Monday, February 27, 2006
Is this what they mean by “PC Lusering?”
I'm beginning to really hate email.
No, not my email, span infested as it is. No, I'm beginning to really hate other people's email.
This is semi-related to AOL only because I spent an hour or so with a
customer today walking him through configuring Thunderbird to check email on our server since forwarding his email
to AOL is a lost cause. And
that was bad enough. I'm under Linux, where Thunderbird sees fit to place
the Account Manager under the Edit menu option. Whatever
operating system the customer was using (I'm guessing Windows) had the
Account Manager under the Tools menu option. And we were using
different versions, which meant the dialog boxes I was seeing did not match
the diaglog boxes the customer was seeing. Compound the fact that the
customer's primary interface to the Internet seemed to be exclusively
AOL, and his propensity to quickly
click ahead made for a trying experience.
But then I spent another hour or so trying to figure out where the heck
his email was going. The test messages to his account where simply not
showing up. The sending server (my workstation and my home computer) showed
sucessful delivery of the message to the MX host, which is our spam firewall (a service we offer). The spam firewall showed a sucessful delivery of said test emails to the actual server. It was when I checked the mail logs on the server that I saw his emails were still being forwarded. I checked the (shudder) control panel (Insipid)—nope—his emails shouldn't be forwarded.
But they were.
Turns out there were some .forward files. And since the control panel didn't see fit to remove them, I had to wonder how they got there in the first place (or I found an actual bug in a
control panel! Fancy that).
Hate.
Hate.
Hate.
“You know, I actually new a kid in high school that sniffed this stuff … ”
As if today wasn't bad enough, at 5:59 pm, just a minute before I'm out the door, the phone rings. I hesitate a second, debating whether I should answer it or not.
“Hello,” I said, silently cursing myself. “Technical Support. How may I help you?”
“Yes, this is C from XXXXXXXX.” It's the customer with the Cisco router that we're tunnelling a connection to. “Yeah, our provider just gave us our new IP address and we need our router reconfigured before midnight tonight.”
Looks like it was the wrong week to quit sniffing C12H22O11 …
