Chipmunk
02-04-2004, 12:34 AM
One of our domains was due today, and I figured that might provide a carrot/stick to get our registrar to resolve a long-standing problem with their email forwarding. Here is the saga:
Before doing anything else, I sent a test message to one of the two non-functioning forwarded addresses, and did not get a bounce, inspected FQ's email logs several minutes later, and still no mail. The registrar's response to my first support ticket was to blame FQ. A ticket to Bob resulted in a polite request for a specific list of needed info (including full headers). Registrar had closed the first ticket, so I opened a second, and their reply contained the useless advice to get the headers by sending an email to one of the problem addresses. At this point it occurred to me to send a test message from a Yahoo account, which did generate a bounce, so I sent that to Bob, with the comment I was confident that the registrar had messed up. Enough time had transpired that Sheila had taken over, who did some checking and confirmed that everything worked at FQ's end. I replied that I figured I'd stop wasting time and just switch registrars... and a few minutes later got a vaguely embarassed sounding test email from the registrar, asking if I :) had received it. I replied and asked for a technical explanation.
Exact quote from domain registrar's tech support (bolding added by me) :
It looks like you had DNS Plus setup for both puffins.net and puffin.net. So, when it went to forward email to puffin.net, it looked locally. Of course, even though you had it setup, you were not using it, so the system would go to your mail servers and get bounced. Talking with the ISP is what gave us a clue as to what was going on.
Apparently Sheila and/or other(s) at FQ chose to walk that extra mile and gave a clue to the clueless. As always, thanks FQ! During the course of this endeavor, it suddenly struck me that the Wisdom of Yoda describes exactly the difference between FQ and other providers: Support or support not - there is no try.
Final tech note: two years ago when I first used their webform to activate the registrar's "DNS Plus" feature, it didn't work, and they themselves manually set it up on all our domains.
Before doing anything else, I sent a test message to one of the two non-functioning forwarded addresses, and did not get a bounce, inspected FQ's email logs several minutes later, and still no mail. The registrar's response to my first support ticket was to blame FQ. A ticket to Bob resulted in a polite request for a specific list of needed info (including full headers). Registrar had closed the first ticket, so I opened a second, and their reply contained the useless advice to get the headers by sending an email to one of the problem addresses. At this point it occurred to me to send a test message from a Yahoo account, which did generate a bounce, so I sent that to Bob, with the comment I was confident that the registrar had messed up. Enough time had transpired that Sheila had taken over, who did some checking and confirmed that everything worked at FQ's end. I replied that I figured I'd stop wasting time and just switch registrars... and a few minutes later got a vaguely embarassed sounding test email from the registrar, asking if I :) had received it. I replied and asked for a technical explanation.
Exact quote from domain registrar's tech support (bolding added by me) :
It looks like you had DNS Plus setup for both puffins.net and puffin.net. So, when it went to forward email to puffin.net, it looked locally. Of course, even though you had it setup, you were not using it, so the system would go to your mail servers and get bounced. Talking with the ISP is what gave us a clue as to what was going on.
Apparently Sheila and/or other(s) at FQ chose to walk that extra mile and gave a clue to the clueless. As always, thanks FQ! During the course of this endeavor, it suddenly struck me that the Wisdom of Yoda describes exactly the difference between FQ and other providers: Support or support not - there is no try.
Final tech note: two years ago when I first used their webform to activate the registrar's "DNS Plus" feature, it didn't work, and they themselves manually set it up on all our domains.