It is hard to draw any definitive conclusions on my end, cause there are a lot of factors, but maybe my activity is somehow triggering my emails becoming restricted? Because I think now it has happened with two different emails clients. Recap:

Day 1. I successfully logged into CL2 on an iPhone using the Outlook email. Day 2. I attempted to log into CL2 on a PC using the Outlook email, but no login emails arrived. I swapped to Yahoo email and that worked. Day 3. I traveled, and attempted to log into CL2 on a tablet using the Yahoo email, but no login emails arrived. With both emails now not working I couldn’t add a new email, so I resorted to linking a Google account, and that worked.

I imagine gmail is probably the most widely used, so I’m willing to swap to using that. Still, I’m now faced with two emails that evidently aren’t working, and I’m growing suspicious that (rather than specific email clients being an issue) maybe it’s my activity of logging in to multiple devices in a short timeframe and in different locations that is flagging something? But ideally since my attempts are legitimate, this wouldn’t be a repeated issue, especially considering so many BScotch games are intended to allow continuous play across devices so I hope experience helps identify a root cause! Anyway, happy holidays, and thanks for getting back to me when you can! :)

Adam is our webdev and knows infinitely more about this than me, so I've passed this along to him!

Outlook is a very finicky service that periodically decides we're a spammer and then temporarily blocks all emails we send to anyone on Outlook accounts. I've reached out to them a few times when it happened, and the always insist it's NOT happening, and then eventually it goes back to working. Sadly there's nothing we can do about it. We have similar problems with Chinese email services, but otherwise it hasn't seemed to be a problem for any others. From our logs (they're stored for 10 days so that's all I can see) it looks like your ymail account is working fine, so using that is probably your best bet.

Sorry for that annoyance! If I've learned anything from building a newsletter service it's that I'll never use Outlook as an email client :/

Okay, it is definitely helpful to have that context - thank you! I'm increasingly motivated to move over from Outlook because I think they've landed me on a couple services' restricted email lists, but it is a remarkably challenging issue to look into or get support on from the Outlook side. I also can't know how many services have been impacted for sure because I'm rarely in a position to discover that I'm not receiving something I'm supposed to unless it is with a service (like the couple I'm thinking of, BScotch included) that leverage emails to log in. Oh well, shrug.

Also, I just did a test and logged in successfully from my iPhone using both the ymail and outlook emails on to my iPhone. So whatever blockage must have cleared since, thanks again if you ushered any of that. I guess the coinciding of failed Outlook and Ymail emails must have been, well, a coincidence. I'll add that third backup just in case.

Complete aside, as a semi-regular listener to the podcast, I always think it's cool to hear about (everything, but especially) the different software tools that get developed and the en-speeb-ening impact they have on the whole team and game development pipeline. Deeper, I recognize it's the software and web development skills that enable you and the team to create whatever tool y'all are needing. Just highlights to me how beneficial and widely useful those skills are and I'm thinking it would be good to learn them myself! Signed up for the dev-chat newsletter as a mini step to saturate in the subject while I find a good, accessible curriculum.

Anyway, thanks again for your attention on this! Hope to have fewer issues moving forward :)

Glad you got it all working! I didn't touch anything on my side, so it sounds like the Internet Gods just calmed down. For now.

I haven't published a Dev Chat for a loooong time, but you can read the backlog: https://www.bscotch.net/blog/devchat

It is indeed a ton of software and webdev that keeps all our pipes unclogged. It's my productivity secret since grad school: even very basic programming skills can make a lot of things easier. You don't even need to go that far; getting really good at spreadsheet programs allows you to do an incredible amount of things (personally I've gotten very bad at spreadsheets since I use programming to solve everything, but in my earlier days I got a lot out of advanced spreadsheeting).

Otherwise the path forward depends on your goals. Personally I always recommend starting with webdev because:

• JavaScript is easier to start with than things like C++/Rust/etc.
• It's immediately fun, because you don't even need programming at all to make a website
• You can edit stuff right in a browser, so you can get started without even knowing how to set up a coding environment
• There is an infinite amount of beginner content out there for webdev. Check out Wes Bos' "JavaScript 30", for example.
• The knowledge is fairly transferrable (all languages differ a lot, so nothing is directly transferable, but the syntax will be familiar in any C-like language)
• You can learn by building your own website and putting it on the Internet!

There are of course benefits to other languages, so it's really all about what you're trying to do. Whatever you do, good luck!