I know. It sounds conceited but bear with me. Today I was browsing the official postmaster email bounces for our customers' domains. These are emails from and/or to our customers that for some reason or other never got where they were suppose to. No one pays us to do it. No one even knows we do it. We do it anyway because as always we want our customers to succeed.
So I was browsing through the bounces when I noticed on that said:
So I said to myself, "huh?". Why would the general information email address for one of our customers be bouncing? I dug a little deeper.
I looked at the content of the email which bounced. It was a well qualified sales lead that had been emailed from our customers website contact form. If their potential customers were sending inquiries for business and they were never responding then they were losing business. That's not good!
The next step was determining why this important email address for our customer was bouncing. I check their setup and it turns out we don't host their email. We only host their website. Sometimes customers host their own email when they want to use the Microsoft group, calendar, and shared folder functionality built into Exchange and Outlook. I ran a simple test to see if I could manually get an email through to their Exchange server:
[root@mail mail]# telnet exchange-server 25
Trying xxx.xx.xxx.xxx ...
Connected to exchange-server (xxx.xx.xxx.xxx).
Escape character is '^]'.
220 exchange-server ESMTP (eb2368a23ff18387532a031363448369)
helo mail.athensguy.com
250 exchange-server
mail from: admin@athensguy.com
250 Ok
rcpt to: info@left-out
550 info@left-out: Recipient address rejected: 5.1.1 User unknown
Their exchange server was blocking the emails because they had never created the info@ email address. Problem solved.
Most web designers don't manage the web hosting of their clients so they could never have discovered this problem. No web hosting company is going to look for problems like the one we uncovered. It's not a hack on them. But we do provide complete website management coverage at a level you won't get from the big companies. We add measurable value to our customers bottom-line. You can't always catch us doing this. Sometimes we're working quietly behind the scenes - kind of like swift moving ninjas. We identify several problems like this one every week. We do it because we love our job, and we embrace the personal relationships we have with our customers.
It's true: Our Customers Make More Money
because they partner with AthensGuy.com.
What do you think?
Cordially,
Patrick MacDonald
AthensGuy.com Support
"I always knew that I needed a website but didn't have a clue about how to go about it or who to trust. Well, my problems were solved completely when I sat down with Cynthia and Patrick MacDonald. I told them what I wanted to convey to my customers and they did all the rest. ... They are truly professional, creative, knowledgeable.....and friends forever!", Dirk Howell - Dirk Howell Band - http://www.dirkhowell.com [Read more testimonials]
Athens Guy is a professional web design, web development, and web hosting company.
You're dealing directly with the owners so you know we'll do our best for you.
"I always knew that I needed a website but didn't have a clue about how to go about it or who to trust. Well, my problems were solved completely when I sat down with Cynthia and Patrick MacDonald. I told them what I wanted to convey to my customers and they did all the rest. ... They are truly professional, creative, knowledgeable.....and friends forever!", Dirk Howell - Dirk Howell Band - http://www.dirkhowell.com [
