A few months ago, PayPal reached out to me via my backup email address to let me know that my primary email address no longer worked.

I knew fixing this would be painful, so I wrote down the steps as I walked through it.

Checks Fastmail

  • Logs in via 1Password
  • Uses YubiKey

Checks Cloudflare

  • Logs in via 1Password
  • Uses Auth app
  • After logging in, I realized my domain was not hosted here.

Checks Dynadot

  • Logs in via 1Password
  • Uses Auth app
  • After logging in and checking my DNS settings, I realized my DNS was hosted with AWS.

Checks AWS

  • Logs in via 1Password (fails three times for Amazon security reasons)
  • Uses Auth app because YubiKey fails
  • Everything seems normal

Back to Gmail

  • Sends a few test emails from Gmail

Back to Fastmail

After poking around, I noticed that Fastmail dropped my alias for “I can’t find with search reasons.”

I re-added my alias and double check that *@domain.com was still set to forward email.

I send a few more test emails, get a few failures, and I notice it’s back up and working again.

Back to PayPal

  • I return to PayPal to re-add my email address, which triggers another test SMS/email.
  • I pull the code and re-enter into PayPal to verify my email address works again.

Fastmail support

  • I contacted Fastmail’s support, who told me this email address had never existed in their system. I have used it every month, dating back over 14 years, and it has existed since the late 90s.
  • I re-create the email address.

Back to Gmail

  • I tested sending an email from Gmail again, and it works.

Back to PayPal

  • I re-try the email address from PayPal, and it works again.

Back to Fastmail

  • I re-tested from Fastmail, and now everything is working again.

Fin

This should have ended with me throwing everything away and quitting the Internet, but here we are months later.

Instead, I have consolidated more of my DNS and domain services so that everything is easier to find and manage, but what a mess.

I lost a ton of faith in Fastmail, but I also needed more patience to push back on support to understand how and why my email forwarders and backup catchall were deleted.