Tech woes…

You know how sometimes a great idea turns out to be bloody awful? Welcome to my day.

I now, officially, only have a $hitty Outlook365 webmail client to work with. What’s worse, I’ve lost all the emails that used to live on my Opera Mail client. So if any of you emailed me in the last 12 hours, sorry, it’s all gone. Every. Last. One.

The one good thing out of today’s disaster is that I managed to export my Contact list before everything fell apart. The bad thing is that the Contact list only works with Opera Mail so unless I can get Opera Mail back up and running, I’ll have to re-enter the contact list manually. I don’t like my chances because apparently, few email clients like playing with Outlook365 email. The reason is something called ‘Exchange’. Exchange plays nice with the crap that is Outlook. It does not play nice with much else.

So, I have three options:

1. Reinstall Outlook from Office 16
2. Continue to use the shitty webmail client for Outlook365 email
3. Keep searching for a non-Microsoft email client that works with Exchange

I’ve read about some workarounds including, Davmail & Thunderbird, Thunderbird & Exquilla, and eM mail [$49]. The first two will probably send my hair white, not grey. The last I refuse to even consider because saving money was what got me into this mess in the first place. And not even that much money…

Less that $100 AUD. That’s what I saved today by deleting my hosting account with GoDaddy.

“What with what?” you say.

In order to have your own website, you need a) a domain and b) a web host for that domain. There are lots of webhosts but I was using GoDaddy. Domains are peanuts – about $20 per year – but the web hosting can really mount up, especially when you have to pay a lump sum for the whole year.

That’s what I was facing this morning, so I rang Godaddy and asked if I could ditch the webhosting but keep my email addresses. The answer was yes, but the implementation did not turn out to be as easy, or cheap, as expected. For starters, the email addresses were linked to the hosting, but wait! For just $50 per year, I could get a plan that would allow me to keep both emails going.

“Great!” said I. “Let’s do it.”

That is the point at which I should have asked for ‘more information’, hung up and done some research. Clearly I didn’t, but that decision was at least partly due to phone fatigue. I’d waited 15 minutes to speak to a person in the first place, so by the time this plan was offered, I just wanted to get it done…

I think you can probably guess the rest, not the nitty gritty details, but the general gist. I was committed, the process began, it was too late to turn back, things went wrong. And then things went even more wrong. 😦

Now here I sit, scratching my head and wondering how on earth I’m going to get myself out of this one. I do still have my email addresses, and they do sort of work, so if you write to me I ‘should’ be able to answer, but for the moment, that’s it. And I’ve wasted the best part of the day digging this particular hole.

So, the moral of this story is that Outlook365 is not great unless you’re committed to using Microsoft’s Outlook as well. Given how much I love Micro$oft, I’m feeling kind of sick at the moment.

Not happy,

Meeks