Email Tale

So, that week’s worth of email never turned up and my contacts listed in webmail never returned, though if new mail is sent to my old email address, I get it. (But don’t use that address! Use the new one.) I also get, every day, a quarantine report that offers to update a list of trusted senders and then doesn’t do it. I indicate that mail from a certain sender is welcome and the next day receive a quarantine report about the exact same sender.

However, with much self-congratulatory back patting, I was able to configure Entourage, my email client, to both send and receive an AT&T email address attached to my Internet service. Did you know that AT&T is a well-respected, even revered, American company that has been around for at least a hundred years?

I determined that I could establish additional free AT&T email accounts for various purposes, just as I have had with my Dubai email, but first I wanted to get rid of a no-longer-applicable nickname attached to the AT&T email. It wasn’t something I set up when I configured Entourage, so I searched my email account online high and low but could not find any sign of this setting.

I finally had to call AT&T, which nearly always results in a complete enraged meltdown (on my part, not theirs). I was offered a phone number for fee-based assistance and managed to retain a pleasant tone of voice as I shared my personal feeling that, since my Internet service now costs $46 a month (not including phone service or cable TV), I’d like not to have to pay anyone to make a very minor change to a setting. Keeping my temper paid off, as I was then offered a number for free assistance, but no one there could find any sign of this nickname.

Then I searched my Internet service account (different from the email account) as advised, and still couldn’t find it. Could it somehow be specified in Entourage, after all? I went back there to search every single possible modifiable thing and, yes, there it was, something I put there years ago when I first switched to AT&T for Internet service, easily changed. But all the poking around online was worthwhile, in that I now know what settings are there, and I had the satisfaction of successfully keeping my temper and remaining friendly.

Next I set up additional AT&T email addresses and configured Entourage and tested them and gave as many email correspondents as I could think of a new address to use. Next issue: this very blog, owned by an account that has a Dubai email address. Naturally you can’t just go to Google and update the email address associated with the account. I had to create an additional Google account and send it an invitation to become an author of the blog, which I did over and over without seeing the new author turn up, and getting email after email saying something like, “An unexpected entity accepted your invitation.”

I finally figured out how to get the second author added, and then I made that author an admin, made Bugwalk just an author, and then took Bugwalk off Bugwalk’s own blog. (Frowny face here.) However, I did not delete the Google account for Bugwalk, because then every single photo Bugwalk ever posted would have disappeared, so that Google account has to exist permanently. I had now succeeded in transferring my blog to an account called Hear Morehere, because I had to put in something for first and last name when I made the new account.

I decided to do the whole thing over again so I could have an account with a name more or less equating to Bugwalk—that’s why it now shows Bug Walk as the owner—and I set out, with some trepidation, to delete the Google account named Here Morehere. I thought it was obvious how to do that: when you’re logging into your Google account, there is a button to add another account, and one that says “Delete.” On that login page, I could see my three accounts: Bugwalk, Hear Morehere, and Bug Walk. I clicked “Delete,” figuring it would then ask me which account I wanted to delete. Instead, it said something like, “Your changes have been made!” That was a bad moment.

Thank goodness, my blog was still here, and nothing actually seemed to have been deleted or changed. So then I looked up (using Duck Duck Go!) how you properly delete a Google account, held my breath, deleted Hear Morehere, and was relieved to see no ill effects. Hear Morehere didn’t own the blog long and didn’t post any pictures, but catastrophic results wouldn’t have surprised me.

Finally, in the coming week, I need to figure out what online accounts need updating, such as my bank account. The whole thing has been pretty painless, but time consuming. The worst parts, of course, have been those having to do with Google. For a while, I thought maybe that week’s worth of missing email would turn up and I’d just stick with my old email rather than go through all the steps to switch, but it didn’t, and, anyway, what happened  was unacceptable. For one thing, they should have notified their customers of the upcoming change, explaining exactly what was going to happen and when delayed email would turn up. And they should not have made themselves unreachable by phone, which they still are.

The final step will be to get these “providers” to stop billing my credit card, by whatever means necessary. I’ve checked my credit account an extra time or two, to make sure extra charges from this biller aren’t appearing.