Okay, I get the message!

So . . . I don't know what's going on, but I've been having some major issues with email.

First, Verio, where my domain is hosted, started having problems with their email server. A couple of weeks ago my mail started being delayed, at first by maybe a couple of hours, but then for longer and longer periods until it was arriving a couple of days after it had been sent. This is ongoing. Sometimes I receive mail immediately, other times it takes days. Sometimes it bounces back completely and I never receive it.

Then one night last weekend I double-clicked on Outlook Express to open it and check my mail, and it wouldn't open. The application just refused to open, giving me an error message about an unexpected end of file.

I downloaded a new copy, which wouldn't open, either.

So I did some searching on the web, and found a message board posting where someone explained how to rebuild the Outlook Express database, which I did, and which allowed me to finally open Outlook, but when I opened it, it was empty. No saved mail, no address book. My folders were there, but they were all completely empty. When the rebuild had finished, I had gotten a message that it had saved the old database, so I tried not to panic while I searched for it.

There was a new database which, as I recall, was about 1.5 GB in size despite being completely empty, plus an old one; I renamed the new one to something else, and renamed the old one to what the new one had been created as, and my mail was back. Bob suggested backing up my mail -- a reasonable suggestion -- in case this happened again, but the last time I had an email catastrophe, I had discovered that unlike some email programs (like Pegasus, which I used to use on my PC) Outlook stores ALL of the email in one humongous file.

So while I could back it up (and I will), I really can't do anything with it, because by restoring it from backup, I would wipe out anything I'd received since then. Although I guess if I needed to access something old I could rename the current database, load the old one, look whatever it is up, and then do the name switcheroo thing again . . . Not exactly ideal, and certainly not "user friendly," but possible. I guess.

I was quite thrilled to have solved the problem, and went to bed that night (I think it was Sunday) feeling pleased with myself. We were woken up in the middle of the night by the largest thunderclap I may have ever heard. I suppose we can assume it was accompanied by lightning. Or possibly a power surge.

Bob got up and went in to power down his computer (akin to locking the barn door after the horses have escaped, I think the phrase is), and I stumbled downstairs to shut mine down, too.

When I got up the next morning, I didn't have an internet connection. I assumed it was a regional problem due to the storm, and while annoying, I didn't worry too much about it. This went on for days. I would occasionally call the cable company, be met with a recorded voice that said that hold times were exceeding 45 minutes, would hold for awhile, and then eventually hang up. This reassured me that it wasn't just me.

It was, however, just me.

I discovered this Thursday night by accidentally pressing the wrong button during that interminable, "if you want _____, press 1. If you want ____, press 2," etc. By pressing the wrong number I was immediately connected to an actual person, who told me that they had fixed the cable problem, and that there was no outage in my area. It would appear that my cable modem had been damaged.

So Friday afternoon I left the office early and went to the cable store and picked up a new modem.

Long story short, it doesn't work, and it now appears that the ethernet card in my computer is the thing that's fried. Despite an expensive surge protector--one of the ones that also protects the ethernet cable itself--it would appear that a powersurge traveled up the cable line, through the cable modem, and into the computer to the ethernet card. This is all a guess, since I don't really know what happened, and I don't really know that the ethernet card isn't working, but after a half dozen phone calls with technicians at the cable company, this is all they can come up with.

So. I don't know what to do. From what I can tell through the research I've been able to do (using AOL as my dial-up on the phone line at home, which keeps dropping the signal, and which would let me receive mail, but wouldn't let me send it until I changed my outgoing mail server to an AOL one, and sometimes not even then), the ethernet card is an integral part of the logic board on an iMac, so it's a very expensive proposition to have it replaced. In other words, not something that you can do at home.

I've thought about getting an airport card, but you have to buy a base station, too, and I'm guessing that both of those options would probably cost about the same, maybe getting an airport card and base station would be a little cheaper. But still probably more than I would want to spend on a four year old computer.

Maybe somebody is trying to tell me something, but I have no idea what it is. That I need to spend less time online? It's my livelihood, I can't exactly just stop. Oh well. I guess I'll figure something out. Bob says I'll either have to get it fixed or get a new computer, that I have to have it -- it's my tool. I can't remember what his analogy was, I think it was, "You'd be like a carpenter without a hammer."