hotmail woes
Yesterday Reliance disabled outgoing calls on my WLL phone because i had run up a bill of 5000 bucks. Now today, hotmail disabled my outgoing email. Why? I don't know. I spent the whole of today morning sending out important emails to our clients. And many hours later, I realized nobody is getting my email.
I was pissed off enough to switch to using gmail exclusively. But, in what could only be a CIA conspiracy to make me totally unproductive, gmail refused to send email as well. Google thinks adding a "Oops..." to an error message makes it funny when in fact it makes it just more annoying.
Well, eventually gmail did comply and now I can send mail via gmail. Hotmail has still blocked my outgoing email. No idea why.
What a waste of time.
Comments
Btw, be prepared for unexpected short downtimes from Gmail. I have experienced GMail downtime when I needed email the most.
Why don't you use your own mail server? I use my own email account for all important things.GMail is for low priority stuff. I have been planning to get Exchagne based mail hosting for quite some time now as it offers best of both the worlds. It will offer me great Outlook support when I am at my desk and offer me OWA when I am on the move.
JD
Posted by: JD | March 3, 2005 07:48 PM
How expensive is exchange based hosting? My worry is that if google and microsoft with their billions of $$$ cant keep their servers running, then can a small time ISP really do a better job? And I dont want to run my own machines -- too much hassle.
Posted by: Gaurav | March 3, 2005 08:58 PM
Cost for Exchange hosting depends on how many accounts you want to host. The more accounts you host, cheaper it becomes. I am considering Mailstreet.com for my account hosting. It's going to cost me 13$ per month as I want only single account. But, it will cost you 10$ if you buy 2 accounts or more. I have decided to use Exchange hosting because after buying my PDA and doing lot of research for good PIM, I have decided that Outlook is the best tool. By default it's powerful, there are lots of plugins/tools available for it and I can extend it myself if need be. And obviously Outlook shines when used with Exchange hosting. I will post more about how I have organized my digital life once I fully settle into my planned system. [Btw, Mailstreet offers Wireless support for email access.] And I would really suggest you to find a good PIM for yourself to make best use of your time.
Mailstreet offers 99.9% uptime guarantee. And my research told me that they are very reliable. And definitely they are more proactive about keeping their servers up then say free service from Gmail or Hotmail.
And in my last comment, I forgot to mention that it sends a better message if your email id is gaurav.bhatnagar@companyname.com then say gaurav@gmail.com or gaurav_1985@hotmail.com.
Posted by: JD | March 3, 2005 10:03 PM
they probably did that cuz they read ur post on them hehe, anyways i am reading the classics for the heck of it and already seen the hitchhiker movie. Also do you want to stay at my place when you get here ? Will save money plus you can use your air bed hehe
Posted by: Jatin Varma | March 4, 2005 12:03 AM
Yes, Yesterday a friend was telling me the same about reliance. Apparently they block his calls as soon as his bill crosses Rs 2000. It seems that reliance has been duped to the tune of crores of rupees in unpaid bills.In the flat I am staying I get the bill of a person who was staying here before me. Once I chanced to open the envelope containing the bill and guess what , he had raked up a bill of Rs 25000+. A couple of days later a guy, who looked like a local goon came home asking me about that person and where he is cause he wanted to collect the bill. I don't know if you have experienced this G, but the kind of people reliance sends to collect the bills, seems like local vagabonds. Talk about hiring people :-)
Posted by: Manish Dhingra | March 4, 2005 10:46 AM
JD, I am definitely going to get something like gaurav@mycompany.com but the question is where to host the domain and mail server. I am tempted to go for exchange based hosting myself though it becomes little bit more expensive when w ee have a fair number of employees.
Manish -- Reliance is notorious for messing up their billing. It didnt happen to me but just visit a Reliance webworld on any day and you will find people screaming and complaining about inflated bills.
Posted by: Gaurav | March 4, 2005 12:29 PM
found this post cuz I'm having a downtime error right now - however you guys were talking about this a year ago - so either i'm in a timewarp or JD, you're right - I should expect downtimes every so often :)
Gaurav, I have to agree on your thoughts around leaving the best IT practices to those in the business - I've tinkered around with setting up my own servers to only realize in the end, I've got to invest a hell of a lot more $ to get the kind of redundancy, failover, reliability I'd want from my mail service! Yahoo! and gmail are a-ok in my book.
I've had pretty good experience with ZoneEdit.com, a free DNS service which will allow you to create and fwd all its email to your gmail acct without having to invest in any other services.
Been doing this for well over 5 years now and it has the bonus of being able to switch the "implementation" layer at any time invisibly (ie. you don't need to send out a note to friends and colleagues saying I'm moving from email X to Y every 6 months). I switched from Yahoo! Plus to Gmail 6 months ago quite seamlessly in fact.
So it's been a year so you may very well have taken this thread in a completely different direction and be interested in hearing what ideas you've come up with to solve your challenges!
JD, look fwd to reading more about your digital life. I found your comment re "once I fully settle into my planned system" a bit humorous - is there such a concept? :D no offense taken and chat with ya soon ;)
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