Why I'm Absolutely Enraged By Gandi's Mail Server Offerings: A Rope of Sand

Published 2022-05-29

Apologies for the quick and impromptu post in advance, however, I simply must express my annoyance at the precarious situation in which I find myself at this precise moment in time.

Or, to put that in the way I actually would like to, I am extremely fucking pissed.

So, let's start the story at the beginning:

About a month or so ago now, a friend of mine bought the domain mariostockimage.com, after we found that the domain was on sale for a relatively low sum of cash, and finding it quite funny. They decided to buy the domain using Gandi, which, to be fair, has been absolutely fine on the web domain front. I mean, you'd hope so, right? It's literally just reserving a name in a DNS resolver, what's there to fuck up?

No, where the issues begin are with the mail server.

Initially, when they were first establishing the mail server, they offered me an account on it as a sort of gift for my assistance on attempting to get the website itself to work - itself, a fruitless venture, due to the thing we wished to achieve requiring HTTPS, and frankly, SSL certificate generation was out of the question due to their hosting method, and they sure as shit weren't going to pay Gandi more for their funny meme site that they got for like, $10. I snapped up that offer, as I found a great novelty in the idea of having my email address be jellyfox@mariostockimage.com. In fact, I found it conceptually fucking hilarious.

So, we sent messages outside of the server in order to check that the sending worked: flawless. We were emailing from our flashy @mariostockimage.com accounts, in the same way that somebody drives around in a flashy Peel P50, but it seemed like it was working, dammit, and that shit was funny as fuck.

And now we come to today.

I was hoping to change some DNS records in order to shift some things around to potentially host them off of an alternate machine, this website included.

And then Namecheap wouldn't let me log in, as it prompted me for 2FA.

Now, this already irked me. I am aware that it is a security risk to have not done so, but I had not enabled 2FA on my Namecheap account yet, nor had I any intention of doing so. Although, I can see why this would be potentially enabled automatically as a security feature. I fucking hate that it's happened, but I can see maybe some sort of sliver of goodwilled intelligence in there, as it may have possibly prevented somebody from getting access to my account. A bit shit when that person is me, but hey-ho, whatever.

Then, I went to simply get my code from my mailbox and move on. I had no mail in my inbox. In fact, I hadn't even received the email back from another friend who I'd sent a tester email to. I had been setting up my email address as jellyfox@mariostockimage.com on many accounts, many times, for many weeks. And not one of them had actually been getting through to my email address.

Is this our fault? Is this the fault of Gandi's web mail service? Is it some other third thing that currently escapes me? No matter which weak link is to blame here, it's fucked me right off, since I really did want to do some shit with my other machine today.

I'm currently awaiting a response to my support ticket from Namecheap, so hopefully I can get that resolved, but in the meantime... Jesus Christ, I am moving all of my email shit back to my ProtonMail address for now.

If anybody wants to offer me a free space on your mail server because you're either really really nice or really really fucking deranged, drop me a line using literally anything but my email; Matrix or XMPP would be your best bet for the time being. Those can be found on my contact page.