Only an idiot would use Network Solutions e-mail. I am an idiot.
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I ran my own mail server for many years until the end of 1999 when we moved out to the Wine Country boonies where the only broadband service back then was by satellite. I couldn’t run my own server but still wanted a cringely.com address so I fell back on what seemed to be the simplest alternative, which was e-mail through my domain registrar, Network Solutions. What a mistake.
We all have friends who claim to have had a more-or-less continuous headache since, say, 1946. That’s how I feel about Network Solutions mail. It was never very good, but I was lazy and it was better than nothing… until this weekend when they appear to have lost forever more than 200 of my incoming messages.
My e-mail just stopped arriving shortly after midnight on Friday. I waited until morning then called support and was told the problem was a system upgrade that should have taken five minutes but was then well into its 12th hour. I’d been through this with the previous upgrade, which they eventually reversed it was so terrible, going back to the bad old code that at least functioned, however slowly.
No messages would be lost, they said, just delayed, and they’d call me as soon as the upgrade was complete. I’m still waiting for that call.
At the time of that first call to support I simultaneously filed a support ticket through the Network Solutions web site, which promised a human response within 24 hours. Thirty-six hours later I am still waiting.
About 20 hours after the problem began 3-4 messages burped-through. In the same 20 hours a week earlier I received 196 messages. So I called tech support again, explaining the problem for a second time.
“Everything is functioning normally,” they said.
What about that system upgrade, was that problem solved?
“The upgrade is still in process, but that shouldn’t keep you from getting messages, ” they said.
I have all my mail since 1992, I explained, and there isn’t a Saturday in that entire time when I received less than 80 messages. Today I got only four.
“Maybe they are stuck on the server,” the tech suggested. So she rebooted the server. No luck.
“Maybe your mail is being rejected as spam,” she suggested. “Send us copies of all messages you didn’t receive including their IP addresses.”
I am not making this up.
How am I supposed to send them copies of messages I didn’t receive, including their IP addresses? Sorry, I didn’t pay for Network Solutions quantum e-mail, though perhaps I should have.
Was spam filtering changed as part of the system upgrade? I asked.
“No.”
So if my mail is being rejected as spam the change is for no known reason. And if, for that unknown reason, my legitimate e-mail messages have disappeared from people who have been writing to me for two decades, what happens to those messages? Are they quarantined somewhere?
“No. If a message is tagged as spam by the system it is deleted and no records are kept. Such messages cannot be recovered. But this shouldn’t keep you from getting messages,” the supervisor said, making no sense at all. At least I’d moved-up one support level.
And I suppose she was correct, because messages continue to dribble through, one or two per hour, and about two thirds of those are spam. But the support techs still see no messages stuck on the server.
“We have thousands of customers and you are the only one complaining about this problem, ” they lied.
My wife is having it, too.
“Then we have thousands of customers and you and your wife are the only ones complaining about this problem.”
It’s my own damned fault.
I’ve known since the beginning of our relationship that Network Solutions is a technically incompetent organization. At least that has always been my experience. Their services are poorly designed, prone to failure, and too expensive. Most of the time they have no idea what’s really happening with their own system. I suspect this is because engineering regularly lies to support which then lies to me whether they know they are doing so or not.
They are never proactive, reaching-out to me when there is a problem. They appear never to have support updates for major system problems on their homepage, apparently preferring to pretend such problems don’t exist.
Their answers to problems caused by their own incompetence is nearly always an offer to move me to a more expensive version of the same service, which sounds to me like a protection racket.
Support, which appears to come from India, is unfailingly pleasant but also unfailingly useless.
So if you sent me an e-mail message this weekend and I didn’t reply, now you know why. Please resend. But wait a few hours so I can move my service to Google Gmail for Domains, which my friends love and also happens to be free. I’m tired of paying for a service I don’t receive.
My only hope is that Network Solutions doesn’t screw-up the transfer.
http://www.verio.com has been great for me. I highly recommend them.
I left NetSol after 5+ years just last month. I didn’t have e-mail problems, but I sure had web server problems. I’m using bluehost now and am very happy with their web service. E-mail was initially a problem because their standard spam filter is a non-functional spamassassin config. I had to pay for Postini filtering, which is Google.
If you have broadband now, why not go back to hosting your own e-mail service? A Mac Mini with OSX Server would do the job nicely and without hassle.
Why not…SPAM. Best left on someone else’s server.
Hi,
I believe, like we say in Brazil, that you are exchanging six for half a dozen. Google Mail / Gmail is “free”. And there is no such a thing as a free lunch. For good e-mail service either run your own server (you are “big” enough to have it) or get if from a good company. I do use Dreamhost.com (tell them my e-mail when you buy from them!
. They are unexpensive, Linux-based, and good. They may try to host you at Google, you just refuse it. I have been their customer for years, and host some client’s domains there. And don’t have problems. Of course, one of these days I did move a client/friend from Netsol to Dreamhost, and Netsol took him out of the air untill I did pay one year hosting to clear things. Very “nice” guys.
Regards, and keep the very good work.
Mario Jorge Passos
Years ago (I think it was in the 2007/2008 timeframe) I got sick of all the SPAM. I tried to get Spamassasin running on my self-hosted Linux box. I got it running and it work reasonablly well. But it never really worked great. I also was running into a lot of service providers that were simply blacklisting my IP address because it was part of a DHCP pool. That’s when I came across Google Apps. I moved my email hosting (my email and a couple other family members) over to it and I haven’t looked back.
I’m not sure when it started out, but I’m pretty sure I was in on it pretty early in its development. Back when I signed up, the free mailboxes were limited to 1GB of mail. As I recall, at the time gmail was somewhere in the 2GB realm. Fortunately, at the time my mailbox was below that limit so it wasn’t a big deal (I just looked and I’m currently using a touch over 2.5GB). I do remember when they gave us free apps users the same mail quotas as free gmail users.
I was able to use IMAP to move all my messages off my linux box and into my new gmail account, so I didn’t loose anything in the transition. I don’t have nearly as much as Cringley, but I do go back to early 2003.
I’m no stranger to email hosting… I was self-hosting on Linux from 2003-2007/2008 … I actually think I may have been hosting before that, but lost some messages to a hard drive crash… I have a vague memory of that happening and then running to Circuit City to buy a pair of hard drives to mirror together. I also still run our mail servers at work and have been since the turn of the century. But, for a small number of mailboxes, it is a thousand times easier to just use Google Apps.
PS. If you look at my website, you may notice that it’s hosted on Dreamhost. I continued hosing my site on the linux box even after I moved mail services off from it. I eventually moved my web hosting to Dreamhost, but still use gmail for the email component (and chat)….
http://blaagh.mikeandpaulagardner.com/?p=124
Forgot to say:
While “there is no such a thing as a free lunch” is a good rule, there is an exception to almost every rule. While it’s not perfect, I think gmail is a pretty good exception when it comes to email hosting. There are a couple trade-offs (it’s ad supported, your Google apps account doesn’t always work as Google account [I think they're working on this one], etc)…. but it works pretty good. IMAP support is awesome for using it on a Mobile platform, their webmail is pretty good (I don’t even have an email client on my computer, I just use webmail) and Google docs comes in handy from time to time.
To say that Network Solutions is technically incompetent is one of the great understatements of all time. I wouldn’t trust them to keep an atomic clock wound.
I would second Dreamhost as a very competent, inexpensive service which I transferred all of my registrations to after having had an encounter with Network Solutions incompetent “customer service”.
They are literally the only customer service I have ever dealt with that actually succeed in making the problem worse, rather than working toward a solution or at least leaving the wound unsalted. I never suspected anyone could make Comcast look good by comparison.
Let’s not forget the class action lawsuit against them a while back (google it if you don’t know), but suffice it to say, if you have a domain registered there, run, do not walk to any-other-registrar-on-earth.
If you have hosting of any kind there, first have yourself tested for mental competence and THEN run, do not walk to any-other-hosting-company on earth.
Man, I feel better.
I have been using the free Google Hosted Apps for my main email for a few years and am quite pleased. Even when there have been problems with maybe a slow web interface, IMAP was still connecting speedily. I you want to do some comparison shopping, you might check into a hosted Zimbra service, like from 01.com. You would have to pay, though (annual for 1 user is about 50/yr). You get the nice web interface, but it plays REALLY well with Mac and iPhone.
And, one cause for concern with Gmail for me is that if there IS a problem, customer support will probably be via email, because I have never been able to find a way to get ahold of Google via phone support to help me with ANY of their services that I use. At leas 01.com has phone support.
I cannot find any references to Google Gmail for Domains as a free service. Can you provide a link to the Google location?
Well, Google Apps for Domains I think was an old name for the service. The free service can be found at: http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html
This is good for up to 50 users and each gets about 7.5 GB of email space (the same as standard Gmail). You can set MX records for your domain to this service. I have set this up in the past and it was very easy. Unless you need the additional capacity (25 GB) or need to be able to add more users, the free version is a great choice.
I just looked at your MX record, and here it is Wednesday and you’re still running Network Solutions??? If you really are loosing messages as bad as this post says, you should really switch ASAP!! I mean, I understand taking the slow approach in order to prevent data loss, but when data loss is already occurring, you need to go, go, go!
It’s all ready to switch but I decided to wait until Friday because there will be a propagation delay of 24 hours or so. While I have you on the line here’s an update on my problem. Network Solutions has given me three explanations: 1) there is no problem; 2) we thought you were a spammer and blocked your mail,and; 3) our upgrade disturbed the mail records of ALL customers and it takes 2-3 days for the old messages to find their way home. I believe this last one because it came from a very nice tech who seemed to know what he was talking about. That explains why they did it on a Friday. It further explains that the five minute switch-over was baloney and they knew it would take all weekend or more. the fact that they didn’t acknowledge much less send out a notice in advance explaining what was going to happen, well that was unconscionable. I can’t wait for Friday.
The very nice techie would seem to be confused with the refresh pertaining to secondary name servers and the TTL expire pertaining to caching by remote name servers. 2 or 3 days is rather implausible for remote name servers to catch up with current events, other than for NS records. Most TTLs for MX records follow SOA default values (typically 1 hour) and maybe a couple of hours but not a couple of days.
Current default TTL for cringely.com is 1 hour while the TTL for MX records belonging to cringely.com is 2 hours.
If you can identify at least one sender that was unable to send you a message and that sender received an MTA warning message, then chances are that you may still receive the ‘lost’ messages.
(What’s more difficult to verify is that) If none of these senders received a warning message pertaining to an email sent to you, then the messages are likely all gone.
Additionally, the NS records for cringely.com are the same today as they were at least one year ago. The IP addresses for these NS records are also the same. It’s highly unlikely (although still possible) that these NS records were different during the email outage.
You’re not an idiot. Anybody could have made this choice and I enjoy a Big Mac on occasion.
The only way of being absolutely sure that your precious emails will be safe is putting them where letters have been for millennia. On paper.
http://www.memeoirs.com/
On my PC I can find and search all my email since 2001. I also have tons of paper documents but being unsearchable, they’re not very useful.
I have had pretty good luck with everyone.net over the past 10 years.
Man, I left Network Solutions 10 years ago, I think. They’re one of the few companies where you can say all the horror stories about them are absolutely true. And they never get better.
FWIW, I’m using HostGator now, and they’ve been exceptionally great. Awesome Tech Support. I think the longest I’ve waited in line for a Tech Chat was maybe 90 seconds, and the Techs have always been super helpful.
Nevertheless, I use Gmail for my mail. I use it as an IMAP account so i can sync it easily with Mac Mail, and I have HostGator redirect all my domain name mail directly to my Gmail account.
Bob, good luck. Once you get off Network Solutions, you’re going to start crying from sheer relief.
Well then i have to admit i am an idiot too
You could probably take the same article, replace Network Solutions with 80% of the IT Support Help Desks that have been off shored and it would be accurate.
Even my own companies internal IT Help Desk (We are an IT company!), if step #1 in their script does not work, Step #2 is ‘re-image your laptop’…
I’ve had google apps for our business email for about 3 years now. Google does not deliver email. I have no way of knowing how much I am not getting, but I regularly have the expereince of talking to someone and saying “Why didn’t you send me an email?” and they swear they did. Or, I will be at a friends computer and they forward an email and I go and I didn’t get it, and they forward it 2-3 times and I still don’t get it.
They don’t get market spam, they just disappear.
I do get a fair bit of email, so it is not all disappearing, but some percentage of it never gets to me.
If I knew of a reliable alternative, I would switch.
My company was with NetworkSol for years . . .
Until . . .
One year, some years ago now, my admin login didn’t work anymore. They said I would have to authenticate identity by sending them – get this – copy of passport and drivers license for verification of identity. Naturally I said no. So then the twit on the other end of the phone suggested that I get one of my employees to send their passport information and they could be set up as administrator. I asked her why, if I didn’t think it was ethical for them to ask for personal information about foreign nationals (we are in Canada) she thought it would be any more ethical if I asked one of my employees to send their information rather than me sending my own? There was stunned silence for a time, buzzing and clicking and then I spoke with a supervisor. In the end, after days of calls, renewals were processed and our account worked in fits and starts for a few more years (including one double billing) until one year when we didn’t get a renewal notice. That year they just turned the email/website off. Toast Not their problem they said. Takes days to reinstate they said.
So in the end, I transferred to a Canadian domain name registrar and have had no problems since (now whispering in a low voice so as not to tempt the fates)! My own suspicion is that NetSol have either been hacked or have lost data in the past, including domain admin data, because all of a sudden old ISP’s, email addresses and registration info was being used, some of which I know I had changed years before. Scary!
“Your confusion is important to us, please stay on the line for the first available agent.
You are 1×10 to the sixth in line and your call will be answered in the same order received. Please hold and have a nice month!”
I ran my own email server for years, until the ISP that was providing co-location for my server and backbone IP connectivity went belly up.
I moved to GoDaddy’s hosted email that automatically redirects via an MX record for my domain (also registered through GoDaddy).
So far, so good…
Try Tuffmail. Love it.
Tuff price
Have you looked into pobox? They seem pretty hardcore about doing email right.
[...] – The ultimate portable email solution By Ben, on February 7th, 2011 A recent post by Cringely about the problems he has experienced with his Email service made me very thankful for my ever [...]
I lost my respect for you after learning that you had been with NetSol for so long.
Rackspace.com…I compared the two, and found that the level of support from rackspace was worth it. I like being able to get to someone who can look at headers from the email server logs, to confirm that the email was indeed sent out.
Mail can be delayed for hours to days if they are greylisting
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greylisting
I hear that john C dvorak gets no spam.
I would also recommend Google Apps. The agressive spam filtering alone makes it worth the effort to switch. You will initially get the occasional false positive but catching them is easy and the system quickly learns what is not spam the more you use it. I did notice IMAP access would occasionally time out while using the free version. I switched to the premium version of Apps when they made it free for non-profits and have since had no problems to report.
man,this is my website page,please help me
http://www.puma-shoes.org
thank u very much.
Put me in the group that uses Google and have no complaints. I have my blog at HostGator but moved mail from them after having problems.
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Some of my problems w/ Network Solutions email are listed below & never get fixed.
#1- “Freezes”/”Locks Up” ~ Every time I open it!
#2- Unable to “Delete” messages, get “error” messages instead
#3- Unable to “Move” messages. Account “Freezes” & when I re-open it the messages I attempted to “Move” have disappeared.
Network Solutions is the only email account I pay for & the only one I have problems with. All of my other accounts are “Free” & I never have problems w/ them.
I have wasted countless hours, lost important messages, & lost $$$. I cannot afford this.
One tech helped me set up OutLook to solve problems, which is not performing properly. When I called back about OutLook problems this tech I spoke w/ told me OutLook is my problem & he can’t help me.
Now, after ALL of my wasted time, & lost $$$ I am told my Network Solutions web email acct is “not” compatible w/ Internet Explorer 8.
Why was I not told this back in the beginning, almost a year ago, when I 1st reported my problems?
I have no choice, but to use IE 8 since I have Windows 7 as my OS.
I was told NS email was compatible w/ FireFox. I tried FireFox & still had the same problems.
When I call NS support I wait @ least 10 – 15 minutes only to get passed on to another idiot who speaks poor English & wastes my time. There have been times when I have gotten a person in America that I can understand & this alleviates the pain somewhat.
Network Solutions email SUCKs & I do not know how they stay in business.
I am concerned that when I finally switch to another company NS will mess up the transfer.
Any suggestions for my new email provider?
What about GoDaddy?
I’m a web developer, and I had a client who was already set up on Network Solutions. I tried to talk them into switching, but no, it was too much trouble to move their mail over to a new host. They had several years’ worth of corporate emails stored in NS’s webmail service.
I set up a Drupal site on their NS account, which frequently hung up. I’ve set up a lot of Drupal sites in my day, and have never seen the sorts of issues I had with NS. Calls to NS support only ever yielded the following answer: “Everything here is fine, it must be your code.” Nothing was wrong with my code, it was just a standard Drupal install.
Finally I convinced the client to switch over to another hosting solution. Moved the database, moved the code, and changed nothing but the settings file (of course). Everything has worked perfectly since.
Just the fact that NS still charges $35 for a domain registration tells me that their management is simply clueless. (Actually, I have to correct myself — I just tried to register a .com domain through their site to verify the price — it’s gone UP to $37.99!)
Once upon a time, NS was the most important registrar on the planet; now they’re just a dinosaur that refused to change. When someone tells me that they use NS, that immediately tells me that that person is a neophyte.
Online UK costume and fashion jewellery shop with,
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Network Solutions is DIRTY! They use underhanded tactics in everything they do. Prices are a ripoff compared to all the other legitimate suppliers out there. I was recently told my domain name renewal cost would be $35 for only 1 year. I went to Godaddy and got the same seervice for $5! When I tried to get the auth from NS to transfer out, they stone-walled me for weeks! When I finally put the pressure on a CSR, they offered me 1 year for $10 to which I declined. I was told to expect my auth code by email within an hour. It never came. When I called again they tried the same dirty tactics. I refused and had to verbally pressure the rep until she gave up and agreed to send me the auth code while waiting on the line. DO NOT DO BUSINESS WITH THESE PEOPLE.
Stumbled up on your post while I was frustrated at the crap I have been enduring for the past 7 years. Network Solution is the most horrible I have ever had. I do have hosting with godaddy too but I try to distribute my services so I don’t have everything in one place. What a horror. Email headaches, website headaches….I even once called and was seeking some direction to find out the my whole website disappear. Yes, Networksolution is a total horror story….
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