This is a post which was originally going to be a bit of a rant, however much to my surprise, it’s turned out as the opposite. Whether that’s due to luck or fate, you can be the judge.
I recently realised that all my comments on other WordPress blogs were disappearing straight into the spam filters and didn’t take long to figure out the culprit…. Akismet. Experimentation suggested it wasn’t my email address causing the problem but my Blog because if I tried posting with just a name and email address, things worked fine. This was further supported by the fact that google short links would work for around around 12 hours before they too hit the spam folders.
I flicked around on the web and found story after story of woe. In fact after reading my 15th or so negative report, I was actually considering renaming my blog as clearly harpies are frowned upon. However Mr Harpy (the sole voice of reason most of the time in our house) suggested emailing them to explain the issue and so, grudgingly we did. I have to admit I wasn’t expecting a reply and this was definitely supported by the number of people posting about Akismet and the nigh impossibility of getting yourself unbanned.
Which brings me to today, in between people telling me “oh I found a comment of yours sitting in my spam folder”, I got an email from a nice gentleman called Mark.
Hi,
Sorry for that – I believe it is fixed for you now.
—
Mark
A spot of random testing later and yes, it seems that it has been fixed and fairly quickly too as it took them less than 48 hours from the issue being raised for them to get in touch to say it was sorted.
So it’s time for Happy Sprout to make an appearance and yes, I’m ever so slightly addicted to this Chibi-maker.
Filed under: Ranting, The Many Faces of Sprout | Tagged: Akismet, Bans, Commenting, Wordpress |
The random musings and occasional whining of a Warcraft playing Harpy, with some lashings of priestly stuff thrown in.
Harpy's Nest Blog 
Yay! You’re back, I won’t look for you in there anymore! Glad they were so responsive.
I’m really impressed tbh, I really thought it would be a waste of time. Glad they surprised me in a good way.
Glad to hear they were so responsive. I wasn’t looking forward to checking my spam folder every day again to see if you had commented… I just got myself out of that habit! (I used to check the spam folder every day in case something like this would happen, and finally decided to spare myself the annoyance.)
Also glad you could keep the name! 🙂
Was extra annoying because it took me a while to realise it was happening so I’m sure lots of people have my comments lurking in their spam folders 😦
Now I’ve got back into the habit of checking my own because it might happen to someone else and I know I had a moment’s insecurity of thinking people were putting them there on purpose so I could imagine it happening to someone new in the community and them thinking we’re all haters before they figure out what’s going on.
*looks in my spam folder*
I don’t see anything in there. Must be a wordpress thing?
Anyway, glad it’s sorted!
Yep, only WordPress 😦
I’m so pleased to have learned this! Since about December almost all my posts on WordPress-hosted sites have been ending up in people’s spam folder, and I didn’t know what was the cause. I’ll try emailing them, and see how I get on.
In the meantime, I’ve created a wordpress account that I absolutely don’t need, simply to try to get round this problem.
I think asking people to free your comments from their spam folders helps too but certainly once I’d pin pointed my issue, Akismet were great at fixing it.
I got a response from Akismet this morning, and I seem to be free now from the need to follow up my replies with emails asking people to check their spam folders. thank you so much! If I’d not read your post, I’d still be stuck in that nightmare.
But in fact, this has been going on since December, at least (and probably before then). It took until mid-January before I even realized my comments were in a spam-folder, rather than destroyed in some other way. And it wasn’t until I read your article that I learned that Akismet even existed, and was the cause of my woes. Only Worpress blog owners would ever have heard of it. It seems over-the-top for Akismet to have blacklisted me in the first place.
I thank my lucky stars you’d already
Ironically, my previous comment on this post has disappeared into your own spam folder!
I rescued it!