The onus is on you to be responsive. If that's not going to work, then, respectfully, think about getting someone else to answer that email address? We ship Rails code; if it helps, we'll answer the mails.
The problem isn't just that the mails didn't go through; it's also that you apparently didn't tell the reporter where you were in the process. Before you express incredible disappointment, can you tell us that you asked him not to post?
Another piece of advice, from crisis management: don't feed the story. I'm actually interested in what your response was now (so I can learn more about how Rails handles stuff like this), but I don't see how your team benefits from hashing this disagreement out in public. It seems so lose-lose for you. Just apologize for the confusion and say you're fixing it and let the story go away.
We'll do a full announcement, and in a week or so report on what changes we've made (moving the mail server being an obvious one).
Nate was told that we were traveling and that we'd get back to him. I then went about fixing the issue, verifying there weren't similar issues in other areas of the framework etc.
Ideally we would have told nate the release timetable, but that wasn't clear yet. Clearly we messed up here. However I'd hope in future people would send an email saying "any update" before posting to their blog and crying 'unresponsive'.
You can't be incredibly disappointed in someone for not doing something you didn't ask them to do. You can probably let the issue drop there. I'm glad you're taking the flaw seriously.
I think that reporting the bug and then waiting approximately 2 weeks with no follow up from them warrants a public post so developers are forced to fix it.
Though I'm a cruel bastard, and I think most people would have sent off an email inquiring about the progress. But in this case it seems it would have made no difference as the mail server was down...
The problem isn't just that the mails didn't go through; it's also that you apparently didn't tell the reporter where you were in the process. Before you express incredible disappointment, can you tell us that you asked him not to post?
Another piece of advice, from crisis management: don't feed the story. I'm actually interested in what your response was now (so I can learn more about how Rails handles stuff like this), but I don't see how your team benefits from hashing this disagreement out in public. It seems so lose-lose for you. Just apologize for the confusion and say you're fixing it and let the story go away.