oct17.com Blog

Hey, Yahoo: I *pay* you for this service!

August 11, 2008 on 10:10 pm | In family, technology | No Comments

I am experiencing some sort of technical curse. My troubles with the home network are well-documented at this point, and tonight at dinner Gopal informs me that his e-mail is no longer working properly. It won’t send.

I fiddle with the settings. For some reason, the Comcast SMTP mail server is not responding. “That’s OK,” I figure, “Oct17.com and the associated e-mail accounts (including Gopal’s) are part of a paid Web Hosting Service from Yahoo.” They have a dedicated SMTP server that I can use, because I pay for it. (Routing outgoing mail through Comcast’s servers seems a bit like cheating, anyway.) So I switch the settings to use Yahoo’s servers and authentication, and everything’s dandy.

Until I decide to check and see if Sudha’s e-mail is working, too.

I should have left well enough alone! Instead, I decide to update her SMTP settings as well. But then the Yahoo SMTP server wants a password. Uh-oh: what’s Sudha’s e-mail password? She’s on the phone, but after trying all the ones I know without luck, I interrupt and ask her. She tells me. It doesn’t work.

“That’s OK,” I figure. “I control the Oct17.com mail accounts. I’ll just reset it in my Yahoo Web Hosting control panel.”

Except you can’t. The e-mail control panel will permit me to delete Sudha’s Oct17.com e-mail account, but I can’t change the password. That’s really annoying. I pay for the service, which includes the e-mail accounts; I am the administrator, and I don’t have permission to administer.

There’s no process for me to automatically reset her password online, and after spending 20 minutes on the phone with Yahoo tech support (also something I pay for), it turns out they can’t reset a password either!