Status Update • 14 January 2022

The colossal email clusterfsck continues. Thanks to GoDaddy’s unilateral decision to move us to Microsoft Exchange and Office 365, in the past four days the submissions@rampantloonmedia.com email address has gone from being slow, difficult to use, and unreliable, to being reliable but “Oops! We erased seven years of archived Sent email messages,” to our being able to receive email but locked out of being able to send replies, to simply not existing at all. If you’ve been trying to reach us this week but your email has either bounced back as undeliverable or seemingly has been delivered but you have not received a reply, that’s the reason.

I’ve spent a lot of time online with GoDaddy tech support this week trying to get this sorted out, and while GoDaddy once provided good tech support, the quality of their tech support has become a very bad joke lately. Perhaps most hilariously, email to me from GoDaddy tech support is now being tagged as spam by Office 365 and routed straight into my junk mail bin, so I didn’t even see their latest messages until I went hunting for them this morning. 

I don’t know whether to laugh or scream.

Their latest email message provides a recovery procedure. We may be able to get the submissions@rampantloonmedia email account working today, but I am not even up to being cautiously optimistic anymore. We may have just had seven years of accumulated messages to authors wiped out with a few keystrokes. Stay tuned for more news as it becomes available.

With gritted teeth,
Bruce Bethke

P.S. If any vendor tells you not to worry about your company’s data because it’s all backed up “in the cloud,” tell ‘em to f*** off and demand the ability to create backups on your own local hardware. Or find a new vendor.