Fun With Email

Lately I've been suffering email miseries: Messages disappearing off the Verizon server, in a few minutes, an hour, a few hours, randomly but inexorably, for the last couple or so weeks. [Edit: Just checked an older blog entry and discovered this has been going on since mid-February! How time does fly when you're not having fun.] It started after an interlude of Verizon’s system refusing to recognize my email auto-log-in... refusing... okay, you’re in. Refusing... refusing... and on and on. My machines are set to auto-check for new email every 15 minutes, and I don’t know how many times I saw that “enter password” popup box twinkle into view (already filled in, of course), get yes’d, fail, pop up again, lather rinse repeat till finally I got signed officially in. The popup box refusals stopped after a few days, but then the vanishing emails started. I managed (I think) not to lose any important stuff via various workarounds, but talk about frustrating and annoying!

What’s that you say? Did you seek help from Verizon? *snort* Right, like I really want to spend hours on hold or trying to communicate with some poor schlub in India who’s following a script that’s useless for anything more complex than “Have you tried shutting it down and turning it back on?” I’ve already done the deep dive into my settings, thankyouverymuch.

Then, yesterday evening, working on my laptops, the auto-log-in got the same little “please enter your password” popup boxes as before, erratically for an hour or two, but without the serial refusals. Hmmmmmmmmmmm................. As usual, I forwarded everything I needed to have on the desktop in the morning to my Gmail account, to download tomorrow, and went to bed.

So I fired up the desktop this morning, opened email, it began to download....

AND EVERYTHING WAS THERE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Every damned thing (barring what I’d moved to storage folders) since I’d last logged onto that computer yesterday. Everything! Huzzah!

Now, I’m going to continue the Gmail-forwarding failsafe for a while, just in case. I'm encouraging everyone sending me stuff to use both addresses, just to be safe. But man oh man, I sure hope this means Verizon has fixed whatever the hell had been doing this!