What NateDawg digs up :)

On Aug. 17th I started playing around with the features in Blogger Beta. One of those features was carried over from the normal Blogger to the new Blogger Beta, “publish by email”. Many people have said that emails sent to Google get lost into oblivion, so I thought it might be interesting to document the Google help process and see if this was true.

Aug 17^th (Thursday):

I entered a "password" for my Blogger Beta “publish by email” and sent my first test email to my blogger page (topdawgnate.blogspot.com). About 30 seconds later I received a

"Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:
topdawgnate**********@*****.blogger.com"

Ok. Test one failed. Thinking it might have been a fluke, I tried again three minutes later; again I got an error message. At this point I was temped to drop an email, but if there's anything I despise; it is forgetting to do something simple to make it work (k.i.s.s); so I pressed on. Then I figured it might have to do with my blogger login. I had recently matched up my blogger an blogger beta to help facilitate migration (this caused some problems because I had to use my Google accounts page to access my beta blog) I changed my blogger password back and gave it one more go. Ok, all my setting were double and triple checked, time to dump an email off to blogger tech support. I moseyed over to the blogger help page and submitted a bug report. Within a few minutes I received the standard reply message

Thanks for your feedback regarding Blogger in beta. We'll review your
message and respond as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience.

Ok, message sent on Aug. 17^th, time to call it a night.

Aug 21^{st (}Monday):

Opened up my email Monday night and found a response from the Blogger team

The Blogger Team to me

Hi there,
We fixed a problem with the Mail-to-Blogger feature of Blogger in beta on Friday. Please let us know if you continue to have any issues with it. If you are unsure of the correct Mail-to-Blogger address to use, you can find it on the Settings | Email tab. Note that this may have changed since your switch to Blogger in beta.

Sincerely,
The Blogger Team

Cool, according to the message, Google fixed the problem a day after I reported it; so far so good. Ok, back to my email. I punched in the standard “This is test” message and sent it off to my publish by blogger email address. I navigated of over to my Blogger beta account; weird, no message. I went back to my email to discover an additional

“Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently”

Well I guess they haven’t removed all the bugs yet :) I went back to my message from Google and explained that my “publish by email” function was still inop (@7:10 PM). I wasn’t expecting an email for a couple days, instead early the next afternoon I got and email for the Blogger tech support

Aug 22^nd (Tuesday):

The Blogger Team to me

Hi there,
Thanks for reporting this. Could you confirm that you are using the
correct Mail-to-Blogger address showing in your blog's email settings?
Also, if you could include a full copy of the error message you receive
(with headers) that would be very helpful. Thank you.

Sincerely,
The Blogger Team

First of all, kudos for such a fast reply; the response asks you to check the obvious (“k.i.s.s”) while at the same time assuming that every thing is correct (a high assumption most of the time when working with unknown customers) and proceeded to ask for all the technical information. I type out a quick reply explaining everything I already tried and forwarded the error message (@3:38pm). Crap, it wasn’t even two hours later when I got a reply

The Blogger Team (@5:29pm)

Thanks for that extra information. We've found the source of the problem and should have it resolved soon. In the meantime, you can get this working again by changing the secret word in your Mail-to-Blogger setting to be all in lowercase.

Sincerely,
The Blogger Team

Fatherly duties prevail and I’m forced to postpone my posting till tomorrow

Aug 23^rd (Wednesday):

Great! Ok, now to test on my “publish by email”. I clicked over to my blogger beta account and changed my “publish by email” password to all lower case. A quick message from my email to blogger beta, and the moment of truth…I viewed my “Managed Post” viewer and the post appeared! Tried a couple more emails with pics to see how they would post and checked the blog page. Ok, this is weird; I’m getting an error page. Back to the email.

[TopDawgNate] to Blogger

Thanks. I tried what you suggested and it did indeed send the blog post. One problem though, now my blog in inaccessible. I can view my
dashboard and edit posts, but when I go to view my blog I receive a
"We're sorry, but we were unable to complete your request."

Twenty-four hours later I got a response back from Blogger

Aug 24^th (Thursday):

The Blogger Team to me

Thanks for reporting this. We've corrected the problem and your blog
should be displaying correctly now. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Sincerely,
The Blogger Team

Back to my blog and sure enough my page is displayed in all its glory (I know, at least I can remain humble).

Overall I am real impressed with the level of attention that my problem received. The Google tech was both polite and efficient. Maybe with some issues, like suggestions, they get lost in the piles, but it is my experience with the bug issues that has left me thoroughly impressed:)