It sounds like they pleaded with you to drop eM Client because that was an easier fix then them having to actually fix their email services to work properly.
I find it sad when email users think that the new reality is accepting a bad email hosting provider as being the norm. There are good email providers out there, but they don’t have the far reaching big name or monopoly status so they are not known or considered as widely for use, which is a shame. The real problem I see is that the large monopoly based providers are driving the smaller players out of business, so eventually you end up with only a few providers which have no incentive to fix anything because you have few other choices. A good example of this is Media Temple being acquired by GoDaddy, and officially merged into GoDaddy this year.
I have read nothing but bad things about GoDaddy hosting services from users (Reddit - Dive into anything) so it might be worth considering moving your email hosting somewhere else that actually specializes in email hosting and prides themselves on offering quality email hosting. If email services are as important to your business as you say they are, and you got a custom domain name, then I think the effort for such an endeavor is worth it.
When it comes to adding such a feature, sure it would be nice to have, but then again it encourages the email client to run slower to avoid a timeout situation that shouldn’t be happening in the first place. I could see why such a feature would be very low on the consideration list if it can effect the performance of the email client to operate. Since I want my email services to run fast and be reliable, I would find it unacceptable that I would have to dumb down my client just to operate in a degraded service mode.
I agree with you whole heartedly. Except I believe the techs honestly believed their services were woking correctly. This is what happens when your internal networks are connected via MPLS and and external networks by an SDN. The service provider cannot see the end user’s experience.
I would love to move to another hosting provider. However, I have been hesitating to do so because I had just taken advantage of a 5-year hosting plan that I had subscribed to only 2 months prior to this fiasco. It is for full web hosting that includes email as one component and lets me manage all of my services including email hosting.
Right now, all is working fine but will be looking into alternatives and ready to switch quickly if necessary.
FYI - The problem encountered wasn’t with the compute infrastructure or mail server software systems, it was with the transport network and related to the Software Defined Networking (SDN) that relies on services based architecture on all cloud based 3rd party micro services from desperate service providers. This scheme helps to manage workloads and optimize least cost routing. Which means they can use SDN automation that leverages a form of AI to throttle traffic during peak periods to manage cost. These systems are still experimental in many respects, especially the budget systems that are based on a bill of goods that guarantee to reduce cost. The distributed workloads in all but the best of such systems can be helter-skelter and are often managed to meet financial SLAs rather than guarantee technical metrics. So, as long as most customers don’t notice or complain, lower performance is acceptable. This is often a byproduct of trying to conserve cost by moving everything into the cloud in a desperate attempt to find value when very little value actually exists.
One of my customers uses GoDaddy Workspace mail via a reseller named Domains Priced Right. We have fought intermittent errors when synching their IMAP and SMTP for years. GoDaddy never has admitted that they had a problem. However, we now see that GoDaddy is pushing their e-mail users toward Microsoft 365 mail. I have believed for a while now that they use a somewhat non-standard IMAP/SMTP implementation for the Workspace mail and have finally realized that it is outdated and trouble prone. Anyway, the only e-mail client that seems to work reasonably well with their servers are the recent desktop and 365 versions of Microsoft Outlook as well as iOS versions of Mail and mobile Outlook. Older versions of Outlook and several other e-mail client apps have had very spotty performance. They say, “You get what you pay for,” and GoDaddy’s Workspace IMAP mail is very cheap by comparison with other providers.
Personally, I also found eM Client to work tolerably well (although not fully reliably) with GoDaddy Workspace e-mail until I applied some recent updates and then synching went down the tubes. Sometimes, after several synch cycles were completed, one cycle would actually work. Sometimes, it would retry multiple days without working. I finally have given up and gone back to using desktop Outlook for my account with my customer until I come up with another solution. However, I really don’t want to mix my customer accounts with my personal and business accounts in my Outlook profile.
While I admit these recent problems really got worse after the eM Client update, I can’t really blame eM Client though since it works perfectly with every other Exchange, Gmail and IMAP/SMTP server I have tried.
I have recommended that my customer move to either Google Workspace or, preferably Microsoft 365 mail. It’s unfortunate that they need to do this but it will fix the problem.
Thanks for the concern. I re-added the account to my eM Client app since I had removed it. eM Client did the initial IMAP synch correctly and seems to be working OK right now. However, it is Saturday after all, so GoDaddy’s servers might not be as busy as during the week. eM Client did that before, too, and then I started seeing synch failures later so I’ll use it for a while and open a ticket if/when it fails.
I believe the problem I was experiencing likely had nothing to do with upgrading eM Client. I just happened to notice the problem for the first time a day or so after upgrading my eM Client.
Also, GoDaddy, who typically gives me first class support, suggested it was due to upgrading eM Client. So, I had assumed that it was just an eM Client issue. Through careful debugging, I was able to determine that by outgoing mail, hosted by GoDaddy was exhibiting a much longer than usual latency. Once corrected by GoDaddy the problem I was experiencing in eM Client went away.
This is not to say that eM Client is totally innocent, since I had no issues sending SMTP mail through any of my other email clients that were able to work flawlessly under the temporary outgoing mail latency issue.
This issue also has nothing directly to do with the GoDaddy Workspace Email migration as other contributors have suggested. Though, it did manifest during the Go Daddy migration effort. I believe it could have been due to something as simple as a 3rd party software being improperly configured that was invoked during the overall Workspace Email migration effort. So, more than likely an external SaaS problem.
It is now months after the initial incident had occurred and all has been stable and working well with all related products and services for nearly two months.