GoDaddy E-Mail Cost Me 7 Hrs on Saturday

Living simply means choosing a good deal and sticking with it - in the words of my father, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." Less daily strife that way, and of course, there's always more than enough to do on the "to do" list, anyhow.

Then again ....

On Saturday, starting at 5:07 pm and ending right before midnight, I plugged away at getting my two business emails (one for writing, one for law) back to where they would load in Outlook. Something that they had been quietly and efficiency doing for over three years without a hitch - until Saturday afternoon.

I played with the tools, etc. on Outlook, expanding the time before timing-out, etc. No dice.

I called GoDaddy, since it was their two emails that were failing. I got a human who speaks English on the line. I gave him the error messages. He said it's not them. Call the ISP.

I called the ISP. Human, English-speaking techie tells me it's not them. Call the AntiVirus folk.

(Somewhere in here, I surfed for the error messages, went to the Microsoft Support page and read all about what to do. I'm already doing it.)

I then communicate with the Norton AntiVirus folk by an online chat room with (assumedly) a human whose native language is obviously not English. There are long gaps in typed conversation, where I'm wondering if my words are being fed through an online translator, or if a manual tranlation dictionary is being used. And, by long gaps I mean: Long. Gaps.

After I can't tell you how long this all took because I've blocked this out of my mind, I'm told that Norton has corrupted files, and while I could just un-install and reinstall the software, why don't I just upgrade since the registration is expiring in 20 days anyway?

I surf sites and find options to Norton AntiVirus -- I choose a Kaspersky product.

I call the K people, talk to a human in sales, and get the upgrade. This is after I uninstall both Norton AV and the software for their chatroom with its scary "remote control" feature that I had to install in order to get to Norton tech support on a Saturday.

(Remember -- these are business emails, I have to have them up and running asap.)

I install the new antivirus software.

It doesn't work. I trying calling back, and learn that while sales has real humans, tech support has another one of those chat room thingies for the weekends.

I consider drink.



I install the newbie again. This time it works. I go through all the hoopla of choosing my options, putting it my protective info.

It's been hours.

I go to the GoDaddy website to check and see about my email there -- can I pull anything up from there, that's been held in limbo while being blocked on my computer? I'm expecting an email from a writing client, is it in here?

Well, what do you know.

GoDaddy has an email service. Complete with POP -- they want you to use GoDaddy for all your email addresses. And, they've got some fancy spam filter. And, there -- starting with my first tests around 5 pm, hours and hours ago -- are all my missing emails. They've been setting in the Approval/Disapproval Spam box all this time.

I turn off the GoDaddy spam stuff and everything -- including all 28 test messages showing time stamps spanning 7 hours -- goes frolicking over to Outlook.

Wouldn't it be nice if someone at GoDaddy had told me they were going to do this new feature? Wouldn't it have been nice if the human I called at the beginning of all this had known anything at all about this?

GoDaddy was once a good deal, but GoDaddy may have to Go.