Email down

Who knows best

Today, ends 48 hours of struggle with my Service Provider, trying to convince them that they had an error on their email server which was preventing me from collecting my email from them.  Luckily I was still able to see my email using webmail.

On sunday, my whole web service went down for a couple of hours and when it came back my email client (Thunderbird) would not connect to the mail server.  This seemed odd as my other machines seemed to be connecting (most of the time).  Anyway, I put a call into Tech Support and spent the next 24hrs answering their questions and running commands for them and sending off the results.

After 36 hrs, I was begining to get the feeling that I was being fobbed off – statements like “The issue seems to be at your end…” and “there are currently no issues with our mail servers” – Oh yes thers is – MINE!

Eventually, after some fairly technical communications (telnet tests, traceroutes, pings, port scans) my email suddently starts working, whilst I was off enjoying a cup of coffee and a croissant!

Moral of the story – stick to your guns and don’t get fobbed off!