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.
