I am happy to report that the “Subscribe to Comments” feature on the site now appears to be functional. Thank you Marc for reporting this logistical issue. I have taken the liberty to subscribe people that attempted to subscribe for the past couple posts to those posts (so they do not have to manually confirm).
(Update, November 12, 2019: It’s broken again. Grrrrrrrrr……..)
On a side note, it is intriguing how email has become less and less of a reliable utility as the internet has aged, especially with the advent of centralized free mail providers (e.g. Google Mail, Hotmail, etc.) which effectively can shut off most of the internet when they blackball mails from less centralized (and usually compromised) servers. The issue then becomes how these free mail providers make a mint by harvesting the information. If you are a high profile person of interest, using such services is absolutely insane, but it still happens. You hear stories about this all the time (example). Properly securing your email is not as trivial as it may seem – on a shared webhost, they can obviously access your information at will (but at least it is not likely to be retained by Google or Microsoft and the like), so the only real defense is running your own private server and ensuring that sensitive communications are given proper levels of security.
Of course, when there is a need, there is a market. The question is – trust.
Also, on a slightly related note, just imagine if you were some foreign hedge fund that made their specialty living (illegally or otherwise) hacking into publicly traded companies’ financial infrastructure and you got wind of their earnings releases in advance of their release to the market. It doesn’t even have to be full financial statements, it could be a single line item, such as consolidated revenues. Such information would be a cash generating machine, or at the very minimum give you a huge heads-up on whether to long or short. The potential gain for these firms makes it easy to think that it does happen.
Thanks for the fix Sacha.
Well I’ve subscribed without commenting to your 2 next post (Pot and Dream) and have not received the verification email as of yet?….waited about 30 minutes, and not in the spam box.
I’m not sure if that means I will or will not get notified of new posts…..yet.
Grrrr, this is really annoying. It was working yesterday. There’s something wrong with the mail server on my webhost that is not causing it to send to major email providers (e.g. gmail, hotmail, etc.) or those major email providers are choosing not to receive it. Very frustrating. Will figure it out later this week.
Sacha, I did get a notice today about a comment posted on the Atlantic thread…..not sure if all is fixed.
This problem deals with some very strange logistical issue with the webhosting email server and how it interfaces with external mail servers – for some reason other mail servers are deciding to trash emails before they are even received by recipients. The fundamental fix is for me to move over to a “proper” mail server provider but this isn’t a fix that is a two second thing, it requires me to investigate different options before execution and right now I’m still slammed with reading quarterlies, looking at tax loss harvesting candidates (on the purchase end) and other of life’s businesses.
Just a heads up, on Thursday I got notice of a couple of new posts on a couple of older threads. Yesterday I signed up for the RSI post without commenting, and never got the validation email, so I am now going to sign up with a …, see if that works.