Thank you to everyone that provided me feedback on the e-mail issue I have been dealing with lately. Based on my efforts at trying to fix this issue and the feedback from dotTechies, I have come up with a few tips that everyone should follow that (hopefully) will help alleviate this e-mail problem:

• Please, please, please add to your safelist/whitelist/contacts list. One of the main reasons people are not getting e-mails is because e-mails from dotTech are being sent to the “spam” or “junk” folders. If you add my e-mail address to your safelist/whitelist/contacts list, the e-mails from dotTech will no longer be sent to “spam” or “junk” folders.
• If you have signed up for e-mail notifications and you are not receiving them check your “spam” or “junk” folders to make sure e-mails from dotTech are not going there. Note that if you use a desktop e-mail client, or any other aggregate e-mail service, go and check the “spam” or “junk” folder of your native e-mail provider because that is likely where dotTech’s e-mails are being marked as spam. (For example, if you are a Gmail user and you use Outlook, go login to Gmail and check the “spam” folder.)
• If in the end you are still unable to get e-mails from dotTech (for whatever reason) consider following dotTech via RSS feed or Twitter (both the RSS feed and Twitter are updated automatically every time a new article has been posted so it will be just like you are signed up for e-mail notifications… without the e-mail). Twitter even has an SMS alert system that you can use, if you want.

In addition, I made a couple of changes to the e-mail notifications:

• I had setup the e-mail notifications system in such a way that everyone was allowed to pick and chose what category of posts they want to be notified about. For the most part this worked well – people picked what they wanted and were happy with it. However, one part of the “I am not getting e-mails” problem stemmed from this selection of categories.

Many times people told me that “they were not receiving notifications”. When I looked up their account, they would only be subscribed to, for example, GOTD Reviews only. So when an article was posted about Freebies, they would not get an e-mail notification and thus tell me the notifications system was not working when in reality it was working… that person just didn’t subscribe to that specific category of notifications. Therefore, now I have eliminated the choice of category for e-mail notifications. Now it is an all or nothing – you either sign up for e-mail notifications and receive e-mails about all articles posted on dotTech, or you don’t sign up for e-mail notifications and receive no e-mails about any articles posted on dotTech.

I realize that this isn’t particularly fair to everyone – and I apologize for that – but this is the best way I found to solve this issue. As Ronald Coase may say, this way is the one that maximizes society’s welfare as a whole.

• One criteria for e-mails getting marked as spam is how many links they contain. Typically e-mails from dotTechi contain three links. Now, they will only contain two (the article link and a link to unsubscribe if desired). E-mails will no longer include a “donate to dotTech” link – tough luck, huh?

Feel free to contact me or post below if you still have any problems.