Transfers and Email Cockups

One of the most important parts of my job is to ensure when a domain name is transfered between hosting service providers (HSP) the client's email is disrupted as little as possible, with the ideal situation being no email losses at all. But unfortunately there are so many companies out there who "just don't get it"! This is a topic that was bound to come up sooner or later in this blog, because so many Web design companies who handle their clients domains and hosting just don't know how to do it properly. So, anyway, I get a call this morning from a print and publicity media company that has taken over an old account of mine, requested the domain name transfer, which went through, but obviously didn't make any provision for the seemless transfer of the company's email facilities... So now this guy on the end of the phone wants to know if I have an email forwarding address for his newly acquired Web client! Well, at least he knows enough to forward email to an existing mailbox of his newly acquired Web client, because a quick fix is better than nothing. Taking a deep mental breath, and in my usual polite and professional way, I explain I don't know of any such email addresses of my ex-client. I go onto explain that his client used to use a catchall mailbox that their internal server collected from and then distributed via the internal network. I went onto explain that one of the staff didn't work from the main office, collected mail from home and needed a separate mailbox to collect from. It was obvious the guy didn't have much idea of what I was talking about, and quite honestly I don't blame him for that - he's probably been saddled with looking after the websites for his company's clients, because they don't have an inhouse IT guy. He's probably a designer or marketing bod, with little or no training in Internet matters - so it's the company that's to blame - it's all down to the management... that's what I say. Still, that's not going to be any consolation to my ex-client. Ah well, life's full of little surprises.