[Alex Pepple]

Dear Eratosphereans,

Some or most of you might have noticed that for the past several days to weeks, Eratosphere notifications (e.g., for new PMs, reply alerts for threads you subscribed to, etc.) were no longer working. This turned out to be because Gmail, Yahoo, and several other mail services have drastically changed the way in which they validate and allow emails to reach their users, due to the unhinged amount of spam now circulating through the web. Hence, almost all the notification emails Erato was sending to those subscribed to them were not only being blocked by these services but, worse, tagged as spam and causing Erato and the associated server to be blacklisted throughout the web! Blacklisting is something no website wants to be slapped with as it not only means being essentially isolated from communicating with others, but also becoming an unpopular island with dwindling visitors!

Anyhow, I've been feverishly working on this problem for the past few days and—for the benefit of those of you with some technical knowledge in these matters—it had to do with more stringent configuration requirements for mail servers' DNS records to mitigate spam, address spoofing, and the hacking gone wild throughout the web. The records that Google, Yahoo, and the blacklisting services (Spamhaus, Barracuda, etc.) didn't like were the SPF and DKIM records. I was able to satisfy Yahoo after a day or so of white-hat hacking at server records, etc., but Google and Gmail were an absolute headache as they appear to be the fussiest of the bunch with what they want in those records (or rather, trying to figure out what they want, which they don't really clarify much).
Long story short, finally, today, I can say I've finally conquered the Google/Gmail blockade and successfully sent a test message from Eratosphere to Gmail (just as I'd done earlier for Yahoo mail, Hotmail, and a few such others).

So, my apologies to everyone for any and all missed communications. But we're back alongside those considered non-suspicious netizens and no longer considered one of the "bad actors"! In fact, I've also successfully campaigned to get us removed from the records of the blacklisting services and as far as I know, we're now in the clear with all of them!

So, post/reply/PM as before as we're past this saga... and long live Eratosphere!

Cheers,
...Alex