I got a Nicnames (it pains me to utter that word right now) mailbox so that I can get around their mail bounce problem that I’m having with them right now.

Also got iTunes 7 working and the Microsoft Installer Cleanup Utility had nothing to do with it. Seems that the problem was squarely with Apple. iTunes uses Quicktime for playing music and was working fine last week until I tried to install iTunes 7. I received the ‘not able to update reg key due to access rights’ message (or something similar) when it failed to install Quicktime 7, which is the first part of the iTunes 7 install. 

With the Nicnames mailbox, no routing is required and the domain email that you get is left on their email servers.

In Outlook it’s just another account to setup and retrieve email from, though it’ll be a couple of days before the Nicnames settings are fully bedded down – read propagated around the internet. Then I should get email reliably. Hah.

On the Treo I tried the following settings: 

Account Name=what ever you want, but something that will signify that it’s the Nicnames or domain email account, Mail Service=’Other’, Protocol=POP, Username=full domain email address ie john@smith.com, Password=password used to access the domain mailbox (same as set in Outlook), Email Address=full domain email address ie john@smith.com, Incoming Mail Server=’pop.iomartmail.com’, Outgoing Mail Server=’smtp.iomartmail.com’, Use authentication (ESMTP)was checked which populated the username and password.

And that did work, both receiving and sending email.

Quote of the day

‘If you believe everything you read, better not read’ Japanese proverb

The support person at Nicnames/Easyspace didn’t understand log files so he removed routing (duh) which auto generated an email to my BT email address confirming that the routing had been deleted. Suppose that’s what he thought a log was. How much confusion does that person create.

Believe it or not there is a way forward. Get a Nicnames mailbox. All of my domain email sits on their mail servers and can be accessed by Outlook and the Treo. I get a username and password for accessing their email servers which I can setup on Outlook as another account and I think I know how to do the setup on the Treo.

Finally got to see the Nicnames log file for a bounced email today and oh boy its a biggy.

Turns out that when we moved house in June and attempted to move our BT broadband account, BT, in their infinite wisdom decided to marginally change our email address. You know little things like lose the full stop or underline character between the first and surnames and stick in an extra letter in the surname just for the hell of it.

Anyway we were able to deal with that and changed Outlook to pick up email, no problem. Now a good thing that BT does is not delete the old email address for a while. So email sent to the old email address is still delivered. In fact it was still being delivered till about 3 weeks ago when I started losing email.

I had amended the underlying email address on Nicnames Control Panel applet so that email addressed to my domain email address went to the new BT email address, so I thought that was ok. When I looked at the log it was pointing at the old BT email address which stopped working 3 weeks ago.

Phoned the support guy who admitted straight away that their Control Panel applet is not to be trusted , in other words it doesn’t work. You might amend the delivery address to a new one on the Control Panel, the front end, but that doesn’t mean it updates anything on the server, the back end, and that’s what does email delivery.

Ain’t the internet the dangdest thing.

Quote of the day

‘Someday we’ll look back on this moment and plow into a parked car’ Evan Davis