ATTENTION BLOGLINES USERS, be very careful! After more that two years of being a Bloglines user -with only minor problems from time to time which were quickly solved- yesterday something truly devastating happened. Suddently, when trying to see my feeds I could only see this error message:

Your email address has not been confirmed yet, please reply to the email verification message that was sent by Bloglines. Click here to have another verification email sent to you, or click here to change your profile.

This was odd, since as I said I've been a user for years. I didn't want to follow through, since I feared that getting another verification email would mean that I'd lose all my subscriptions. So I just wrote them an email to ask what was going on.

This morning I got this reply:

We regret any inconvenience you may have experienced while signing up for Bloglines. We have taken the liberty of confirming your account for you. Please get back to us if you continue having problems.

Went to my subscriptions and my worse fears materialized: my subscriptions were all gone. All of them, and they're quite a few, email subscriptions included. And, although I do have a backup copy of the OMPL file, I have lost all the unread posts, some of them dating back quite a long time which I had saved for later reading. And worst of all, all the blog posts I had clipped were also vanished. They were hundreds of posts I had classified for saving, or just long, thoughtful posts I had saved for reading when I had some free time. I wrote them again, but haven't heard back from them yet.

So for the moment I'd just want to warn you in case you trust Bloglines for what they claim to be: a way to manage your blog-life.

UPDATE. Got several emails from readers asking, well, if you have the OMPL file backed up, what's the fuss? Well, the OMPL file has the mere subscriptions themselves only; that is, I can rebuild what blogs/news outlets I was subscribed to, but it doesn't backup what specific items in them are unread. Nor it keeps the email subscriptions, a theoretically interesting feature to sign-up to email-delivered information to the aggregator and to avoid spam; nor it does keep all the many individual blog posts I had saved for archive or for later reading.


Click here to send me an email