Yesterday our email system was down for almost the whole day and sometimes we forget to realise how dependant we are on technology. To give you a brief summary of what happened, we recently upgraded our hosting account from IIS6 to IIS7. Normally the process is very straight forward and should only take 24 hours. Well our one took almost 4 days with constant follow ups and it was eventually completed. But yesterday I received an email from donotreply@blackberry.com on my blackberry with the title “Action required: update password!”. I initially thought it was spam but reading through the instructions it seemed legitimate. I tried logging into my Blackberry Internet Service account by using the email setup application on the blackberry but I somehow forgot what my username and password was.

So that evening I decided to try it from the vodafone website and managed to login to make the changes. I tried reactivating my advertiseme.com.au email address but kept getting a message that the password was incorrect. I was 110% confident the password was correct and the first thing that came to my mind was someone hacked into my account.

The next best thing for me to do was to login to my email hosting account and change the password, but when I did login all the advertiseme.com.au email accounts were missing.

My heart stopped beating for a second and started contemplating on the number of emails that were bounced since the morning. I thought to myself how unprofessional it also looked when the sender received a bounce back message saying the account did not exist.

I immediately rang support and discovered that the email hosting account and all forwarding emails were deleted when the domain hosting account was upgraded and obviously they tried to notify us by sending us an email to an account that no longer existed – a duh!

Fortunately, the support staff did manage to track down the names of the email and forwarding accounts that were previously created so I spend the next 30 minutes recreating all the accounts.

So the lessons learnt were:

  • When performing a backup of your files and sql databases, make sure you also record all email addresses
  • Find better email technologies
  • Find a better hosting provider

About Us: Advertise Me

Advertise Me www.advertiseme.com.au Request a Digital Signage Quote

Advertise Me is a privately owned Australian company specialising in all aspects of digital signage solutions.

Our team of highly skilled professionals is able to introduce innovative ways for businesses to communicate with their intended audiences for a variety of purposes including informing, educating, entertaining and selling.

You can expect us to:

  • offer the most affordable and cost effective solutions tailored to your specific business needs.
  • provide you with concise and accurate information and will ensure that you understand and are comfortable with our proposals.
  • strive to make our clients happy and successful.

We have partnered with a number of key reputable organisations and will continue to build further partnerships to deliver the most effective solutions for our customers.

Visit our website at www.advertiseme.com.au for more information.