Jay N Smith's Blog

Eight days ago, my blog and email account stopped working suddenly. It seemed without warning, but of course it wasn’t. I purchased a domain name 14 years ago (!) and used it for a very occasional blog post plus domain-based email. I linked every account – financial, recreational, you name it – to my domain based email account, so when it stopped working, I felt sick, as though my life was gone. That was not true, but it dominated my thinking every day for a week.

How did this happen?

When I purchased the domain, I had to register an email address as the owner of the domain. Simple, right? Having no idea what the implications of that decision were, I used the only email address that I had at that time, my work email address. I remember one time getting a verification email request several years ago and thought that it could become a problem once I retired, but I wasn’t able to figure out where to change it. My email and everything else associated with the domain kept working after I retired in 2019 but apparently there was no verification of my domain until 2024! When that old work email address didn’t respond, my domain was suspended. I finally found where to change the email address associated with the domain, but the system said that both the old and new email addresses had to respond, so I was sure that I was stuck.

After stewing for days, trying to figure out how to overcome the problem, I decided to try just one more time, and for some reason, I was able to change the email address without needing the old work email address to approve it! Now my domain is back and my email inbox is filling up again. Ironically, I used to resent the number of emails that I used to receive, but now it is delightful!

So, have I learned anything? What I think that I should learn is this: when you sense that something will be a problem later on, but you don’t know how to fix it, KEEP AT IT until you actually fix it so that it doesn’t rise up at an unexpected time.