Emails restored

Last week I noticed I had stopped getting emails about new comments on my blog posts. (And similarly no emails to commenters about new comments in their thread went out.) I'm not quite sure when this happened, but it was at least as early as October, since I got an email in June but didn't get the next comment email that happened in October. It's not unlikely that the problems started after I upgraded Ubuntu and my ec2 instance type.

Now that it's resolved I'm also not sure about the ordering of what went wrong or why. So I'll just describe all the issues and my fixes, maybe it'll help someone.

My blog runs on Amazon's EC2 and uses their SES to send emails. This requires verifying my domain, and the way they want to verify domains is by you adding a TXT entry in your DNS records. When I noticed my emails were dead, I went to the SES console and discovered my domain verification had somehow been expired. I went to my domain administration page, and sure enough the TXT entry I had since 2012 or so was still there. A key of "_amazonses.thejach.com" and a value of some b64 key. I told Amazon to reverify, and went on a business trip.

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