Third Time’s a Charm (We Really Mean It)

We’re about transparency, so let’s talk about email. More specifically, let’s talk about our email. And the fact that, for a period of time we’d rather not dwell on too long, it wasn’t exactly doing what email is supposed to do — which is, you know … arrive.

If you’re a client who sent us a message and heard nothing back, please know: we weren’t ignoring you. We weren’t on a spontaneous team retreat. We weren’t collectively deciding that phone calls are actually better. We simply, mortifyingly, didn’t get your email.

The First Fix (Spoiler: Not Fixed)

It started with a few reports. Emails going missing. Replies vanishing into the void. Our web team investigated, our IT people investigated, and after a period of furrowed brows and confident nodding, we were told the problem had been identified and resolved.

Fantastic. Job done. Nothing to see here.

Except — and you may sense where this is going — it wasn’t done. Things seemed fine for a while, in the way that a radiator seems fine right up until it starts making that noise again at 2am.

The Second Fix (You Already Know)

More reports. More missing emails. More furrowed brows, though this time with an added layer of mild embarrassment. Our team went back in, poked around in the server settings, muttered things involving words like DNS propagation and mail exchange records that the rest of us nodded along to while understanding approximately none of it.

“That should do it,” someone said, with perhaps slightly less certainty than the first time.

Reader, it did not do it.

What This Actually Meant (The Bit We’re Genuinely Sorry About)

Here’s the part where we stop being breezy about it, because the truth is: dropped emails cause real problems. Enquiries that felt ignored. Quotes that never arrived. Follow-ups that disappeared. For our clients, that’s frustrating — and rightly so. For our team, fielding calls from people who’d been waiting on replies we never knew existed was, to use the technical term, stressful.

We’re a web team. We live and breathe digital communication. The irony of our actual communication infrastructure quietly misbehaving was not lost on us. It was, in fact, extremely lost on no one.

The Third Fix (Please, Please Let This Be The One)

The cavalry came back. More investigation. Deeper investigation. The kind of investigation where people stare at screens for a long time and then go very quiet before typing very quickly.

Apparently — and we’re paraphrasing here — the root cause had been lurking beneath the two previous fixes like a smug little gremlin, waiting. It has now been located, evicted, and the door has been firmly shut behind it.

Our IT team are confident. They used words like definitely and properly this time and we’ve tested it thoroughly, which honestly is the most reassuring thing they’ve said across all three visits.

We’re choosing to believe them.

Where Things Stand Now

Emails are flowing. The team is monitoring. We’ve done more test message sends in the past week than in the previous six months combined. If you sent us something in the last while and never heard back, we’d genuinely ask you to try again — we’re here, we’re reading, and we’re very motivated to prove that this chapter is behind us.

To every client who waited, wondered, or had to chase us down through other means: we’re sorry. You deserved better on the communication front, and we know it.

And if you’re reading this and thinking, “I’ll believe it when I see it” — honestly, fair enough. We’d probably think the same. We’d appreciate a test email though.

Fingers crossed. 🤞

— The Web Team