Email shenanigans

In short: the rebecca@giddyminnow.co.uk address hasn't been receiving emails since early March, although it was letting me send them. This has (fingers crossed) now been fixed, but any mail sent to me in the last month has been eaten by internet gremlins and I'm really sorry it took me this long to notice and sort it out!

Details if you're curious:

So, waaay back when I originally registered the giddyminnow domain name, that was it. I paid for the domain, nowt else. It was a little while before I started building a site to use with the domain, but even with the original pre-Wix build my site was hosted by a different provider to my domain provider. This was not an immediate problem, as I did what I had done previously which was get the relevant details from my site host's cpanel to forward any emails aimed at giddyminnow to my own gmail account. I think I recall a certain amount of frustrated rummaging before I worked out which letters and numbers I needed to put where, but once done it worked, as it had with The Silver Hide before. However! what I failed to appreciate was that what I had effectively done was bypass the official mailbox all my email was going into - gmail checked that box and made a copy of any mail received, leaving the original in the official mailbox. This mailbox has been quietly filling up. I did not receive any helpful warnings that it was filling up. In March, it was full. So! I've had a quiet month, just working on an ongoing joint project which mostly involved communication via phone, which is my only excuse for not noticing I'd stopped receiving emails. Happily I caught on, and thus ran into the oh-so-entertaining situation as follows:

My domain host's cpanel shows no clear way to check my mail, as I never paid for a mailbox service with them. I'm assuming the now rather mysterious full mailbox was a default free feature.

My site host's (Wix) cpanel shows no clear way to check my mail, as I didn't pay for a mailbox with them either, because forwarding from my Mystery Original Mailbox to gmail has been working just fine so why would I?

I check my gmail settings and find the giddyminnow account, have a look at it's settings, then start gently despairing as it cheerfully disappears from my accounts-to-check list for no readily obvious reason.

Through getting a friend to send a test email, and them getting an actually useful error message back, we know I need to clear out the Mystery Mailbox. But I can not access the Mystery Mailbox... Previous site hosting included a lovely in depth cpanel with file structures and folders that I could likely have navigated to delete some old emails from. Not so the Wix cpanel. As much as I have liked the site building and shop setup aspects of Wix, I am now feeling an equal amount of frustration at the apparent inability to go any deeper into site management to fix an issue like this. I have resorted to finally buying a mailbox through Wix (uses g-suite, so basically I just have an official version of what I had anyway). It allowed me to set it up with the same email address, and testing has shown that the new mailbox is receiving and sending mail happily enough. I haven't yet managed to import the backlog of old mail to the new box like I was hoping to do, and suspect I may be unable to save anything that was sent my way in the last month. I will be seeking further technical help to see if I can get at the Mystery Mailbox - if only to ensure it doesn't do something helpful like auto-delete older messages and then start hijacking new mail that should be going to the new mailbox.

End point: I have a shiny new functioning mailbox, so should be properly receiving mail once again. I am also feeling rather frustrated with both my domain and site hosts, and there may now be ice cream in my immediate future, because it is sunny and I like ice cream.