Sorry for Missing Some Comments (and Maybe Messages)

[deirdre]

Ice Flowers, by Thom Bouman

Sorry I haven’t responded to some comments for the last four days. When I’ve been on my iPad, I’ve seen the notifications, and responded then.

As for the rest….

Four days ago (I can narrow it down to an hour-long span, actually), I fat-fingered marking an email message and accidentally reported an email from my own website as spam. Even though I quickly hit undo, I’ve learned from experience that “undo” on marking something spam does not actually remove it from the Bayesian spam algorithm. Not on fastmail.com, anyway.

I’ve got my settings set as aggressive, meaning:

Known insecure email hosts/relays are always blocked (xbl)
Possible spam is placed in your ‘Junk Mail’ folder
Extremely probable spam is discarded without you seeing it
Email from people in your address book is definite not spam

None of those comment notifications appeared in my Junk Mail folder, so therefore:

1. I’d failed to mark the address sending mail from WordPress as not spam by adding it to my contact list. Oops! (Now fixed.)
2. Further messages were marked as “Extremely probable spam” and hence silently discarded.

One of my comment management strategies I’ve used is to auto-flag incoming comments, then delete the flag when I’ve replied (or determined that no reply was necessary). So, failing that….

Lesson learned, time to go actually look at the comment queue.

Originally published at deirdre.net. You can comment here or there.