More frustration

I think I mentioned that about a month ago, my email started to be severely delayed, sometimes by a few hours, sometimes by as much as a few days, and mail is quite often delayed so long that it's bounced back to the sender as undeliverable.

I used to be able to have email conversations, spitting emails back and forth as fast as I could write them, but no more. Now if I want to have a real-time conversation, I have to do it via instant messaging or cell phone text messaging. Which is fine, too, but not being able to count on email arriving in a timely fashion has been extremely frustrating.

I've had my domain and email hosted at the same company for almost ten years. It's one of the first, one of the largest, and one of the most expensive, but I've left it there because I valued the reliability, and also because I didn't want to risk messing up my email.

So now that my email is royally messed up, with no action on my part at all, I've decided that it really couldn't get any worse, and I've instituted the actions necessary to move the domain to a different provider, a local company called Arsalon Technologies. I changed the DNS on Wednesday, and now I'm just waiting for it to resolve.

Okay, well, actually, things have gotten worse -- I'm not sure what's going on, but I'm receiving almost no mail at all now, not even spam. Normally I receive a couple hundred email messages a day, most of which are spam. But it's been slowing down dramatically in the past few days, and this morning I only had about a half-dozen messages. Normally I would have around 80-100 after being offline overnight, so I'm assuming that the hosting company has instituted some kind of dramatic spam blocking on the servers, although no one has notified me of that fact.

I'm not lamenting the absence of the spam, of course, but to me, the absence of spam means the possible absence of my real mail, too -- I'd much rather deal with the spam than have someone else decide for me what I should and should not receive.

But rather than write to them and get another piece of useless form mail, I'm just going to try not to expend any more energy worrying about it, and assume that when the name server change finally kicks in in a day or so, all this will be behind me.

I've written to technical support a couple of times about the delayed email, and the responses I've gotten have been fairly cryptic, referring to the escalating spam problem and things that they have put in place to deal with it. Reading between the lines, it sounds like they're slowing down the amount of mail that they allow through at any one time, so if an email to me happens to hit the server right after a big batch of spam, it's probably going to be bounced back to the sender with a message that my domain is unavailable.

The second time I wrote, I got an obvious form letter focused on how sorry they were that email was being delayed, and how they knew it was impacting my business, and that they would have measures in place to deal with it hopefully by the end of September.

Nope, I'm not gonna wait for that. I've wasted enough time and energy trying to figure it out, and trying to deal with it, and I've just had enough.

I've been hesitant to print alternate addresses here for fear that they will become the spam magnet that my regular address has, so if you've written to me and I haven't replied, I think the best course is just to wait a few days and try again.