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Dispatched Messages Status

This is a technical discussion on message dispatching

Rhub's message delivery system is a little complicated because of the hoops it has to jump through to deliver messages across different mediums. Now the trick is, you will not receive a notification if one of your dispatched messages failed to send. Your intended recipient will always be able to view it on the web, so in no way is your message 'lost'. It may be that you are sending the message with the expectation that your friend will get it while they are away from the web. In this case, you would do well to check the dispatch status page to see if there were any problems. Note that some mediums, such as SMS and IM should be reliable, but service providers don't offer any guarantees.

This is how it works:

1. You send a message (e.g. an IM to friends at a location).
2. Rhub looks up exactly who it has to send the message to.
3. Rhub internally adds it to its web-accessible message database so each person has it in their inbox.
4. Some messages will be optionally forwarded to other services. We don't want to send the same message to every service, so rhub needs to try each service in turn, according to user's preferences, the particular message and what services are available. This is what we call 'message dispatching', and this is where things can break.
5. If the dispatcher is down, rhub won't realise until a period of time has elapsed. The message is however queued for later sending.
6. If there's a problem with the medium the dispatcher is trying to use, the dispatcher will report an error, and you can see it in the Dispatched Messages Status page.

Please do notify us if there are problems with message dispatching, as it's a little, well, hacky :)

Note: Messages that rhub has considered successfully dispatched will not be shown in your status page.

See also: Dispatched Messages Status