[TAG] ISP email goes down in flames

[Mike Orr]

I've been having an interesting twist on Rick's "use your own servers
for everything" approach.  I used to have email going directly to my
computer, but after periodic DSL outages and then losing the address
completely when my apartment building burned down (the domain was a
legacy one from the ISP and they had frozen changes on it), I decided
to leave my mail on the ISP's server since they had "high
availability" drives.  Last week they decided to upgrade their
servers, and I haven't been able to access my mail for six days. 
Thunderbird times out logging in, and their webmail (Squirrelmail)
says "IMAP connection dropped by server".  I called the tech support
Thursday and again today, and the standard line is, "We're upgrading
the servers and it isn't going well, we're experiencing high latency,
nobody can get in, and we don't have an estimated repair time."  OK, I
don't want to take it out on the guy answering the phone, but how can
an ISP go six days without putting an interim system in place?  How
many of their clients were depending on those email accounts for
business?  Couldn't they have at least warned us beforehand that mail
might be interrupted?

I'd set up this gmail account a few weeks before, mainly to try out
the interface.  But due to the everyday poor quality of their
Squirrelmail setup (timing out in the middle of page displays), I
moved my beloved TAG subscription here.  Now it turns out to be
prescient because this is the only way I can contact people ("don't
use my other address, it's broken").  Yesterday I started thinking
about all the password-protected sites I have accounts at, sites that
use the other address for verification or to send invoices to. 
That'll be a mess to straighten out, unless it fixes itself in a week
or so.
My mom gets medical announcements at her email on the same ISP.  We
tried to log in yesterday but got the same problem, so I set up a
gmail account for her.  (She has trouble remembering how to use
Thunderbird, so we'll see if gmail is more intuitive.)

I've been thinking for months about getting a virtual Linux server at
one of those hosting companies, but haven't wanted to pay the
$25/month.  This is giving me one more reason to.  Now if only I could
reduce my ISP expenses by the same amount.  But you still need some
way to get to the server, drat.

--
Mike Orr <sluggoster at gmail.com>