Email woefusion.

To begin I have several email addresses for various types of messages. Custom domains that forward Personal/business email, and two Hotmail accounts. One for net friends, and another for net companies to whom I wish to remain anonymous—usually because they send a lot of junk mail. In the past month my main (personal) account’s—I’ll say “reception”—was spotty. I would send an email and get no reply. The recipient said they received it and swore to me they responded. They didn’t get a bounce back and I didn’t get a response. It was the proverbial black hole of Calcutta.

This is how it’s supposed to work. I have the personal domain names each with its own email address forwarded to my SBC POP account with a DNS service. All emails with my special domain names are forwarded to the same POP email. Entourage for the Mac has a beta feature to download Hotmail messages to the desktop application Entourage. For me this is all seamless as all my messages come through Entourage.

Back in 2001 I left a residence and took my PacBell email address with me. I had it added as a sub-account at my next residence. While I was in transition, I was very happy to find Hotmail would access my POP. This way I could get both Hotmail and POP email over the web.

Once I was moved in I set up my DNS to forward to the reactivated PacBell email address. Send an email to any of my domains and my DNS forwarded these to PacBell. I recently moved again and changed my DSL service. I now have a new SBC POP account. I specifically recall updating the DNS to point to this email. Guess not. But, if it was not updated with the new destination, why was I receiving any emails?

Back to the present. I’ve had this email trouble for the past two months and I moved six months ago. I could send a message but the replies were not getting to me. SBC | Yahoo help personnel instruct me on how to troubleshoot my POP account.

1. Access the Yahoo Mail server. If you are getting any of your email, it has to go here first. According to SBC|Yahoo, mail.yahoo.com is the web mail equivalent of taking a peek on the ‘mail server’ to see your email before it is downloaded to your desktop client.
1.1. Quit your desktop email client.
1.2. Using your browser go to mail.yahoo.com.
1.3. Send email from yourself to yourself using mail.yahoo.com.
1.4. If you do not receive this message, check the junk mail folder. This is the most common trouble for missed email messages.
2. Still having problems?
2.1. Set Entourage Account preferences to leave a copy of email on the server. This lets SBC|Yahoo help staff check/verify (from their end) if you receive any email.

Now back to this story. My messages go out without any bounce messages. Recipients reply without bounce messages. However, I do not have the replies. Only by calling the people do I discover they replied at all.

After following the troubleshooting steps above I recheck mail.yahoo.com. It’s still empty. But look, Hotmail has a copy of one of the tests (from yourself to yourself)! This is what’s so damn strange. How did Hotmail get a POP email address it is not set to get? Remember Hotmail is set to get POP for my old PacBell.net account. I tried to check Hotmail POP settings feature, but this feature was upgraded to a special services account.

All my email in the desktop applications says its from this domain or that domain. It only shows the ISP account in the email header. Naturally, like any sane person, I choose to hide this information. All my outgoing messages work fine, but the return trip is getting rerouted. Remember that I said I thought I changed the DNS to forward to my new SBC POP? It was never changed. Messages were going to my old PacBell.net email. I was continuing to receive intermittent emails, but through the old Hotmail forwarding! Domain email was arriving to PacBell.net forwarded to Hotmail that is received at the desktop and filtered by Entourage to my general inbox and I mistakenly believed they were arriving at the SBC POP.

Then, Hotmail stops forwarding. I take the next three days to discover with SBC that my email at SBC is actually fine. Unfortunately it takes another few days to uncover the trouble is with PacBell.net. And, my PacBell account is a legacy sub-account paid by someone else. I don’t have access to the account management tools. And, PacBell.net is considered legacy by SBC. None of the technicians who I spoke with knew this, so all must be new hires after the SBC merger. There is no provision to access PacBell.net email through mail.yahoo.com. I was spending days with SBC people who forced me to go through their trouble shooting procedures only to learn they could not help me.

Finally I find someone who knows a way to access legacy PacBell.net email. And this guy was the most uninterested person I have ever spoken to at SBC. It was like he was actually enjoying my predicament. He said things like that’s “fucked up.” Never in my life has a SBC technician swore to me on the phone. It was actually quite humorous. We’ll. I can swear with the best. So, we got “jiggy with it.”

He gave me the super secret web mail browser URL for legacy PacBell.net POP accounts:
http://piauth.prodigy.net/auth.html

When I finally got through I had over 735 emails waiting for me! It's all working now. What a strange concurrence of unique domain emails forwarding to legacy a PacBell.net email address being forwarded through a Hotmail email address. The Hotmail feature masked that I never updated the DNS service. When Hotmail stopped offering the service. I looked in the wrong place. The right place, only a few SBC employees have knowledge of. Ultimately this is a story of, "I only know what the computer says to me". I have more than my share of these stories as I am sure you do too.

Good Night and Good luck!