I’ve been trying periodically since OSCON on July 19 to create a Twitter account for @ActionMessage, but kept getting an error page with “Internal Server Error” from twitter.com.
After 3 weeks signup finally worked … yay!
However, the first account confirmation email never arrived (verified by looking at my MTA log), so I had to request it again.
Twitter.com engineers, here’s 2 tips for reliably sending email programmatically:
- Have your program inject the message to an MTA relay that is located inside your data center (www.twitter.com and mx006.twitter.com seem to be on same network segment, so that looks ok)
- Do program error checking and retry email message injection if it fails, and log the application error so ops can figure out why. (The resend_confirmation_email link could be instrumented with query-string parameters to help diagnose problems.)
I guess part of the charm of Twitter is its unreliability, though that needs to change as it targets paying business clients.
