I’ve made a small change to the email feedback system that all authors should be aware of.
From now on, all non-anonymous email messages coming from the site’s feedback system will be coming from ‘feedback’at’storiesonline.net’ with their ‘Reply to:’ field set to the real email address submitted by the feedback sender.
The net result of this change is that less feedback messages will have the chance of being blocked by spam filtering software/services. And that’s because the site’s mail server won’t be pretending to be the sender’s mail server in order to deliver the messages.
What will this change mean for authors? should be nothing.
All email services and email clients, whether desktop based or web based respect the ‘Reply to:’ header and when you click the ‘Reply’ button in your email client, the ‘To’ field should be filled with whatever email address is set in the message’s ‘Reply to’ field/header.
If you filter messages based on the ‘From’ field, then you may have to change that to the ‘Reply To:’ field.
Anonymous messages will still come from ‘anonymous.at.storiesonline.net
With this change, all email being sent from storiesonline’s servers will be from the storiesonline.net domain. Also, the new mail server installed on the site, which is responsible for receiving mail sent to the storiesonline.net domain, is configured to scrutinise incoming messages as much as possible to cut down as much as possible the amount of spam being received by the mail server.
All in all, this change will make the site a better net citizen.
3 responses to “Email Feedback System: A minor, but important change”
I was wondering about that change myself. I had noticed that my last few feedbacks were coming in with a weird return address until I looked more closely at the headers.
This is a good idea, and I figured you did it to avoid false positives on spam filters.
BTW, just a side note: Excellent work on maintaining the site overall. I’ve never seen a site so efficient as this one (and with a webmaster that actually RESPONDS TO EMAILS — that alone gets my kudos)
As always, lazeez is working tirelessly to make Storiesonline the best free story site on the internet. Kudos.
-PB1
Strange issue, might be related. my only web access for the near future is my treo phone, and SOL has always worked fine. Last Tuesday I went into the mountains with a couple stories freshly saved. Today the site no longer works. All the pages are now seen as download only, disconnected files.
Nothing on the phone has changed and other php sites work. Help! I can’t even get to the webmaster contact on the SOL site.
potter at surfacing dot com