You're used to hating spammers. We all hate having 90% of our incoming mail containing earnest offers to ship us C i a L 1 S. Sure, sure, we hate the spammers.
But there's somebody else you should be hating:
lazy mail admins. When faced with the admittedly difficult problem of choosing what mail gets delivered to you, they dump a lot of legitimate letters in the ditch.
It seems the fashion among modern mail administrators to err on the side of non-delivery. I.e. when Grandma e-mails twenty family members to announce her cat died, Hotmail might catch a faint whiff of processed meat product and quietly fail to deliver to half of the recipients. It's collateral damage in the war against spam. And when our Caravel e-mails aren't delivered due to simplistically unfair spam filters, it makes me feel like I got shot by a drunken frat boy. Holding the gun backwards. Blindfolded. On a vaseline-greased pogo stick. There is some combination of stupidity, irresponsibility, and disrespect at work here. I don't know how or when the situation will ever get better.
I can't make every (any?) mail admin do his job right. What I can do is tell you who the good guys and bad guys are. If you're using one of the bad guys as your mail provider, there are some things you could do that will help Caravel get mail to you and perhaps make some small difference in the struggle against braindead mail delivery:
1. Contact the mail provider's support and report that they are failing to deliver legitimate e-mail to you. I don't suggest being huffy about it. For best results, include the name of the sending domain ("
caravelgames.com"
and "
caravelgames3.com"
), explain that you expect to receive e-mail from this domain, and that receiving legitimate e-mail is a crucial feature for your mail provider to have. Don't be demoralized when you get a form letter back along the lines of:
The delivery of e-mail to our customers is of Biblical importance to us. We have meetings and make reports and stuff about it all the time. However, it is difficult to balance the mail-delivery thing with all that crazy, freaky spam out there. Really, it's just insanely difficult to deal with. So you have to forgive us if we got egg on our shoes after striving so admirably to make you an omelet. Mmmmmm, tasty vegetarian (NO SPAM!) omelet. Eat it up, lil netbabies. Papa Admin knows what you need!
I say don't get demoralized, because every tech support minion out there has to throw some sort of noncommittal canned response back at you. But most tech support departments will eventually write a nice little report classifying the different types of support issues they must deal with. If "
DID NOT RECEIVE E-MAIL"
pops up enough times in that report, somebody has to stop and think hard about how to fix a larger problem.
Still, odds are they won't fix the Caravel-email-thrown-in-ditch problem, so another thing you could do is...
2. Get another e-mail account with a different e-mail provider (see the Good Guys list) and use it to get your DROD-related e-mails. You can edit your "
Profile"
settings to change the e-mail where CaravelNet e-mails and forum post notifications are sent. For receiving the Illumination, just add the new e-mail address from
the main page of the website.
3. You might consider ditching the half-assed mail provider like he's ditching mail that people want to send to you. No pressure from me, here. It's your choice, lil netbaby.
Also, I'll make a list of people we tried to deliver mail to and were unsuccessful. If the contents of the mail aren't too personal, we will post them here as well to avoid annoying catch-22s.
-Erik
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The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
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