School’s Out. The Blog.

We were recently featured in the Washington Post. We were in the “Making It” section, which profiles small businesses. You can read it here.

After talking to the right people at Comcast, we got some information as to why our messages were getting blocked. It turned out that we were sending such a large amount of email in such a short amount of time that the comcast.net mail servers thought we were spammers. After talking to Comcast, they told us exactly how quickly we can send mail and we adjusted our servers to meet that requirement. Everything seems to be much smoother now.

If you are a comcast.net email user, you have probably noticed the late emails you have been getting from us. For some reason, the comcast.net servers are accepting our alert messages, but not delivering them to your mailbox until hours later.

We have tried to contact Comcast several times to get this issue resolved, but have been unsuccessful so far.

We will continue to try to remedy this problem, but in the meantime we suggest that you signup to receive alerts with another email account if you have one.

Update Friday Feb 1

We finally reached comcast, and are working with them to make sure that comcast.net customers are getting our alert emails. The root of the problem was the rate at which we send email to comcast.net. We slowed down our connection to comcast.net which seems to have solved the problem.

Update: Thursday Jan 24 3:30pm

We are in contact with the comcast folks to get this issue resolved

Earlier today we had to take our schoolsout.com servers down due to a denial of service attack on it. The attack, plus all of the normal traffic was making the site so unresponsive that we had to completely take it down, fix the root of the problem(s), and put it back online.

We are confident that we have the problem solved. Thank you for your patience.

atlanticbb.net and comcast.net has been delaying/blocking our alert emails. We have tried, unsuccessfully, to contact these ISPs to make sure that our users get alert messages as soon as possible.

If you use atlanticbb.net and/or comcast.net for email, please contact them to tell them you are not getting these critical messages. As always, the most up to date information will always be available on our website.

Things have been pretty quiet here for a while. There are two reasons for this. 1) It’s summer, which is generally the quietest part of the year for us and 2) We are getting ready to launch our new service!

Our new service is  similar to schoolsout.com. It’s all about mass alerting and notifications with some new features (hint: *ring* *ring*). We are very excited about this.

If you are a school or group that has a need for mass notifications and would like to get a sneak preview of or new service, send us an email (support@schoolsout.com) and we’ll set you up!

We just launched our new website, schoolsout.com

Take a look at it and let us know what you think.

We were featured in a Baltimore Sun article about school closings and emergency notifications. Read it here.

Today has been one of the busiest days for School’s Out this school year. So if we don’t reply to your emails right away, please be patient with us, we are working through them.

Just to give you an idea as to how busy today was for us, we have sent out nearly 150 emergency school closing alerts to over 220,000 concerned parents and students.

This past week was a pretty busy school closing week and the Stafford County Sun noticed.

We were featured in a recent news article. Read about it here…