Pikeman's ???

[dubhease]

I spoke too soon about Pikeman's. I emailed Daffyd about reserving feast and never heard back. I figured he was a busy guy and no news was good news. Gabrielle emailed him last night and got put first on the waiting list. Then, good friend that she is, she emailed him back to ask why he never replied to me

Comments

[beable]

This type of thing happens often enough - in part because some of the "big" mail providers automatically block mail from small providers regardless of provocation (I now have a gmail that I use regularly - not just for mailing lists like I used to - because some recipients who have @rogers.com or @yahoo.com accounts in particular don't get my mail unless they explicitly whitelist it otherwise) - that I think if one is taking a volunteer position that involves "people will e-mail stuff like reservations to me" that one has a responsibility to regularly check one's spam filter.

Of course the corollary to that is that people sending e-mail should always use meaningful subjects (like "Feast Reservations") so that their e-mail will stand out if their name isn't likely to be recognized.

I know that spam is a big problem and all that crap, but if one is going to volunteer to receive e-mail from all sorts of people whose address and names you may not always know, one has a responsibility to actually check regularly that one is in fact receiving that mail. Cleaning out the "false positives" from one's spam filter is not arduous if one has to do so for a brief period of time.

Companies that use over-zealous spam filters that try to provide "gated safe worlds" that assume that any mail provider that is not a big-ass company are just as much to blame of course, especially when they put the 'deal with spam' options to the side so that the average user won't even know they are missing mail.

[dubhease]

I'm not mad at Daffyd and I don't want to bash him.

I'm just disappointed since I generally have a goood time at the event. I think we are still leaning towards going. Piers is pissed off; however, given that he's never made a feast or Pennsic reservation in his 10 years in the SCA, if he thinks I dropped the ball, he can be in change of Hare reservations.

[mr_messy]

Nope, not pissed off in the least. If I appeared cranky it was because of the recurring legacy of having our site hosted somewhere else before I switched things. The people who used to host our domain and email bought their hosting from a bulk seller/reseller in Texas. I found out that this company didn't care who they hosted so as a result, spammers were using their services. That meant that IP addresses which lie behind the domain names were getting banned by some spam filters. That also translated into our domain getting flagged as well. Every so often this problem creeps up but luckily it is getting rare.

And no, I don't think you dropped the ball. You might, however, have dropped a couple of pounds by the way that top looked on you this morning :)