Eureka - A Solution!
Topic: My Web Pages
I have had a long few days sitting at my computer - I was getting so tired at the weekend, I tried to pour pineapple juice into my coffee instead of Soya milk. Now that would have been a new experience! Luckily, I stopped just in time. I remember my sister once put a spoonful of instant coffee into my mother's hot lemon juice - I think that experiment went down the sink!
Well, at least I now know that my Feedback Form and my Guestbook emails are working properly. Thanks in no small part to 'Mamagoo', a member of the Tripod Community. I posted a message on the Tripod Community Blog about my problems and this very kind lady went to a great deal of trouble installing a Feedback Form on her website and testing it out. As a result, I have now changed my email notification address to my Yahoo Web Mail address instead of my home email address. All the test messages we sent arrived immediately.
When I first set up my Yahoo account, I put that address on my website but I forgot to check it for several days and of course there was an email patiently waiting there. So, I reverted to my home email address. This time, I noticed that Yahoo now had a free mail forwarding service and I decided to try it out. Set everything up and verified my email address. Sent myself a test email from myself and back it came into my Outlook Express Inbox. So far so good... I then put yet another test entry into my Guestbook and nothing arrived - the notification email was lost in outer space somewhere, probably in the Alpha Quadrant! Went back to Yahoo and had a small panic until I found out how to turn off the mail redirection.
So, could the culprit be my Internet Service Provider! I have always had the same ISP, which started off as Freeserve. From the 5th April 2004, Freeserve introduced anti-spam and anti-virus services and then from 28th April, Freeserve changed its name and became Wanadoo - maybe some of these changes caused a bug somewhere in their Mail Servers? Hmmm... The earliest entry in the queue of entries I found in the Guestbook Gear Manager was dated 25th March 2004. Possibly, they started putting changes in force around that time. I have now contacted Wanadoo but, as usual, received an automated reply! I am writing again and hope to receive a reply from a human being in due course. However, I may never know the real cause of my problems.
I have yet to hear from Tripod whether there is any possibility of recovering nine lost Feedback messages - probably not. However, I have learnt a lesson. No news is good news - BUT keep checking Gear Manager! And, from now on, my Yahoo Mail box.
