Problems With FeedBurner Email Delivery For The Squid List

Since October subscribers to The Squid List have had problems receiving email from the list. Email subscriptions for The Squid List are handled by FeedBurner which converts the RSS feed to email. I tried deactivating and then re-activating FeedBurner’s email subscriptions service, but that just seemed to make the problem worse.

There doesn’t seem to be any way to contact FeedBurner for support, so if anyone has any ideas how to get in touch with them, it would be greatly appreciated.

In the meantime, you can always access The Squid List directly through the online calendar, get updates via RSS, subscribe via iCal or using your mobile device.

Another option would be to subscribe to the list using FeedBlitz, RSSFWD or Feed My Inbox, which are all similar services that convert RSS feeds into email.

I’ll update this post when I have more information on the status of this issue.

UPDATE 1: FeedBurner has a contact form, but it appears to only be for abuse issues. Does anyone know how to contact them for general support issues?

UPDATE 2: A representative from Google informed me that FeedBurner no longer provides direct email support.

UPDATE 3: Someone from FeedBurner contacted me about the issue and said that it might be because The Squid List feed was not properly validating, most likely because of people pasting in bad characters into the event submission form, like pasting in MS Word documents, etc. The strange thing is that this has never been an issue until recently. I’ve turned off the WYSIWYG editor in Helios Calendar, the script we use for The Squid List, which will make all future submission plain text.

I’m in the process of removing any events with bad characters so that the feed will validate. I you are an event producer and your event is no longer on the calendar, you may want to re-submit it. When you do, make sure it is in plain text.

UPDATE 4: Ok, I had to remove around 15 events from the list that had bad formatting and now the feed validates. I was also able to re-enable email subscriptions. The next test is to see if email is actually sent out to the subscribers.

UPDATE 5: Alright, it looks like we are back in business. Today email was successfully to subscribers of The Squid List. Thanks for hanging in there everyone.