First off, I’d like to apologize to everyone who has been trying to send me email for the last two or three months, only to get a bounce message. I finally tracked down the problem tonight, with a mere 5 minutes of work. I kept looking at it, off and on for the last two weeks, but nothing clicked. I finally realized that the major problem with the mailserver was that the admin is a total idiot, and incompetent to boot.

Yes, I mean me.

You see, when I set up Houblog v.1 under Post-Nuke, I also got an e-mail account, administered using the host’s toolkit, and I tested it by sending an email to myself, using u#bu at ho#ubl# og. co# m (Sorry about the spaces and #, but I’m spoofing harvesters, of course) and I got it, so all was good with the world. Unfortunately, over the next two years, I also got more and more spam, and the tools included in the mailserver were totally inadequate — in face, the host admitted they don’t work at all. Joy. Since I wasn’t doing a whole lot with the site as of last fall, I was getting WAY more spam than I was legitimate e-mail. Finally, I got fed up with it and started digging through the tools. Found a lovely setting that would blackhole any mail sent to houblog.com. “Nah,” I decided. “Not mean enough. I want their machine to eat processor cycles discarding my bounce messages too! MUAHAHAHAHAAHAA!” So I set it to bounce instead.

And a funny thing happend. I stopped getting e-mail entirely. Now understand, I was only checking mail here about once every 3 weeks or so by then. I just didn’t want to mess with Houblog, owing to being stressed out. (hehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehe stressed out. I thought I was stressed out then… hahehehehehehshahahehehehaheehehheheaeahehheaheehehehehahehe *gasp* urk. Ahhhh, excuse me.) Ahem. So, it was quite a bit before I noticed I wasn’t getting any email at all. And I just shrugged and decided “what the hell, I guess everyone forgot about me, between the anime blogging and nothing interesting going on with the city.”

And so things sat, until both Kevin and Tom started fussing that they couldn’t reach me. “Odd, I must have messed up a setting,” I thought. So I logged in and poked around, but never found anything amiss. The bounce is set properly…

If you’re an experienced site admin, you probably saw what went wrong at the beginning. Even if you’re not experienced, the obvious clue is two paragraphs back, and I should have twigged then. But no, I kept mucking around in the dark, when I could have solved the whole problem in about 1/10th the time it’s taken me to type up this article. What a maroon.

When I set up the mail account, I accepted only the default account, which used my site admin ID for the name. Needless to say, my administrator ID is NOT “ubu”.

All of the email I had ever recieved in that mailbox, I was getting, not because it was adressed to me, but because it was addressed to an invalid mailbox, and the default setting was to dump it in the administrator’s box!

What a fucking maroon.

There is now a mailbox for ubu@ this server. I’ll even check it occasionally, I promise.

Sigh.