Please don't leave copies of emails on the server!

Clients with "real" (non-forwarded) domain emails:

For those of you with domain email addresses (yourname@yourdomain.com) which are NOT forwarded to gmail or elsewhere, everything should be functioning perfectly. There is one change, however, and that is that the new server is limiting everyone to 500 MB of server space for emails. This is obviously a lot of space -- as long as you clear your messages off the server regularly. Note that this does NOT mean you have to clear it off your own computer, you just need to click the box in your email preferences that says to delete email off the server.

In Apple Mail, for example, you can do preferences, then accounts, and then under the Advanced tab, UNCLICK "Remove copy from server after retrieving a message" and you can pick "after one week" or whatever.

If you check your domain email in gmail (a great solution), go to mail settings (under the blue gear in the far upper right corner), choose "Accounts and Import." Under "Check mail using Pop3," on the far right click on "edit info." Then UNCLICK the box that says "Leave a copy of retrieved messages on the server."

Other various email programs should have a similar way to do it.

Simple!

thanks,
maddee

Server upgrade complete

Thanks for everyone's patience throughout this needed server upgrade. It turned out to be pretty hellish, with both Ryan (my wonder tech guy) and I working till 3:30 this morning getting email back up and running. To make a long story short, all spam controls and even more importantly forwarding addresses were lost in the server switch. This means that anyone whose email is forwarded to say a gmail account temporarily stopped getting email this weekend. This was unexpected — GoDaddy had "never" seen this happen before (yeah, right). So Ryan and I had to add each one back in manually — over 300 email addys.

While doing that, we also forwarded any email that came to the new server from Sat-Mon to you each individually so that you didn't lose anything. You should have received what we forwarded, but if not -- if you feel like you might be missing email from those three days -- let me know and I can figure out how you can access it. Again, the vast majority of you should have zero problems at this point, so don't worry unnecessarily! [and note that anyone who gets email via webmail or an email client like Apple Mail was NOT affected]

However, if anything seems funky with your email, let me know and I'll do my best to respond quickly, but to say I've been inundated is a bit of an understatement. ;)

Last note: this was a very important upgrade — it was better to do this now while we were still functioning fine than waiting so long to upgrade that the server crashed and we lost everything! So even though it felt frustrating to many of you, and I have slept little in four days, I do believe this was worth it.

I appreciate all of you!

maddee
P.S. I will be sending one more email to those people who have regular (non-forwarded) email addresses.

Server: almost all set!

To all my clients:
We began moving all client websites to a new, faster, more stable server at the start of this weekend. That means that your website and email should run a bit faster and definitely more efficiently. For today, Sunday, be aware that everyone's ISP (the service you use to connect to the internet, e.g. Qwest, Comcast, Earthlink, etc.) does their internet updates at different time intervals, so it's possible that you might still be seeing info from the old server depending on whether your ISP has updated their information yet. However, the switch from old server to new will be complete by mid-day Monday at the latest.

If you're unable to see your website or get your email after about noon on Monday, please let me know. By the way, I got about 1,000 (no joke!) OLD emails into my inbox last night, so this might happen to others as well. Just delete them, of course.

Some good news: we did not lose any stored email! But if you think you might have missed new email at some point during the transition, this is how you can access it, at a domain I left on the old server for this purpose:

http://webmail.storyinspiration.com

username: yourname@yourdomain.com (example: madeira@xuni.com)
pw: your email password, of course

I would really appreciate it if you give the new server the full time needed for the final switch (till noon on Monday) before you send questions about your site or email.

Thanks so much for your patience through this ordeal. I've tried to keep the stress level down, knowing that there are a lot more important things to be upset about than a weekend of wacky server-ness! :)

The up side to all this is that our new server is faster and more stable than ever before!

maddee