Outside the Beltway

Site Update: Email Edition

A fix if you haven't been getting comment updates.

Matt Bernius · Monday, June 30, 2025 · 4 comments

As long-time readers know, we’ve been in an ongoing process to update the backend of Outside The Beltway. The good news is that we’re finally at the end of that process. Last year, we successfully moved the site to a new server. More recently, we’ve improved the site’s security and ability to withstand certain types of attacks*. We’ve also fixed our caching and load time issues.

Finally, last week, we dealt with an ongoing issue with our email configuration. As a result, if you subscribe to comments on a given post, you should be getting updates each time a comment is posted.

Unfortunately, due to previous issues, there is a strong chance that your email client may have incorrectly flagged those emails as spam. This is almost certainly the case if you use Gmail. This will require you to create a filter to correct this issue.

Here’s how to check:

1. Post a comment on this page, being sure to click the “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail.” box. Or if you normally subscribe to comments, you can just jump to step 3.
2. Post a second comment (to trigger a notification).
3. Check your email. If you see the update email, then you are fine.
4. If you don’t see an update email, check your spam folder to see if the notification was sent to spam. Alternatively, on Gmail, you can use this search string: in:spam creating a new rule.

Hopefully this will the last of these site updates for a while. As always, if you have any questions, please let me know.

* – Gosh, I really hope this comment is NOT tempting fate.