We’ve been busy working on a ton of new features and bug fixes to the site, based on your amazing feedback. They’ll be live soon, so keep checking back for updates!

In the meantime, though, we did push a small bug fix to the live site. We mentioned a few days ago that our emails to Hotmail and Microsoft Live users were still getting flagged as spam. It should be fixed now!

Hopefully we’ve covered all the major email providers- however if our emails are getting marked as spam for you, let us know and we’ll get right on it!

Ladybugs and sunshine!

We’re updating like crazy at Offbeat today. As of 12:30pm PST, we rolled out a modified account system that should address any login issues that our fellow travelers were having. Reports of travelers not being able to log in after logging out have been addressed. If you’re still having login/logout problems, please let us know!

Thank you, everyone, for all of the wonderful and detailed feedback!

Earlier this week, we were having trouble with some mail providers flagging our email as spam. As of today, we’re able to successfully send mail to Yahoo!, AOL and GMail without any flags being raised. Hotmail (or Microsoft Live Mail), however, is a slightly different story.

If you’re a Hotmail or Live Mail user, make sure you check your Junk folder for messages from @offbeatguides.com.

The Junk folder, if you’ve never been it before, is just below the Inbox folder on the left-hand side. Click it and you should see a message (or two) from @offbeatguides.com. For each @offbeatguides.com email, select the message and then click the Not junk button in the top button-bar. You’ll only have to do this once and then Hotmail will remember your preference.

We’ve been in contact with the (remarkably responsive!) folks from Microsoft, and we’re working on the problem, so I hope we’ll be able to get all of you hotmail/live/msn mail users feeling the love soon. More as things progress!

Ahoy fellow travelers,

First off, thanks for the wonderful reception to our little company! And apologies to those of you who didn’t make it into the private beta yet – we’ve been surprised with the overwhelming reaction – hang in there!

As you’ve probably noticed in the past few days, we’ve been feverishly working out some of the kinks that come with rolling out a service. There’ve been a few hiccups but overall most travelers are having a pleasant time. This is exactly why we rolled out into a private beta – so that we could get such great feedback from you, but also keep things manageable while we fix a bunch of glaring bugs and add requested features. Here’s some info on our bug-fixing progress over the last 2 days:

The non-technical version
We had some trouble sending email to folks with @hotmail.com addresses. If you’re a Hotmail user then we may have lost your mail in a jumble of 1s and 0s. Sorry about that! But have no fear - If you signed up with a Hotmail email, we know who you are and will be sending the appropriate information your way.

A handful of users have also experienced trouble with login/logout at various times. If this includes you, drop us a line at help@offbeatguides.com and we’ll make sure your account is set up properly. We’ll be upgrading from the none-shall-pass login system this week to address this issue.

OK, the really technical version (non-techies, feel free to skip this!)
Hotmail.com’s servers have been rejecting the authenticated SMTP messages from our Google Hosted Apps account. We’ve added the proper SPF records to DNS to hopefully address this issue. Fingers crossed! If anyone knows a bunch about Hotmail and how to make sure that they see us as a legitimate email sender, please drop us a line so we can make sure we’re doing things right!

Some travelers’ cookies are becoming corrupt at strange intervals. Most of the time, if you clear your cookies then you’ll be able to resume logging into the site. This issue runs a bit deeper depending on a few other variables that we’re looking into – so if that doesn’t work, please drop us a line at help@offbeatguides.com and we’ll take care of you.

Feature Requests
Overall, it has been an exciting week and we’ll be continuing to roll out fixes and feature updates. A lot of travelers have been sharing their cool feature ideas with us and we invite you to do the same! We also enjoy good jokes, funny videos and long walks on the beach. Send them all our way!