Website Question: Email notification

RE: g-mail...Peter, this is exactly what I mentioned about 7 hours ago; the same thing happened to me, everything was sitting in the spam box... and I know exctly why - in my instance, anyway. I always delete the old comments and the delete link (up top) is sitting to the right of the "report spam" link, AND I clicked on the "report spam" by accident. Therefore all comments coming went to the spam box...and at first I didn't realize that because g-mail does not indicate it for the naked eye to see. You actually need to go check your spam box and click on the "not spam" key. Once you do, your comments will start coming to your "in box".

SO...beware of this, too, an additional lesson - which is, when you delete your old comments, in g-mail, be careful not to click on the "report to spam" link which sits to the left of "delete". If so, just go to your spam box and click on "not spam" :)

All, so I just traded emails with Bolangere outside of Food52 and it turns out that all the emails were sitting in her gmail "spam" folder. She's going to open a few, click "not spam" at the top of the message, and I expect that will allow all the rest of the email from us to get through.

Let that me a lesson to you all. Gmail is really, really good at detecting spam... but sometimes it's a little *too* good. ;-)

Peter, #1 - can't tell you how many time's I've checked that this box is checked; #2 Last night I double-checked that the gmail address within my profile is correct, and it is; #3 - sadly, no. What am I doing wrong? When I first joined a few weeks ago, I received notification of comments and threads for a short time, and since then none. And I've changed nothing on my profile, except the photo, since.

Peter - makes complete sense, and yes, that matches my experience exactly. I switched over to an old gmail account for now. It's perfect actually, because then it's just food52.com correspondence. And yes. Sigh. Gnashing of teeth. I know I need to relinquish my @verizon address and switch to something more generic / universal, but it will be painful and I've been avoiding it. I used my academic address at Johns Hopkins for decades (literally since the dawn of email), and only had the verizon account for family, but now that I'm not with Hopkins any longer - I need to make the switch.

Hi Peter,
I just wanted to second lapadia's suggestion about a potential Technical FAQ link somewhere on the site. There are little hints of what to do found here and the comments suggestions in recipes but they are hard to find. If you miss this pickle, for example, you'd never know. Like: how do you select a picture to choose to display (hit the like picture), what happens when you don't receive food52 e-mails...well, you probably know way better than me what frequent questions are.

Lapadia, while it pains me to have these technical conversations in the Foodpickle -- the 'Pickle's supposed to be about cooking after all -- I think there's real value in having these conversations in a public venue. Many others can learn from what all of you say (and sometimes from my answers) and a lot of these issues are as much a discussion of the future as they are a guide to how to use the current site.

@Peter: here is my brillant idea of the day...Why not have you own link link for users technical questions? Perhaps set up on that "site map" I suggested in Burnt Offerings other pickle question :)

Boulangere,

1. As Mrs. Larkin suggests, at the bottom of your profile, when you edit it, is the line of text "
Check this box if you'd like email updates when people interact with you." checked off?

2. I know you're using gmail to read your email but is it an actual gmail address you have registered to Food52? Or have you set things up to use gmail to read email sent to another address?

3. Just as a sanity check, I just sent you a message via your profile -- did it show up?

boulangere, one more thing you can check: when you go to "edit your profile," look at the way bottom and make sure both boxes are checked off for email notifications.

good luck!

In other words, as BurntOfferings mentioned yesterday, to keep up on comment correspondence, I have to keep going back to each place I posted anything, such as here. It's kind of a bother, and I am sure you have much more pressing issues.

Thanks so much Peter and Lapadia - thorough explanations all. Unfortunately, I checked the Report Spam on gmail and there was nothing at all. I receive the newsletters, but no comment correspondence. It it matters, I use a Mac with OSX Leopard. Thank you so much for your diligence, Peter!

Thanks again, Peter. Yes, I will be upgrading my system, totally understand and don't look for you to accomodate IE7. For the time being, as I mentioned, I use Chrome when browsing Food52 and will continue to do so until I upgrade. I don't use Chrome permanently for a varitey of reasons. Hopefully will be upgraded before the end of the year!

Lapadia, so sorry that IE 7 is causing you problems but indeed, we (like most of the internet) are no longer supporting IE7.

Unfortunately, people access our site with 44(!) different browers!

Fortunately, 97% of visits come from the big four: Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and IE.

Unfortunately, there are many, many versions of these big 4 browsers (91 versions of Firefox!)

Fortunately, they're all pretty compatible with one another.

Unfortunately, IE7 is only used by 4.57% of our visitors and supporting it is like running a whole second website.

Bottom line? I encourage you to switch to a "modern" browser. Since IE8 won't work for you in XP why not switch to Chrome or Firefox permanently?

Yes, Peter Steinberg, what you describe matches my personal experience. Thanks for all open participation.

Thanks for your comment, Peter. Here is one (and FYI) for you: for the longest time I was not able to participate on a *comment stream*, once there were already 2 comments, whenever I clicked on reply it automatically started a new comment stream. I emailed through the editors@food52 link asking about that, and it was a puzzle, never fixed. Months later, I was exploring Google Chrome and VIOLA...I no longer had this problem. Come to find out *my* problem was that I still am using XP with IE7. the reason for IE7 is because, IE8 ,9 and above are not compatable with XP...the programmers have left IE7 in the dust as they have upgraded (and besides XP will be history someday). So, now I login through Chrome when going to Food52...well until I finally upgrade! Just thought I would throw that out there for anybody that might be in the same boat as I. :)

@bolanangree: re: g-mail, just something to troubleshoot; when I started using g-mail I finally started receiving personal messages, comments, fan notifications, pickle answers. However, when using g-mail the *report spam* link is close to the *delete* link, and at one point I had clicked (without realizing it) on *report spam*, all of a sudden I wasn't receiving anything for a day... it wasn't until after clicking on the *spam* link at the left, that I found all messages, comments etc., that had been coming in, I then clicked on the *not spam* link, reversing everything and I started receiving everything as usual. Just something to check, (unless you already have), because it is what solved my problem....was a *user error*..one I created, but happy it is fixed!

Burnt, thanks for opening this separate discussion. Here's what's I suspect is going on:

If you use gmail or hotmail or yahoo mail I bet you get ALL our emails.

If you use an email address from Verizon or AT&T or Time Warner or SBC or some other cable or telephone company, some of our emails never get to you.

What emails are you missing? Well, you get all the email we send from "[email protected]" and you do NOT see the emails we send from "[email protected]".

What emails do we send from each address?

The newsletter and password reset emails come from "[email protected]".

Answers to pickle questions, messages from other users, and notifications that someone has become your fan come from "[email protected]". This isn't a real email address though and that's what's causing the problem.

So...

1. Does what I describe match up with your personal experience? If so, please say so. If not, please describe how your experience differs.

2. What can *you* do to solve the problem if emails are not getting through? Honestly, you shouldn't have to do anything -- we should solve the problem. But if you're really, really impatient for us to get to this you could start using an email address at one of the providers I mention above. (which is a good idea anyway for a variety of reasons).
What are we doing to solve the problem?

3. What are *we* going to do to solve the problem? We're going to create a *new* email address called "[email protected]" and start using that. Since it will be a real email address, it should work for everyone.

Whew! I hope that makes sense to everyone. I look forward to your feedback.

Hotmail works for me on all fronts. I'm also topic notified through Facebook although I only occasionally check there.

Interesting - I went into my profile and switched my email address to an old gmail account I used for an old blog I managed. It lit up like a Christmas tree with food52
messages! My primary verizon account got nada

Burnt, did you try gmail? I had to switch to a gmail address for the notifications to work for me. I was only getting the weekly newsletter, but nothing else. Now I'm getting everything. It was life altering, to say the least.

A somewhat related suggestion: I'd like an easier way to reply to a message we receive from a member through the internal messaging system, instead of having to go to their profile and click on "send me a message".

I use gmail and get the newsletter but no notifications for some time. I received 2 or 3 at first.

Just looked at your "storm," and I guess it'd be Peter's cup of tea--and that he'll eat this one too. So I'll go: with an AT&T-group address, I get the newsletter but no notifications.