the perils of spam

Well, that was fun.

Appears I've not been receiving email since some time on 2nd Feb. Which made for a quiet weekend.

The problem was relatively simple. My (now previous) domain name registrar (123reg.com) apparently decided a while back that they'd no longer support mail fowarding with their domain name registrations. Apparently they emailed me a number of times in the period since to advise that this was going to happen and that I'd have to subscribe to one of their "professional mailbox" packages.

I'm guessing all these advisory emails went straight into my Gmail spam folder.

So not being aware of any of this, I called them to find out what was going on. The usual automated "we're experiencing an unusual amount of calls" message advised that I was going to have a while to sit and cool my heels on hold. However, and I love them for this, the bot voice then advised that if I'd prefer to hold without holding music, then "press hash or pound sign now".

Which I duly did. It was, as warned, a very long wait, but otherwise painless.

For that alone I'd have stayed with them forever, despite the massive delay in getting through; I'm guessing I'm not the only one that got caught out by the removal of their mail forwarding service. 

However, to stay with them they wanted just over £70 a year if I wanted to continue to enjoy mail forwarding for the two domains I apparently had with them (personal and band). Plus the annual subscription for them to continue hosting those two domains (my personal .co.uk one is cheap as chips, but the band's .uk.net domain is not)

On the other hand, Freeola hosts the band's website and, it turns out, I'd already transferred the band's domain name over to their registrar GetDotted last August so that I could take advantage of their free SSL security certificate for the band's site. This lets it use https and so avoids all sorts of "there be dragons here and your data is unsafe" warnings browsers typically give if you try to access a website using an unsecured http address. 

However, despite transferring the domain from 123reg to GetDotted last year, 123reg still thought they had it the band's domain name, so that resulted in a second call to their helpdesk, and another correspondingly long wait before all that could get sorted.

GetDotted include mail forwarding with the domain name registration. So I've now transferred my personal email domain to them, which was a pretty painless process. At £6 per year vs approximately £47 per year to keep the same service with 123Reg, it was the proverbial no-brainer. 

Anyway, my email is back up and receiving again. A frustrating morning. But still, despite the frustration, very impressed by 123reg's "Please press hash or pound sign now" option to kill the holding music. Shame they priced themselves out of my business.