You do download your emails properly, don't you?
Probably the most frequent support call we get is from clients saying that their email 'isn't working'. I have ranted before about how 'useful' that information is. (Take your car to the repair shop and tell them it's 'not working'. Or go to the doctor and tell him or her that there's 'something wrong with you'. See the related articles below).
Nine times out of ten, no, let's change that, ninety nine times out of a hundred the problem lies with the client. And that problem is, ninety nine times out of a hundred, that the client isn't downloading their email properly.
The remaining one time out of a hundred is often because the client has requested that a forward be used for their email address. For example, we set up [email protected]. The client then asks for that address to be forwarded to their (heavens forbid) AOL account. They then have their AOL account email forwarding to their blackberry and then they set up their blackberry to forward email to their clientname@client company.com....
Just read that again and try to follow it. The email is never settling anywhere, it's just going round and round, from clientcompany.com's server to AOL to the blackberry to the server to AOL...
Or, the blackberry gets full and the messages are returned to sender. Now remember that the sender in this example is their AOL account. So the AOL account gets full and returns the email to the sender. And of course, the sender is [email protected] and so that account gets full - and the vicious circle is completed!
Now, much as we want to help clients who have problems, we have no idea what is going on with their AOL account or their blackberry.
And we have no idea what's going on on their computer, either. NO IDEA. It's that telepathy thing again, that we haven't quite got yet. We truly have no idea what's wrong with your Outlook or your Entourage or whatever email client you use to download your emails onto your computer.
But I strongly suspect that there are some clients who never download their emails onto their computer. Strange, I know, but when we get a call from a client saying that their 'email is full' and I go to the server, I find huge emails there which have not been downloaded. This is because a) there is something wrong with your Outlook, Entourage or other email client or b) you haven't set up your emails to download correctly in the first place.
Is this clear?
Related topics:
Webmail
What seems to be the trouble?
My email doesn't work
Tech support
Use email in a professional manner
We're working on it, OK?
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