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 (America Online) [1] only because I spent an hour or so with a customer today walking him through configuring Thunderbird [2] to check email on our server since forwarding his email to AOL (America Online) is a lost cause [3]. 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 (Mail eXchange) 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.