by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2006/06/11 02:14 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2006/06/10/625998.aspx
(Nothing technical in this post; it's a private service announcement from Trigeminal Software!)
Sometime in the early morning this last Tuesday, the Internet Service Provider that hosts my virtual domains upgraded their spam filter. This is good as far as it goes, and they have done it many times before. Unfortunately, this time they made some mistake that caused every mail that was sent to me to be treated as spam and quarantined.
Now I own two virtual domains, an one of them has no spam filtering (since I have never given anyone the email address, I have a client side rule that simply deletes all the spam). Unfortunately this caused me to not really notice that my actual email asccount was down.
Then by Friday I was calling them and saying I seemed to be having problems; unfortunately they had been having some other problems with their DNS registrations which they had just fixed so they sorta of assumed it was the same problem (and that I was exagerating how long I had been seeing a problem!). But they assured me they were up and running now.
So it was not until this morning that I was calling them again to say that even in tests I was doing from other email accounts, nothing was getting through.
The person I talked to immediately turned off the spam filter on the account, but he had no administrative privileges to the spam filter, so I do not know whether the quarantined messages are gone forever or whether I will just have 3000+ messages dumped on me on Monday morning.
I may not be home and dry just yet, but perhaps I could be seen as being home and vigorously toweling myself off....
Anyway, if you have sent me email to my non-Microsoft account and have either received no response or a response like this:
Your message has been delayed and is still awaiting delivery to the following recipient(s)
<my email address>
(Was addressed to <my email address>) Message delayed
Could not resolve mail server name because DNS server did not respond in time.
Then you can (if you like) send me another message, or if it was not very important then you can wait until I maybe am buried under an unbelievable mound of it on Monday morning.
Though of course you wil be competing with all of the offers to lower my monthly mortgage (I do not currently have a mortgage) or for Viagra or for a degree from a non-certified university for underwater basket weaving or whatever.
No worries, I am sure I will get to it all eventually. Your patience and understanding is appreciated.... :-)