September 18, 2007

Blogger Hoses Notification Emails

Just to underline my feeling that Blogger is the poor relation at Google, the confirmation emails that come through to let me know that people have made comments have recently been mangled badly.

Formerly I would get a properly-formatted text email saying something like

ScW has left a new comment on your post "Innovate and Get Sued by Apple?":
...


Now instead I see stuff like:
New comment on  Blogger
Behind the Curve?.
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="----=_Part_28_25742053.1190124918523"

------=_Part_28_25742053.1190124918523
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Doug Napoleone has left a new comment on your post "Blogger Behind the Curve?":
I don't know what's happened, but I am pretty sure I haven't made any change to my email system that might be responsible. Of course, we never have, have we? I suppose it's possible I might be responsible, but I'd much rather blame Blogger. If nobody else is seeing this, however, then perhaps it is me. Am I alone, or have Blogger screwed up by inadequate testing?

4 comments:

Christopher Armstrong said...

It looks like google have been having all kinds of problem with email notification of comments, then: for months I (and many other Blogger users) didn't receive email notification of comments at all. I found out about this a little while ago and went through and found several interesting comments on several of my posts that I had missed.

I pretty much had the same hopes that you did that Google would really pick things up with the Blogger service. One thing that I would *love* to have is some integration of Google Pages with Blogger, so that I can have static content on the same web site that I have my blog.

Steve said...

Christopher: Thanks for your comment.

Clearly someone in Blogger is reading this blog and taking it to heart, since the notification email for your comment came through unmangled - the problem appears to be fixed! Nice to know it was only a temporary glitch.

It does seem as though Blogger is the poor relation in Google right now, though of course one never knows what the guys in the labs are working on. It definitely isn't lack of brain power that's holding things up.

The cynical part of me wonders whether it might be because there is no immediately obvious revenue model. But in that case, why buy Blogger in the first place?

Unknown said...

I had the glitch for a few days, so it was not that temporary.

And I had the missing email notification a while back as well. Re-entering my email address for some reason fixed it.

Hopefully one of these days they will either give Blogger the attention it needs or just start from scratch and migrate the data over to a new system.

Stephen Thorne said...

I was seeing this as well, and to make the blogger/google thing more ironic, gmail would fail to render the invalid messages as well...

As for the revenue model of blogger, google sells adwords, and by owning blogger they make it so easy to put adwords on a blogger blog ... thereby increasing google's almighty marketshare.