The Case of the Disappearing Emails

Over the last two years, a couple of people have had problems sending email to my openismus email address. They never received any failure message, but the mails never arrived. This was annoying and mysterious, but the problem was obviously with the senders’ systems so there wasn’t much I could do.

This week one more person had the problem. All three people were German, which made me suspicious. We discovered that all three people were using bytecamp‘s email servers. For instance, gnome-de.org email addresses are hosted at bytecamp (for free, I believe). Major clue.

openismus.com was hosted at bytecamp a couple of years ago, but I moved it away because I found their services limited and rather ad-hoc, though it seems to have improved since then. It turns out that they forgot to update their MX records, so they were just swallowing any email to openismus.com from their remaining customers. Some emails to bytecamp solved the problem, so bytecamp customers can now send email to us again.

I do hope that several German GNOME developers (with gnome-de.org email addresses, for instance) have been trying to email me about working for Openismus. If you didn’t get a reply before, please try again.