marcelk

I'm just an average knucklehead that is excited to get a new hosting account. And knuckleheads like me scan the welcome email for the IP address of the server, ftp userid and password, and DNS server, then let the ftp uploads loose. The rest of the documentation is superfulous as long as the ftp login works. Yes, I am probably setting myself up for future problems by not reading the whole welcome email closely and following all the instructions exactly. But walking in the customer's shoes it is probably good to expect them to do the minimum and have some robustness when they don't do the minimum. The forwarder policy is not what I expected, but I can live with it. I just didn't know about it. I checked Wikipedia for "cpanel" and it appears to be closed-source, so I understand that it might not be possible to run a check when a forwarder is created. But if the cron job to strip out the aol/comcast/hotmail/msn forwarders is yours, that would seem to be a reasonable place to trigger an email notification to the webmaster to let them know that something was modified, and include a pointer to the policy description. I've got it figured out now, but is there an elegant way to avoid future customers from having to figure it out too (assuming I'm not the only knucklehead out there)? -- Marcel

I have spent hours over the last few weeks trying to figure out why some of my customers' forwarded email was being bounced, and why a few of my forwarders kept disappearing. I had been trying to figure out if it was data corruption or some unpublished limit regarding the maximum number of forwarders, or something else. After searching through the forums, I finally found the answer. I don't have a problem with the forwarder policy re AOL/Comcast/Hotmail/MSN and understand why it is there. My frustration is that it broke my customers' function for an extended period of time and I didn't know why. There is a really simple solution to this that I am asking you to implement: in the cpanel, check if an admin is trying to add a forwarder to aol/comcast/hotmail/msn and either give them a warning "this will be removed" or prevent the add, and show a link to the forum entry that explains the policy. Having data silently stripped out nightly without understanding what is going on is very frustrating. Preventing the data from being entered in the first place, or at a minimum giving a warning at the time of data entry is the solution that will remove that frustration. Even lesser, if your cron job strips an email address from my forwarders can you send email to the webmaster/owner to let them know that it happened and why? TCH has been good to me so far, this is the first bad experience I've had here. I suspect others are going to bump into this issue. Being proactively open about it (i.e., at the time the forwarder is created, not expecting me to know to subscribe to a particular forum or having to investigate what first appears to be a bug) is the best way to keep your customers happy and keep support costs down. Can you do this?