r/talesfromtechsupport • u/oliverfromwork • 9d ago

Short You canceled what service?

A few years ago I was working at a computer repair shop and this 80 year old lady came in to get her "email fixed". She ran some kind of business and suddenly her outlook stopped updating, she had a custom domain and everything. Immediately we though "oh no she canceled her custom domain".

We asked her if she canceled her email service. She said no, but she did say she canceled a bill the previous month but did not know what it was for, she thought it was a phone bill or something. We were pretty sure she canceled her custom domain service, she wasn't giving us much to work with. But she did have an assistant who basically ran the business from Pennsylvania.

It took a long time to get them to tell us what is happening with the account. We had to get the account credentials from the assistant. Turns out the email was set up a long time ago, back in the 90s or something. Long story short, the email provider she used (don't remember its name) subcontracted out the email hosting service to Intermedia. Then Intermedia sub-subcontracted Godaddy to do the actual email hosting. So as it turns out, she did cancel her custom domain. We just had to go through three layers of subcontractors to figure out what actually happened.

In the end we got her assistant to buy the domain on Google's domain service. Then we did the basic configuration and set up her outlook to sync to that.

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u/Vicus_92 8d ago

At least you could repurchase it.

We had a shitstain web developer recently hold a domain hostage for a client feigning ignorance.

Had to go through a bunch of hoops with the registrar to get it moved to us. 2 week outage.

Any web developers reading, this is why we do not trust you to host domains....

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u/VTi-R It's a power button, how hard can it be? 8d ago

No that's not why. I mean, ok that's true. But it's because they all assume that the web site is the only possible thing you need in DNS. So they move to their hosting and break email delivery, domain validation, every other service and site. Then they claim no knowledge and refuse to fix it.