First things first, we made a mistake last week with regards to Feed My Inbox. Here is how it effects our customers:
1. Early Friday morning, the server had a hardware failure, and the email queue started crawling. Emails were piling up faster than the server could send them for 2 days. Early yesterday morning, we resumed normal operation and the email system is now completely up-to-date.
As a result of this issue, you may have seen emails stream in up to 2 days late yesterday or today, but nothing was lost.
2. In trying to improve the situation on Saturday, we made it a little worse and lost some data. Here are the customers that are effected:
- If you unsubscribed from a feed/email between Feb. 1 and Feb. 22, your unsubscription may have been lost. If you receive an email from a feed that you already unsubscribed from, simply unsubscribe again and we will NOT lose it this time.
- Between Feb. 1-22, if you subscribed to a new feed, confirmed your subscription, but never received any emails from that feed during Feb. 1-22, your subscription has been lost. If you received at least one email update from that feed, no account information has been lost.
This is the first real issue we have had with Feed My Inbox, and hopefully the last. We are very sorry for ANY inconvenience this has caused, and take full responsibility for the mistake.
The great thing about mistakes is that is forces you to take action to prevent them from happening again. In the very near future, Feed My Inbox will be moved to new hardware that is more capable of handling any problems, and full backups will take place more often. In addition, this was the kick in the butt we needed to finish out a long requested feature!
Announcing Customer Accounts!
It is most important to us that Feed My Inbox remains just as simple and easy to use as it has always been. So having an account is and always will be optional. Nothing is changing about the process of subscribing to feeds and receiving them via email.
From now on, the bottom of all confirmation and feed emails will have a link at the bottom where you can create an account. If you click the link to create your account, all you have to do is fill in a password and you are finished.
Once logged into your account, there is a simple dashboard where you can see all of your feeds, confirm new subscriptions and unsubscribe from them. We also have tabs where you can export an OPML of your feeds, update your account profile and even cancel your account.
In light of the recent issues from last week, the customer account area will hopefully assist you in keeping track of feeds and fixing anything that may have happened as a result of our mistake.
Next Steps
We have lots of great features planned for the account area in the near future. This is simply "phase 1", and we hope that it makes life a little easier.
One of the features we are currently testing is real-time email updates, instead of one daily digest of posts. If you are interested in getting all of your feed emails in real-time as opposed to one daily email with all posts, contact us and we will turn it on for you. Once we feel good about the feature, we will add frequency options to all accounts.
We appreciate you being a customer, and REALLY appreciate your understanding while we try to make up for the recent mistake. As always, your feedback, questions and comments about the new account area is welcome.
