SubText is my choice blogging app for this Blog. It's .Net based, open source, and just nifty. Yesterday I had a cow with it though. The contact form refused to send notification e-mails. No error was generated. That was confusing, discouraging and frustrating -- since potential clients contact me via this blog.
There were only two places that I knew of where changes could be made to the e-mail delivery mechanism. web.config file to set the smtp server and the contact form code to execute the delivery.
The mystery deepened when I could setup SubText on a couple of spare servers. Contact form worked just fine. What gives?
Well apparently during setup SubText requests an OPTIONAL e-mail address when setting up a user account for a blog. That e-mail address is used to deliver e-mail messages to from the contact form. Here all this time I was thinking it was the HostEmailAddress in web.config that these messages would be routed to.
After setting the e-mail address in the subtext_Config table in SQL. Messages started to work. Oh how magical!
All this to say, as a developer, I was just given a glimpse at what users may sometimes experience when I fail to clearly establish expectations for the operation of a system. Lesson learned!