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You Get What You Pay For

Happy new year and all that good stuff. I’ve been slacking big time on my blog. My usual ranting and raving just seemed out of place over the holidays. I had planned to vent during my family’s first official Festivus celebration (I even got the pole, which I’m sure my sister’s wondering what the hell she’s going to do with right about now), but somehow I missed my turn to speak during the “airing of grievances.” At least it left me with a few pent up aggravations to blog about.

So my first attack of 2006 shall be against my piece of crap web hosting company who likes to periodically screw with my email. First they removed my email catch-all a few months ago without notifying me, causing me to lose a lot of letters. Basically, what the catch-all does is forward all email sent to my domain to my main email account. The problem for me is that I make up new email addresses all the time. For instance, if I go to a company’s website and have to submit a valid email address I’ll put in the company’s name followed by “@jenee.net” so that I can keep track of who’s whoring my address. For three days, I had to keep filling out support tickets to get the stupid customer service reps to understand that I don’t need their assistance in blocking spam if it means I’m missing important emails. My letters started out very cordial, with “please” and “thank you” and eventually degenerated to “DON’T FUCK WITH MY MAIL EVER AGAIN.” Sadly it was the latter approach which finally worked and my catch-all was reinstated.

Then recently, I noticed I was receiving drastically fewer emails. It went from about 80 pieces per day to about 10. I couldn’t figure it out. I spent way too much time adjusting my Outlook settings and sending myself emails trying to determine where all the mail had gone but I was stumped. Then an incident occurred where I had to write to my poker site about a problem and didn’t receive a response. They’re always awesome about replying quickly so I sent them a few more letters over the next few days (no degeneration this time because they’re very cool). They made a couple of bonus deposits to my account, which was great, but I still wanted an answer to my inquiry. I finally got one when I accidentally wrote to them from a different email address and they told me that they’d done some investigating and learned my web host had added Spam Cop to my site. It blocks certain content and IP addresses that it has determined sends spam. But neither I nor the sender is notified the mail isn’t being delivered.

I was absolutely furious when I learned this. I couldn’t believe my hosting company implemented something like this without telling me. Was I not clear when I wrote, “DON’T FUCK WITH MY MAIL EVER AGAIN?” The support tickets started again and I didn’t even attempt to be polite. In their responses, they insisted that Spam Cop is necessary (though I really don’t understand how it affects them). I explained that receiving my email is necessary and that I’ve got all kinds of junk mail filters in place. I even directed them to their own terms of service which essentially says that they don’t touch customers’ email. I got nowhere. These bastards refuse to remove their little spam nazi.

The most frustrating aspect of the whole situation is that they’re a pretty cheap company so when problems occur, I’ve got no leverage. I can’t threaten to take my business elsewhere because they’ll just say, “Oh no! Guess we’ll have to order a medium pizza instead of a large for the next company party.” They probably giggle about their “99.9% uptime guarantee” knowing that even though they’re closer to 85%, what are the customers going to do about it? I only have two paid months left and I considered staying with them just because they promised me another two free months for all the emails I lost when they removed the catch-all. The stubborn side of me wants to get everything they owe me but then I realized sticking it to them for $6-8 won’t exactly sting.

In the process of writing this post I got so annoyed that I moved my domain over to the reseller account I just purchased where I’m the boss and can host as many domains as I want. Unfortunately, I screwed something up and now my homepage doesn’t work properly. And the worst part is, now I’ve got nobody I can complain to!

Great start for the new year.

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