I’ve been watching for about 18 hours, and I think my email is fixed. Who messed it up? I believe I did, in the middle of resolving another problem, by unwittingly pressing a button that deleted my MX settings in Dreamhost that tell Fastmail it’s my email provider. Dreamhost Support tried to suggest this was the problem, but (not too surprisingly) I didn’t receive the message. I found their support message in their reporting system when I logged in to report another small problem unrelated to email.
The interesting part about a problem like this is that the email just vanishes. It doesn’t bounce, it doesn’t arrive, it’s not sitting in a spam filter. Email becomes unmail.
All those correspondences, neither here nor there; trees falling in a forest, a trumpet player in the attic, the disappeared.
Posted on this day, other years:
- Hiding My Candy: Give Me The Option To Share My Reading - 2008
- OCLC's New Report: Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources - 2005
- TNT's The Librarian: Two Views - 2004
- About - 2003
- A Belated RIP for a Great Publication - 2003
I have personally had continuing problems with Dreamhost email. So far as I know, I haven’t changed any settings. And _usually_ the email gets through to me.
But sometimes, unpredictably, it bounces back to the sender for no reason. And other times, unpredictably, it disappears into a black hole.
I have heard about both these things enough from friends trying to correspond with me, that it makes me awfully worried about the times I _haven’t_ heard about.
Of course, when I report this dreamhost support, they claim there is nothing wrong with their system, so my senders must be mistaken, or it must be the sender’s ISP fault. A couple times I went through the hassle of getting my sender to forward me the bounce message and then showed that to dreamhost support, but they still found some excuse to claim it was not their systems fault somehow. (And it IS a hassle to get my non-technically inclined correspondents to find and send me that bounce message, I’ve discovered–when I even find out about it!).
I’m moving email providers when I get around to it. Losing email is pretty unforgiveable. A2 has been suggested to me as a preferable dreamhost alternative.
Makes me curious why your email disappears into a black hole instead of bouncing too. The email system is supposed to be really robust like this; back in the day (before spam), email would NEVER disappear, it would always bounce if it didn’t actually reach your mailbox. The email protocols are supposed to have this built in. Makes me suspect dreamhost as a culprit here too; no matter how badly configured, if the email doesn’t reach you, it should bounce.
Ah, but I’m not using Dreamhost email; I’m using Fastmail. I was in a place where I was stuck between two mail providers.
I’ll look at A2; I also looked at Google’s domain services, which seem pretty good. I made the Dreamhost configuration error when I was dealing with Fastmail’s stubbornness about how it handles subdomains.
That said, Dreamhost email feels pretty lame… I used them for a while and had less of an issue with receipt of mail than with their horrendously bad web client and spam support.