stumped the tech guy
Used to be I was good at figuring things out, back in the days when that's what I did. Then I got promoted into management where other people got paid to think and I got paid to ask questions. So back in the days when the Internet was young, I set up a mail, web, and DNS server at home. This was mainly for a learning experience for me, but it handled mail for torcon3.on.ca for years.
Things changed. Torcon came and went. Macs came out with new operating system, but my mail server application wasn't upgraded to MacOS X, so I had to run two operating systems on the server, which became less stable over time. Eventually I got tired of rebooting the old server, my users complained, my email contacts complained, and so I moved my main domain to a commercial ISP. I tried to set up my mail client to use the ISP's servers, but it didn't work for some reason. I called them, and they weren't very helpful. As a temporary solution I switched to web mail.
Five years go by, and I've built up a large volume of online mail. Not paying a lot ofr it, but it would just gall me to have to increase my online storage when I have so much offline space. Of course Eudora has gone the way of the dodo, but people say good things about Thunderbird so I decided to give it a try. I downloaded it on my computer (the one I now refer to as the "old laptop"), followed the online instructions, and it worked fine. I didn't commit to it as I knew I was planning to replace the computer and I didn't want to migrate the data.
I have over a hundred folders in my current web mail. I decided it would be easier to migrate from online to offline a folder at a time, so I figured it might work better to use IMAP rather than POP to migrate in an organized way.
So I installed Thunderbird on the new computer, set it up for IMAP, I get an authentication error. I figure I've done something wrong. I've been using the account for years, and in fact I had the web mail open in another browser tab, so I was pretty sure I had the right password. Rather than me doing hours of research and trial-and-error, I decided to call tech support, as it's their job to answer this sort of question over and over and it should be easy for them. I call in and explain my problem. The guy puts me on hold for a minute and then comes back and says, "Weird, I've never seen anything like this before. It says your account is inactive while it's being set up." Let's keep in mind said ISP has millions of domains and millions of users,
Turns out it wasn't that unusual, they were just doing some kind of server maintenance. He told me to just try again in a couple of hours. I try to act a bit clueless since tech support people sometimes get a bit snippy; if you sound like you know their job, why would you be calling? (