Generally I have several messages about new posts in threads I’ve subscribed every time I go to email, but I haven’t had a single one all day.
Has the system changed? Or is there a problem with sending the email? I find it very hard to believe everyone has shut up in ALL the threads I read. 
BTW, I just checked (should have earlier) but:
So?
Dunno. I’ll see what I can find out.
I have noticed the email is occasionally sporadic – I received a bunch of “report this post” emails sent to me last night – some of them 6 hours old and more. That’s not normal but I hope it is an errant burp and not indicative of some larger problem.
Been that way (off and on) for years for me here. Now I just check my CP* whenever I come back, forget all those e-mails, late or not.
*subscribe to threads with no e-mail notifications.
That’s a good word to describe it. Sometimes they arrive straight away. At other times they come hours late, in batches.
Has to do with stress on the system – I’ve been told that sending email (and most other chores in vB) everything else is always secondary to being able to read and write posts. So if the system is overtaxed it will drop tasks like email and pick them up later when the load is lessened.
That’s probably what happened here – it’s sending email now.
Okay, the ‘villain’ in this piece turned out to be Earthlink. For some unknown reason they put the straight dop address on their ‘confirmed spammer’ black list. Meaning that every message from them got automatically deleted. 
I’ve complained to Earthlink, and will keep complaining until it’s fixed. If any of the rest of you have Earthlink or Mindspring as your ISP, it would probably speed things up if you complained, too.
I have Comcast, but I’ve just noticed the same problem of not getting emails. How do I find out if the Straight Dope is on their spammer list?
Who do I complain to? I’m on Earthlink as well and I haven’t gotten any “new post” emails in a couple of days.
Contact your ISP’s customer support.
Here’s a workaround: Sign up for a Google email account, use that as the email associated with your SDMB account, and set the Gmail account to forward all mail to your existing email account.
I just went in and set my spam filter to none and two SDMB emails popped up right away!
In the end I did that. At first I left the spam filter on, but clicked the box that told it to put my ‘spam’ into what they call the ‘confirmed spam’ folder. (By default, they delete those messages immediately.) Then, when I wanted to get mail, I first went to the Mindspring Webmail, logged in, went to the spam folder, and checked the boxes of the Straight Dope messages and clicked “Not Spam.” This moves those messages back to your in-box AND supposedly forwards them to some admin place where they figure out why they got tagged as spam in the first place.
I say supposedly because I did this “not spam” several times a day for three or more days, and it was still filtering out the SD messages.
Yesterday I turned the spam filter off completely. It was just too annoying to go through all those steps each time. I use Eudora to read off line, I suppose it wouldn’t be as big a nuisance if I actually read using their web mail.
Anyway. This morning I got my messages from SD in my downloads. Also nearly a dozen ads for ordering drugs on the web. Not sure which will turn out more annoying. :mad:
Maybe I’ll try the gamail workaround Xash suggested, to see if the drug stuff will get filtered out while letting the SD messages through.
Oh, and complaining: besides the ‘not spam’ button pressing, I’ve sent emails and used their contact support on line thingy. I haven’t yet tried calling a voice line. I figure if they get enough complaints, maybe they’ll actually make the change.
I just checked the spam folder on Comcast’s webmail and there is nothing in it. I usually check email offline as well using Mail on the Mac. I changed the “automatically delete spam” setting at Comcast to 30 days (used to be 3). However, I should have gotten a message from this thread yesterday and I didn’t.
I have a gmail account, so I’ll give that a try.
I just went into my account to change my email account, but I also wanted to make sure that I had notification set to email me right away. In my subscribed threads folder, all the threads said “instant”, but there was a little check box after them that was not checked on any of them. I checked the box on top to check all the other boxes. Perhaps this is my problem. I am not sure how those boxes got unchecked, since I usually never go in there.
From time to time an ISP will get a wild hair and decide that “webmaster@straightdope.com” is obviously some sort of spammer. This probably has something to do with the fact that we send out a weekly mailing that has in excess of 35K subscribers. Or maybe not; we’ve just had them put us on the bad boy list out of the blue.
Your best bet is to check your spam folder regularly.
We have zero control over any of this. The ISPs will not talk to us when we ask for assistance; it’s up to each of you as their customers to get us off the list.
Has something happened to the email notification system? I haven’t gotten emails regarding updates in subscribed threads since last week. While my inbox has been considerably cleaner, I’ve kinda missed the quick updates.
SDMB is giving up e-mail notification for Lent.
I am still not getting emails. There are none in my spam mailbox on Comcast’s website. Every time I go to view all my subscribed threads (which is now the only way I know that someone has posted to a thread I am subscribed to, like this one), each thread still says “Instant” under “Notification” and there is a check box that is unchecked. I check the box at the top to check all the other boxes, and they are checked, but if I leave and go back, they are unchecked again.
I’ll try switching to my gmail account to see if the situation improves. Do these boxes need to be checked to get emails from the SDMB? If so, how do I make them stay checked?
I got the email allowing me to change my email address. So far, so good.
What worked for me was to change my spam settings to none. Talking to Earthlink didn’t do anything.