Transfering My Domain...

I'd been relatively happy with godaddy.com (registrar and email host) for over a decade, but in recent months too much of my incoming email from friends and family never arrived, and godaddy was unhelpful. Then godaddy stopped allowing catchall mail.

That was the deal breaker.*

After asking people and the web, I found namecheap.com which includes a catchall option at no charge in their Private Email packages.

I transferred my domain and got email running despite a few hitches in less than 24 hours. Not bad.

The hitches and solutions:

• Server addresses and ports for both POP and SMTP from support pages didn't work with Eudora 7.1.0.9, but late-night (yay!) support agents came up with:
  
  
  • POP mail.privateemail.com port 110
  • SMTP mail.privateemail.com port 587


• Secure Sockets setting names differed, support agents recommended STARTTLS. So far, these socket settings work: 
  
  
  • If available, STARTTLS
  • Required, STARTTLS — this is the one I'm using
  • Never
   
• A broken server certificate, imported and trusted, made it possible for two subsequent certificates that were good, so email is arriving smoothly.

Other notes:

• Namecheap regularly has coupons aka promotion codes, and the best one for email was buried in a collection. I used the obvious one and spent $4 more than necessary.  


• DNS setup was automatic and took effect very quickly. Once that happened I was able to create a mailbox and opt for catchall.


• The transfer process had a few annoyances (aka new procedures in the last decades) but it worked. 


• My gmail addresses and Stunnel settings required no changes, though until Eudora had good settings for my dominant email address, gmail was stalled too.

Future concerns:

• Relying on gmail being around** strikes me as being naive. People relying on Google Reader for atom/RSS feeds got burned.
  
• I worry that catchall email will be harder to find. I've paid in advance for a year of email hosting on namecheap, but who knows what their policy will become? Not me.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Thanks for "listening!"


* I use Eudora filters on From addresses to manage my mail. When I give my email online, theirdomain@mydomain is the template used for most sites. Out of the daily mass of incoming mail, filters find the mail I'm likely to want and put it in the right mailbox. Leftovers get checked for a few things (including a specific signature phrase) and the rest goes to trash. This system also reveals when an address gets adopted by spammers.

** I use several gmail addresses because they're short and easy to give to my students and activity friends. I get and send gmail via POP/SMTP and they were more reliable that my domain email when that was losing messages. One of my options for email management would be to ditch the domain and use a handful of gmail addresses for stores, banks, crafts, genealogy, and other categories.

Ignoring Gmail Certificate Changes in Eudora with Stunnel

Ignoring Frequent Gmail Certificate Changes by Getting Comcast, Godaddy, Eudora, Stunnel, and Gmail to Work Together in Windows 7

My email is now working without interruptions caused by Gmail's frequent certificate changes. I'd read that using Stunnel is a way to avoid the certificate update process. The process of making Stunnel work for me was frustrating for the people answering my questions as well as for me. Maybe this record will help someone else have an easier time of it as well as remind me how to fix it if/when I break it.

I'm posting these particular settings because my primary email requires that I use port 80 for SMTP. After trying several methods to circumvent that setting without success, it remains a requirement in this case.

After installing Stunnel as a service and leaving its configuration file unedited, I set up my Gmail personalities in Eudora by first setting the Properties for each personality to:

Generic Properties tab:

•     SMTP Server: 127.0.0.1

•     Use Submission Port: UNchecked

•     Secure Sockets when Sending: Never

Incoming Mail tab:

•     Secure Sockets when Receiving: Never

Then I closed/quit/exited Eudora, found Eudora.ini, made a backup copy, and used Notepad to open the original Eudora.ini file.

Each non-dominant persona has a section in Eudora.ini that starts out something like this where "gmailuser" and the domain varies:
---------------------------------------------
[Persona-gmailuser@gmail]
SavePasswordText=randomstuffencodingapassword==
POPAccount=gmailuser@gmail.com@127.0.0.1
RealName=Michal
ReturnAddress=gmailuser@gmail.com
DomainQualifier=
SMTPServer=127.0.0.1
---------------------------------------------
The important line is that bottom one, and it could be somewhere else in the settings for this persona or it could be missing (one of mine was despite being specified in Properties). For each gmail persona, I added SMTPPort=25 immediately after the SMTPSERVER line like this:
---------------------------------------------
SMTPServer=127.0.0.1
SMTPPort=25
---------------------------------------------
I repeated this edit for each Gmail persona, adding both lines when the SMTPServer line was missing. Then I saved Eudora.ini and closed Notepad.

After running Eudora again, I sent many test messages. I set up a group in the address book called All Personalities to simplify the addressing. I sent messages from each email address (Personality) to All Personalities, giving each subject line a unique number, and checked mail several times, watching for Task Errors, and confirming the messages all arrived. Several times. And then again. It all seems to be working correctly now.

Kudos to Jack Jackson and Katrina Knight at Eudora-Win List Server for explanations and answering my questions.