Last Thursday I realized that it had been quite a while since I had received any notifications of people signing up to subscribe to my blog. I had been so busy that I hadn't given it any thought. And then when I went to send an e-mail out to my subscribers telling them that the blog had been updated, the e-mail never went out. I did a couple of tests on myself using different e-mail addresses, but never received any of the e-mails that I had sent to myself from my subscription program.
Then I remembered that my website hosting service had changed hands on December 1. And lo and behold, the last subscription notification I had received was dated November 30. So I contacted support services at the new hosting company and asked them if they had changed some settings. After many back and forth e-mails, they told me that my subscription program was not working because I was on a blacklist. They directed me to this site, which they offered up as proof that I was blacklisted, and told me that I needed to contact my ISP.
Needless to say, I was pretty upset. I contacted my ISP, which was no help at all because their "Abuse Department" has no real people answering the phone -- only a recording. I left a message and also sent them an e-mail. No response. Then I went to the site where I was supposedly blacklisted. It is called SORBS, and is some kind of anti-spam site. The information on the SORBS site is written in some language that only a techie can understand. So I e-mailed them, and someone by the name of Oleg was kind enough to respond. Over the course of several e-mails, Oleg explained what SORBS is all about and, more importantly, told me that I was not on any blacklist. Based on what I had told him, it was his impression that the problem lay with my website hosting company and not with my ISP or with any blacklist.
Strangely enough, about the time I received my last e-mail from Oleg, subscription notifications began appearing in my inbox. I went back to my subscription program, did some testing, and sure enough, found that the program was working again. I suspect that the hosting company found the problem and corrected it. So now I am trying to decide if I should contact the hosting company to find out what the problem was and to tell them that I did not appreciate their blaming me for the problem because they couldn't find it themselves. I'm also trying to decide if I should change hosts because of this incident.
The upshot is that I now have 45+ people who have subscribed to the blog over the past 10 or so days and who never received a confirmation e-mail asking them to activate their subscriptions. I can't add these subscribers manually because of CAN-SPAM. I either have to send them individual e-mails asking them to re-subscribe, or just let the program delete them automatically.
So if anyone who tried to subscribe from December 1 - December 10 is reading this and did not receive a confirmation e-mail, please re-subscribe and accept my apologies.
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