front-line support, though somehow I hoped Groundspeak would be immune to the problem... Silly me. 
 

@HiddenGnome I did finally get my FTF notifications back a few days after posting this concern.  And yes, I noticed that Groundspeak had set my notifications to go to different addresses, and I set them all back, AFTER I set my primary and secondary e-mails back to the right order - Groundspeak had reversed them!  

But no, I only started getting FTF notifications to the "secondary" address (actually the primary, before they reversed the addresses) a few days before I posted this concern, i.e. the end of April.  From February through April, I didn't get them at all, at any address. 

BTW, both addresses are gmail addresses. So it's not that. Something was truly amiss at Groundspeak.  Something specific to my account, since it didn't affect my spouse who has nearly identical addresses, and never stopped getting his FTF notifications. (both our primary addresses are @thehoagies.com and both our secondary are our @gmail.com smartphone addresses).

I'm just glad it's finally resolved!!

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