Introducing The Black Spot

No, mateys, not a lame, late reference to "Talk Like a Pirate Day" - instead the final piece of the automated non-delivery handling mechanism for FeedBlitz.

When an email address has had more than three reported delivery failures in a 2 week period it will be marked for deletion. Twenty four hours later, if the address hasn't been made good, it's gone. And the "black spot" icon is your clue that will appear in your dashboard for addresses that are about to walk the plank. You can click the icon itself to review the addresses, force them to be classed as good temporarily, delete them yourself (from your feeds only), or just mutter "aarrrrr, shiver me timbers" under your breath and let FeedBlitz deal with it on the next go round.

FeedBlitz has been fixing up email addresses that were failing but then become OK automatically already; it's the automatic deletion that hasn't been put in place (until now, anyway). This feature will really kick in over the next few days as non-delivery counts rise for new feeds, so don't be too alarmed if your circulation counts drop a little as a result. Just keep an eye out on your dashboard. On average, non-delivery rates are running in the 6% to 10% range, so be prepared for that scale of change over the coming days.

Meanwhile, those scurvy bilge rats a.k.a. sp*mmers have recently been beavering away posting junk email addresses on some FeedBlitz-enabled blogs. A complete waste of time for them, (and not a huge problem system-wide either), since FeedBlitz's confirmation system is designed to thwart this very class of barnacle (with apologies to mollusks everywhere). No posts go to these fake addresses, nor can you see them since they never get out of the "registering" status. Still, they are cluttering up the database for no good reason, and so as of tonight email addresses created by known sp*mbots will be keel-hauled with extreme prejudice. So long, bye-bye, don't keep in touch. Avast, even. You won't be missed.

Aaaaaarrrrrr!