True story ahead. A customer of ours decided to leave their current network service provider. They were, let's say substantially unhappy with their service.

Now from the customer's point of view, the network service company was their "web hotel". Unfortunately, when the customer terminated their contract with network service company, they unwittingly also terminated their domain hosting service, leaving their DNS records in limbo and effectively stopping all incoming email, since the email had no idea where it should be delivered. It's like taking the name plate away from your mailbox. The mailbox still exists, but the mailman has no idea which one is yours.

Our customer has had little success in contacting their old service provider who are in no hurry servicing an angry ex-customer of theirs.

Lessons to learn:

• Look before you leap. If you aren't 100% of what the leap means, consult someone who does.
• If you are a network service provider, be cool and do provide service even to disgruntled ex-customers. They might tell their peers to stay clear of you, and in best case, they might even come back.
• Don't do anything in anger.

Have you been in the situation where you sent an email and then immediately went (in cinematographic drama slow motion) "Nooooooooo...! I did not mean to send that!"? I'm sure you have. I have.

If you use Gmail, there's a wonderful setting, Enable Undo Send. Set it to ten or twenty seconds, which will leave the message in the outbox instead of delivering it rightaway. Ten-ish seconds should be enough for you to get the oh-no -reaction and press Z to effectively unsend your message.

There's a similar trick for Microsoft Outlook. Create a Rule. Start with a blank rule applied when messages are sent (last on the list). Check no conditions unless you really want to tweak things. Defer the delivery by one minute (again, the last setting). No exceptions necessary (unless, again, you really want to tweak things). Give your rule a nifty name ("Delay sending by one minute") and that's it!

Outlook has a feature to "Recall a message". What it in all practice does is send a second message to the original recipient telling that you wanted to recall the message. That if anything would make the recipient want to go wow, what's he written now?. The funny thing is that your Outlook will just look smug and say that it's recalled the message (or at least attempted to). Oh yeah. Or you can buy an Exchange module to have the server delay the message deliveries, but all in all this is the cheaper option :)

I just had a very Douglas Adamsy moment. There's a passage i love in one of his books where there's a big hole in the space ship but the hole in question also knocked out the sensor that would have told the monitor computer that there's a piece of the space ship missing. Which causes the maintenance robot to fall through the hole in the space ship because it does not know it exists.

The moral of the story? Monitor your monitors.

The case in question? Email. I have two email accounts that i use, one with the gmail domain name and one on my vanity domain. I actively use the Gmail account because i got it first, but i use the vanity email address for all outgoing mail regardless from which email address i send it. This means that when i send mail from Gmail, the replies get sent to the vanity domain which are automagically forwarded back to my Gmail account. It's a bit of a hack, but it has worked so far.

But oh.

At some stage in December apparently, i managed to mistype the forwarding settings so that all my email to the vanity domain got forwarded to another user at Gmail. Of course, i was not aware of this. I just stopped receiving some of my email. I just never attributed that to my own stupidity. But i should have.

When i today checked my vanity domain, i had a bunch of non delivery reports from that other account. Not very cool. I suppose i could go and send an apology mail to that other user but i fear that too is going to be bounced.

So if you haven't received a response from me to a mail you sent to my vanity domain, i am sorry (this, unfortunately also goes for billing statements sent from my ISP). My fault. Mails should be delivered now. And i shall cluebat myself just to improve my memory.