Hi everyone,
TL;DR: My email was down for a week while I migrated to a new provider.
I've been using valuehost.ca to host groupbcl.ca's mail for over a decade now. On June 3 they sent me an invoice for service renewal just 3 days before expiration. The only payment option was credit card via PayPal.
When I attempted to pay, PayPal demanded a mobile phone number in addition to billing address information, which in my opinion is unnecessary for a simple credit card transaction. As far as I'm concerned, a mobile number is the 2020s version of the SIN/SSN: a unique identifier that can be used to link disparate accounts together. I simply do not trust PayPal to use that information solely for the purposes of this one transaction.
I opened a support ticket on June 6 requesting alternate payment methods. There was no response for over 40 hours, despite a follow-up I posted nearly 34 hours later.
On June 8 my account was suspended for non-payment, despite a ticket being open on this matter with their billing department for a day and a half. (The only thing to Valuehost's credit in this entire affair was they waited two days past the invoice due date before suspending my account.) That cut off my groupbcl.ca email address, which I've been using for over 20 years for most of my email correspondence.
I updated the ticket 7 hours after my follow-up, requesting to be billed only for the domain renewal and not the hosting package. They replied 2 hours later stating that my domain is not registered with then (which was true) and had marked my hosting as cancelled. This was the only time they made any sort of comment on the ticket.
Seven hours later I replied to the ticket, noting my email was now down and requesting options to get it going again. They never responded to that note.
Late in the day on June 10 I sent a letter of complaint to the only other contact Valuehost has on their site, hoping that would get someone's attention. They never replied; not even a pro forma message indicating they received my email.
By the evening of June 12 I had given up on Valuehost and signed up for mail hosting with HostPapa, who accepted my credit card without any problems. I had to provide them with a phone number, but because they're in Canada they're subject to PIPEDA. After updating my MX record, I spent a fair bit of time getting the HostPapa account to show test messages I sent them from my ISP's email.
I had problems getting KMail talking to HostPapa. Their documentation for Thunderbird says to use port 995 (pop3s) with TLS for receiving and 465 (smtps) for sending, but when I duplicated the settings in KMail it failed on both. Eventually I configured KMail to connect to port 25 using STARTTLS for receiving and to localhost for sending, both of which worked. I then configured my postfix server to relay outbound mail via HostPapa's mail server.
On June 13 I updated the ticket at Valuehost to say I had migrated to a different provider, and closed it.
Unsurprisingly, I'm very disappointed in Valuehost's almost complete lack of action to my ticket and will no longer do business with them.
Brian
On 2024-06-14 Brian Lowe wrote:
Hi everyone,
TL;DR: My email was down for a week while I migrated to a new provider.
Yikes Brian! That's quite the quest.
I can add a couple of insights, maybe:
Paypal does *not* have my MPN (cell #) on file and I use pp all the time to send & receive. They do have my home phone, which I am much happier about giving out because we never answer it! :-)
And like you said, MPN is the magic key to tie all your accounts together -- no one uses home phone to tie anything to anything; and in any case, only a smattering of sites have even that info.
My point being that even if pp asked for your MPN, you can often bypass that by closing that window and logging in manually in pp (not using the pp link in the invoice). They should let you login without an MPN. Once in pp you can usually find the invoice manually and pay it via that route.
And if not, you can probably just ask or determine what the invoicing company's pp email address is and just send a manual payment. Ya, they may need to do something manually on their end, but companies rarely refuse incoming money.
And I can second the praise for HostPapa. A client has me using that for some stuff and it's pretty good so far.
Of course, some of you are waiting for this, so I won't let you down: I'm always a promoter of running your own email infrastructure so that you can never be cut off like this. But I do realize that's not for everyone! ;-)
On the bright side, at least you own your own domain and don't have to have everyone change their contact info for you!
FWIW... https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mwlucas/run-your-own-mail-server/ MWL has been a regular sponsor of MUUG, via donations of eBooks.
I'm sure it'll be on his web site (https://mwl.io) at some point, but I think we waits until it's in distribution before he creates the webpage.
He did a tutorial at BSDCan a few weeks ago: https://indico.bsdcan.org/event/1/contributions/2/ and a general talk: https://indico.bsdcan.org/event/1/contributions/3/ . The tutorial isn't recorded, but the talk is... videos are still being uploaded. Search YouTube or ping me in a week or two.
-Adam
-----Original Message----- From: Roundtable roundtable-bounces@muug.ca On Behalf Of Trevor Cordes Sent: Friday, June 14, 2024 9:46 PM To: roundtable@muug.ca Subject: Re: [RndTbl] I'm back!
On 2024-06-14 Brian Lowe wrote:
Hi everyone,
TL;DR: My email was down for a week while I migrated to a new provider.
Yikes Brian! That's quite the quest.
I can add a couple of insights, maybe:
Paypal does *not* have my MPN (cell #) on file and I use pp all the time to send & receive. They do have my home phone, which I am much happier about giving out because we never answer it! :-)
And like you said, MPN is the magic key to tie all your accounts together -- no one uses home phone to tie anything to anything; and in any case, only a smattering of sites have even that info.
My point being that even if pp asked for your MPN, you can often bypass that by closing that window and logging in manually in pp (not using the pp link in the invoice). They should let you login without an MPN. Once in pp you can usually find the invoice manually and pay it via that route.
And if not, you can probably just ask or determine what the invoicing company's pp email address is and just send a manual payment. Ya, they may need to do something manually on their end, but companies rarely refuse incoming money.
And I can second the praise for HostPapa. A client has me using that for some stuff and it's pretty good so far.
Of course, some of you are waiting for this, so I won't let you down: I'm always a promoter of running your own email infrastructure so that you can never be cut off like this. But I do realize that's not for everyone! ;-)
On the bright side, at least you own your own domain and don't have to have everyone change their contact info for you! _______________________________________________ Roundtable mailing list Roundtable@muug.ca https://muug.ca/mailman/listinfo/roundtable
On Friday, June 14, 2024 9:45:42 P.M. CDT Trevor Cordes wrote:
Of course, some of you are waiting for this, so I won't let you down: I'm always a promoter of running your own email infrastructure so that you can never be cut off like this. But I do realize that's not for everyone! ;-)
Agreed. I wonder if Shaw allows inbound connections on SMTP? If so, I could probably set postfix to answer on inbound and accept mail. Outbound pretty much has to go through Shaw, since they block outbound SMTP at their border routers. The same is likely true for MTS.
On the bright side, at least you own your own domain and don't have to have everyone change their contact info for you!
Exactly. I didn't want to have to change my email address in case Shaw/Rogers overhauled their email system and forced everyone to a use new email address.
Brian
On 2024-06-14 Brian Lowe wrote:
Agreed. I wonder if Shaw allows inbound connections on SMTP? If so, I could probably set postfix to answer on inbound and accept mail. Outbound pretty much has to go through Shaw, since they block outbound SMTP at their border routers. The same is likely true for MTS.
Yes, that's the main (big!) impediment to self-hosting that Big Internet (TM) has imposed on us plebes. Shaw does allow inbound 25, but for outgoing you have to smarthost through Shaw (which works ok for low volume non-spammy-looking things), or get an outside smarthost relay. That can be a box you control or friend's you make a deal with, a 3rd party smarthost you pay tiny amounts of $ for, or some cloud VPS thing you run either a bit, some or all your mail-ish daemons on.
Adam's book recommendation sounds really good, too. And I wonder what he will recommend for solving that smarthost issue.
But hey, if anyone decides to go down these route(s), figuring out how to do all the DKIM/SPF/DMARC stuff has already been solved for you in the MUUG presentation 2 months ago :-) check out the slides!
On Friday, June 14, 2024 9:45:42 P.M. CDT Trevor Cordes wrote:
My point being that even if pp asked for your MPN, you can often bypass that by closing that window and logging in manually in pp (not using the pp link in the invoice). They should let you login without an MPN. Once in pp you can usually find the invoice manually and pay it via that route.
I would much refer not to have anything to do with PayPal at all. I have an account with them, but haven't used it years. This is a Canadian company doing business with a resident of Canada. At the very least they could accept an INTERAC payment.
And if not, you can probably just ask or determine what the invoicing company's pp email address is and just send a manual payment. Ya, they may need to do something manually on their end, but companies rarely refuse incoming money.
I asked Value host about alternate payment methods. They never responded, so it appears they weren't interested in accepting my payment.
I've drafted a snail mail letter to the company, addressed to the president's attention. It will be interesting to see if it generates a response.
Brian
On Fri 14 Jun 2024 at 22:27:23 -05:00, Brian brian2@groupbcl.ca wrote:
At the very least they could accept an INTERAC payment.
Probably not. Interac payments *online/Web* either has been, or is being, shut down, due to very poor interest. The Canadian Government (CRA, Service Canada, and a few other departments) was among the very few users who offered this payment option.
I've drafted a snail mail letter to the company, addressed to the president's attention. It will be interesting to see if it generates a response.
That President's Choice will likely be to ignore you.
Hartmut
I do have another thought, and a very practical solution, which I've occasionally used myself. It involves using a VoIP carrier. Though I've had experience with LesNet, VoIP.ms, and Anveo, I'll be specifically giving VoIP.ms details.
Just get a VoIP.ms SMS-capable telnum (a VoIP telnum is formally called a DID), enable SMS, and forward SMS to e-mail and/or your mobile number. Consider the VoIP.ms telnum to be disposable, since you can always drop it and take on another VoIP.ms telnum.
One drawback: Some issuers of SMS authentication codes seem to detect VoIP and refuse to send the code (or else there are other tech issues). The Canadian banks and the Canadian Government used to not work with SMS-to-VoIP, but more recently, at least two of the big 5 banks now do, at least to some of the SMS-enabled telnums. We would need to do a test with PayPal.
[Later] I just tested my PayPal twice, with a VoIP.ms telnum as type "mobile" and as type "home". PayPal bastards! Both gave the message "You can't add a VoIP number. Try another number to continue.".
Hartmut
On Fri 14 Jun 2024 at 23:44:00 -05:00, Hartmut W Sager hwsager@marityme.net wrote:
On Fri 14 Jun 2024 at 22:27:23 -05:00, Brian brian2@groupbcl.ca wrote:
At the very least they could accept an INTERAC payment.
Probably not. Interac payments *online/Web* either has been, or is being, shut down, due to very poor interest. The Canadian Government (CRA, Service Canada, and a few other departments) was among the very few users who offered this payment option.
I've drafted a snail mail letter to the company, addressed to the president's attention. It will be interesting to see if it generates a response.
That President's Choice will likely be to ignore you.
Hartmut
Interestingly, both my current type "home" and type "work" telnums at PayPal are VoIP.ms telnums. We'll see when PayPal cancels those.
[A bit later] Ha!!! I tricked PayPal. I added a VoIP.ms telnum (+1-403-200-xxxx) that was originally provisioned by Telus Mobility, and it was accepted! PayPal did text a verification code to that number, which reached me by e-mail, and I used it to authenticate (successfully).
So, it looks like PayPal currently only uses the general NANPA tables of original provisioning of NPA-NXX blocks (of 10,000) in +1-NPA-NXX-XXXX.
Hartmut
On Sat 15 Jun 2024 at 03:12:08 -05:00, Hartmut W Sager hwsager@marityme.net wrote:
I do have another thought, and a very practical solution, which I've occasionally used myself. It involves using a VoIP carrier. Though I've had experience with LesNet, VoIP.ms, and Anveo, I'll be specifically giving VoIP.ms details.
Just get a VoIP.ms SMS-capable telnum (a VoIP telnum is formally called a DID), enable SMS, and forward SMS to e-mail and/or your mobile number. Consider the VoIP.ms telnum to be disposable, since you can always drop it and take on another VoIP.ms telnum.
One drawback: Some issuers of SMS authentication codes seem to detect VoIP and refuse to send the code (or else there are other tech issues). The Canadian banks and the Canadian Government used to not work with SMS-to-VoIP, but more recently, at least two of the big 5 banks now do, at least to some of the SMS-enabled telnums. We would need to do a test with PayPal.
[Later] I just tested my PayPal twice, with a VoIP.ms telnum as type "mobile" and as type "home". PayPal bastards! Both gave the message "You can't add a VoIP number. Try another number to continue.".
Hartmut
On Fri 14 Jun 2024 at 23:44:00 -05:00, Hartmut W Sager hwsager@marityme.net wrote:
On Fri 14 Jun 2024 at 22:27:23 -05:00, Brian brian2@groupbcl.ca wrote:
At the very least they could accept an INTERAC payment.
Probably not. Interac payments *online/Web* either has been, or is being, shut down, due to very poor interest. The Canadian Government (CRA, Service Canada, and a few other departments) was among the very few users who offered this payment option.
I've drafted a snail mail letter to the company, addressed to the president's attention. It will be interesting to see if it generates a response.
That President's Choice will likely be to ignore you.
Hartmut
On 2024-06-15 Hartmut W Sager wrote:
[Later] I just tested my PayPal twice, with a VoIP.ms telnum as type "mobile" and as type "home". PayPal bastards! Both gave the message "You can't add a VoIP number. Try another number to continue.".
Haha, trackers gonna track, eh? You can get pay as you go "burner phones" / burner accounts for this purpose, but the expense won't be negligible. Up-front SIM costs each time you want to change, etc.
However, I'm sure our resident cell plan expert (BRAD) can tell us just how cheap we can get a BYOP monthly plan for. There's always those BYOP gov-mandated $15/mo plans that might be perfect for this. But maybe there's even cheaper! I wonder if someone has text only, no data for under $10.
On Sat 15 Jun 2024 at 19:57:49 -05:00, Trevor Cordes trevor@tecnopolis.ca wrote:
..... But maybe there's even cheaper! I wonder if someone has text only, no data for under $10.
My VoIP.ms solution (that now works, as my messages said) is cheaper, at only CAD 1.50 or less per month. Plus, it gives the tinkering challenge that a MUUG member (Brian, hehe) should love!
Hartmut
On Friday, June 14, 2024 11:44:00 P.M. CDT Hartmut W Sager wrote:
Probably not. Interac payments *online/Web* either has been, or is being, shut down, due to very poor interest.
Interesting! I hadn't heard that.
I've drafted a snail mail letter to the company, addressed to the president's attention. It will be interesting to see if it generates a response.
That President's Choice will likely be to ignore you.
Probably true. From their point of view they got rid of a cheapskate customer. Let someone else have the headaches! :)
Brian
On Sun 16 Jun 2024 at 02:34:14 -05:00, Brian Lowe brian2@groupbcl.ca wrote:
On Friday, June 14, 2024 11:44:00 P.M. CDT Hartmut W Sager wrote:
Probably not. Interac payments *online/Web* either has been, or is being,
shut down, due to very poor interest.
Interesting! I hadn't heard that.
Yeah, it's a shame that Interac online payments never became well-known, not even to businesses and organizations. And like most things Interac, the fees were exceptionally low.
That President's Choice will likely be to ignore you.
Probably true. From their point of view they got rid of a cheapskate customer. Let someone else have the headaches! :)
You nailed it! It's a common and normal business model. I do it too with problem customers - right now I'm trying to "dispose" of two such customers.
As per my other message (10+ minutes ago), if you want the problem solved at less than CAD 1.50 per month, please contact me privately, so that I don't give the impression of self-interest here. And any significant discussion will have to be by voice, due to my neurological problems with writing significantly. Interestingly, and partly for the neurological reason, all my SMS texting is done on my laptop with full screen, mouse, and keyboard.
Hartmut W Sager - Tel +1-204-339-8331, Tel/VoIP/SMS/texting +1-204-515-1701, Toll-free +1-844-515-1701
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Adam Thompson -
Brian -
Brian Lowe
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Hartmut W Sager -
Trevor Cordes