Dear HiHello Users,
If you sent in a support request to use through the HiHello app (on iOS, Android, or web) anytime between February 10 and this morning, July 25, we’re sorry to report that we didn’t receive your message. As a company we strive to ensure that we are responsive to your requests and we welcome your feedback, so this is deeply troubling to us.
What happened?
When you submit a support request from one of our apps we use an API call to send the request to support@hihello.me. The API uses our email service provider. For some reason unknown to us, as of February 10, 2020 the email service provider flagged support@hihello.me as undeliverable due to messages being sent to that address bouncing. An email message can bounce (not be delivered) for many reasons. Very often is it a transient thing that resolves itself. However, in this case our email service provider blocked delivery to this address permanently effective February 10, 2020.
We were still receiving emails sent directly to support@hihello.me and our staging environment in-app support emails were also still coming through; so we didn’t realize that the support requests from our live apps were not making it through to us.
How did we discover this?
A user had sent us an email directly (initiated from their email client rather than from one of our apps). In order to investigate the issue for the user we requested them to send the email from within the app so that we have more information for debugging (our in-app support requests include the OS version, the App Version and an account identifier). The user confirmed that they had done this, but we still didn’t receive the email, which led us to investigate further till we discovered the silent failure happening due to the support@hihello.me address being on a suppression list on our email service provider.
How have we resolved this?
We have removed the support@hihello.me email from the suppression list, and also whitelisted all of our emails with our email service provider to prevent this from happening in the future.
What is the impact?
Unfortunately, the undelivered email content is only retained for a period of three days. This means that if you submitted a support request anytime between February 10 and July 25 it is highly likely that we didn’t receive your message and don’t have a way to getting to it. It’s gone. Poof! 💨
If you did send in a request, we hope that you see this blog post and or our related post on Twitter. Please feel free to contact us again and we promise that we will do our best to be responsive to your requests.
Thank you. 💜 🙏🏽
On behalf of the team at HiHello,
Manu Kumar
Co-founder & CEO
HiHello, Inc.
TL;DR
Due to an email error, we missed all support requests sent February 10 through July 25. We’re sorry! 😞
