A handful of you are saying your having trouble sending out mail, it’s bouncing back, or both. I just submitted a ticket to the host to get some more help and I’ll let you know what they say. The long and short of it, however, is that although there are some tricks and settings we can try and test (see below), it’s mostly a waiting game. Who are we waiting for, you ask? Well, that’s where it gets a little murky. For an old time analogy, it’s as if someone is sending you snail mail but one of the mail carriers along the way sent it back because, last they remember, you hadn’t moved. Ah yes, but you did.

In the “I don’t really care, but you’re going to tell me anyway” department, here’s what’s probably happening.

When you send out mail, it goes through a bunch of different “nodes” (computers, routers, servers, ISPs, etc.) to get to its final destination. ISPs and the like usually update what’s called the DNS information “regularly.” This is the information that says www.yourdomain.com really sits on a certain server. Therein lies our problem. It might be hourly, it might be daily, it might be weekly (mostly likely daily). So when there’s a server move, one node along the way might think your domain still lives where it was before, but you moved, and the server is confused and says you’re a fraud and blocks or delays your mail.

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Here are some tricks if your mail isn’t coming in quite right yet.

  1. Use Yahoo/Gmail to send/receive your mail. It’s a fantastic way to get [email protected] and you’ll never again have send/receive troubles and you won’t care about SMTP servers. More about that here.
  2. Use webmail for the time being: www.yourdomain.com/webmail
  3. Turn off and on your email program. (That worked for me the first morning.)
  4. If no #1, turn off and then on your computer. Then try your mail.
  5. If no #2, turn off (wait 2 minutes) and on your router.
  6. If that doesn’t work, replace the settings in your mail program for incoming POP server from: mail.yourdomain.com to 66.7.206.180. Download any new mail then put it back to mail.yourdomain.com.
  7. Use OpenDNS for the settings at your router (this fixes quite a few things, by the way). Yes, we’re getting techy here, but it does work.

Mail IS coming in, it’s just that your mail program isn’t seeing it yet. But your Blackberry (etc.) might see it. Your email program is stuck in the past (well, yesterday) and needs to be restarted to see the mail.

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