I have a vanity email address that I first set up way back in 2001. The domain [mylastname].com was already taken, unfortunately by a company named NetIdentity that was set up with the business plan of nailing down domains that corresponded to common American surnames, and then basically renting out forwarding addresses.* (I think they also did domains like engineer.com and the like.) This worked fine for many years. I didn’t want a mailbox, I just wanted the mail forwarded to my existing mailbox, which at the time I think was on Yahoo (because I had an SBCGlobal DSL account and the corresponding email address).
In 2007, NetIdentity apparently abandoned that model and went for the full ISP model, where you had a 2GB mailbox and could also set the account to forward somewhere else. Either I missed that email or ignored it (I do have a copy of it in my archives), but flash forward to last week and suddenly people started telling me that email being sent to me was bouncing.
I checked this out with my work account and sure enough, bouncety bounce bounce bounce — even though I was still getting the forwarded copy through GMail!
So I wrote a bitch email to Hover.Com support, who bought out NetIdentity sometime back in the oughts, and said, WTF, over?
They told me that my mailbox was indeed full. I said, what mailbox? This is a FORWARDING account. They said, we don’t do forwarding accounts like that. Anyway they said log into the webmail and you’ll be able to clean out the mailbox.
Sure enough, I get in there and there are over 11,000 emails going back to 12/1/2007. (Interestingly enough, I now know that I receive just under 1/3 GB/year of mail. Most of it junk, of course.) So I deleted all of that (after forwarding myself some mail I found in the junk folder that had been junked without forwarding, and turning off the “keep a copy” option in the forwarding tab).
The bottom line in all of this is that I’m trying to decide whether or not to keep my forwarding address after the next renewal comes up. I don’t like the fact that I’ve probably lost a ton of legitimate mail to the Hover.Com anti-spam system over the last 7 years because I didn’t know about this mailbox. I’m actually thinking that if I can’t get them to turn off the spam filter entirely for me then I will probably let it lapse.
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* I should have bought the domain in 1995, but back then domains were EXPENSIVE because Network Solutions had a monopoly on the domain name system. By the time I thought about it again, these assholes had already bought it up.