They just keep finding ways to screw me.

Using Box's tip, I set up lynx in my crontab to kick off the email distro. I found out, after a week of it working, that it had stopped for a week. Spent two hours fucking with it before just setting up my own crontab locally. Means my box needs to stay on, but it usually does anyway.

So I send out a newsletter today. And it turns out their crontab decided to start running again yesterday. Due to clocks not synced, mine was hitting two minutes sooner, so I was seeing what I expected in my local logfiles. Now that I was sending a big mailing, I ended up with both running at the same time. Which put me over their hourly limit.

It took me a few hours to notice and debug the issue before I called. When I got monkeyboy on the line I told him exactly what happened. I asked, "Has my email account been suspended for excessive sending?"

He "checked" it by sending an email to my account, and one from my account, and they both worked. He asked how I had my mail client set up. Explained it was sending via SMTP from the webserver, not touching the mail server. "So what do you have set as the SMTP server in Outlook?" JESUS FUCKING CHRIST! I spent 20 of the last 45 minutes trying to convince shit-for-brains that it runs from the webserver.

Then I noticed that hey, I just got my test email I sent from my autoresponder. And he says that yes, he cleared the block.

AAAAAARRRGGGGH! That's what I asked 20 fucking minutes ago!

So, now that I've confirmed what happened was exactly what I started with ... is there someone I can talk to about crontab. "Cron-what?" Yeah, crontab, it's a system administration command. "Oh, is that for Linux?" Yeah, and you don't know what it is. So can I talk to someone who does know what it is? "No."

Fuck you guys. I'm about two more solid days of work from switching to a new host. Maybe time to pull a couple of all-nighters and get it over with.