The Not-So-Rapid Blog

We're doing a staff survey here. It's an annual thing, and it's done via an external company so as to keep it anonymous for our employees.

This affects me as the Messaging and Document Management Administrator, as they have to send an email to every person in the organisation with their own unique link in it so that they can fill in the survey online.

So, on Monday, I got a call saying that 820 mails had been sent but hadn't arrived. The strong implication was that there was something wrong with my mail servers. Which was odd, given that everyone else in the world was happily sending us mails. (Especially ones with hot stock tips, medicinal miracles, and the promise of unexpected fortunes.)

Cue the rest of the week being filled with working alongside (and occasionally around) absolutely awful technical support from the third-party company.

Don't get me wrong. Everyone was very nice during this week. But nobody seemed to be able to give us decent technical support.

To give you an idea as to how bad it was, after two and a half days I was sent some SMTPSVC logs from their servers that clearly showed the mail being transferred to us. Providing, of course, that you assume our servers have a 10.x.x.x IP address.

Yes, they'd sent us logs that proved that they still had the emails somewhere in their systems.

(For those that don't know - the entire IP range under 10.x.x.x is private IP space, for use on internal networks. Having spece reserved for internal networks means that everyone can use those IP ranges, and be confident that nobody on the internet is using them so they'll never have a routing clash.)

Suffice it to say that it's been resolved now, but I'm not sure we'll use that survey company again. However, that decision is for our Communications department, not myself - so I'll not name them here. Yet.

Anyway, in case you were all wondering why you were treated to three blog entries on the same day, and then nothing - well, that's why.

That and a week in which every evening was spent at some kind of celebration or social event, which also limited my scope for blogging. I have 500+ unread feed entries over at Bloglines, and a similar number of emails waiting for me at home. I'm only back here because I've worked hard, played hard, and have plenty of hours in lieu to me so I decided to relax and blog for half an hour.

And tonight and tomorrow I'm helping a friend move house, so those emails and blog entries will remain unread.

See you all on Sunday, I suppose!