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Jeff
Owner
Dec 11, 2014, 9:35 PM
Post #1 of 8
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As most of you know, we're working hard on rebuilding the site. After spending a few days looking into it, I decided we will stop offering username@rockclimbing.com email addresses.
I recognize several of you rely on your @rockclimbing.com email, and I don't want to just pull the plug on you. Instead, I can forward your email to another address for an extended time (6-12 months) to allow time to update your contact info with folks.
I will be switching from an in-house email server to using Google Apps, so unfortunately I can't setup auto-email forwarding for everyone.
If you actively use your rockclimbing.com email address, please contact me via PM or jeff@rockclimbing.com (a reply to this thread doesn't count) with your RC username and I will turn on forwarding to the email address listed in your profile. For security reasons, I won't forward to just any address, only the email address listed in your profile. You can update that under "My Stuff" > "My Account" > "Email".
Again, I can't forward everyone's email, so please only contact me if you're actively using your RC email account.
Why are we doing this?
Every feature we build costs developer time, and webmail is no exception. Offering webmail requires configuring a mail server for 260K+ accounts, re-skinning a webmail client, and then filtering all the spam. Spam is actually kind of tricky because since anyone can sign up for a RC account, spammers could sign up and use their RC account to send spam to other addresses, so I'd have to fight both inbound and outbound spam.
I considered tackling all this, but then learned that even if you do everything right, email deliverability is still a big issue. Basically each email server has a reputation score that other email servers use to decide whether to accept their email and when calculating how likely it will be spam. These days it's not enough to have a neutral reputation, if you want emails consistently delivered your email server needs a good reputation which generally requires sending 5K+ emails per day.
None of this is trivial, so I estimate it'd take several weeks to a month or more to get it all setup. Plus, all the webmail clients that I looked at have a subpar user interface relative to gmail/yahoo/outlook.
Considering all that, I decided that time is better spent improving the routes software or partner finder, and not building a subpar clone of gmail.
A copy of this will also be emailed to everyone who's logged into the webmail interface within the past year.
(This post was edited by Jeff on Dec 12, 2014, 9:47 PM)
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sbaclimber
Dec 11, 2014, 10:00 PM
Post #2 of 8
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Registered: Jan 22, 2004
Posts: 3118
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Hi Jeff,
I already PM'd you with an alt. email address, but a question that might interest all just occurred to me...
What will happen to the accounts of those of us who have enter [username]@rockclimbing.com in our user profile?
At what (latest) point will we need to enter a new email address?
(knowing what is coming, I have already changed mine  )
Cheers,
Gabe
(This post was edited by sbaclimber on Dec 11, 2014, 10:04 PM)
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Jeff
Owner
Dec 11, 2014, 10:42 PM
Post #3 of 8
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Good question.
I'd strongly suggest updating your email. Also your secret question(s).
If you somehow get locked out of your account and don't have access to the email tied to the account, then if you contact me to get back into your account, the first thing I'll ask is your secret questions to make sure it's really you...
(This post was edited by Jeff on Dec 11, 2014, 10:43 PM)
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markc
Dec 12, 2014, 4:37 AM
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Registered: Jan 21, 2003
Posts: 2481
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How soon is this happening? I'd suggest updating the post and maybe the subject just so no procrastinators (myself included) are caught by surprise one morning.
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Jeff
Owner
Dec 12, 2014, 8:16 AM
Post #5 of 8
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Good point Mark.
Unfortunately I'm not sure how soon--I'm planning to switch hosts in the next few months, so probably when that happens we'll remove it.
The earliest it would happen is the end of this month. More likely is another 1-2 months after.
I will be sure to send a couple of reminder emails to everyone who logged into webmail in the past year. I'm only emailing those users because if you didn't login to webmail in the past year, it won't affect you that webmail is going away.
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markc
Dec 12, 2014, 3:01 PM
Post #6 of 8
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Registered: Jan 21, 2003
Posts: 2481
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Thanks for the reply. That seems reasonable. I've long used the rc.com email for non-work related stuff, so I have a bit of updating to do.
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Jeff
Owner
Jan 20, 2015, 10:24 PM
Post #7 of 8
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We are planning to move to new servers this weekend, so that's when webmail will be going away.
If you haven't yet contacted me and you need your @rockclimbing.com email forwarded, please let me know.
If you've already contacted me, no need to do anything.
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Jeff
Owner
Jan 25, 2015, 5:03 AM
Post #8 of 8
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We've moved to new servers, so we've disconnected the webmail links on the website.
However, I didn't turn off the actual email server yet--I will do that in the future, but to be safe I'm piping everything into a big catchall email account for now.
So if you need your email, let me know and I will retrieve your old messages and forward them to you, as well as setup forwarding for a few months as you migrate to new email addresses.
If you've already contacted me, you should have received instructions for how to setup forwarding... if not, let me know.
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