Imagine this scenario

Out of the blue, and for no apparent reason, all of a sudden you’ve stopped receiving emails. You’ve checked your router and there are still lots of flashing lights. You’ve managed to track down a phone number (usually an 0800 one that could reside in any part of the world) and you’ve called your email service provider. Despite being urged to go on to their website to make contact while you’re sitting on the end of your phone, you’ve quickly realised that there is not much point in contacting them via their website if their only means of communication is by email. Duh.

After the often-three-hour wait listening to terrible canned music and untold messages telling you how much your call is valued by them (but clearly not enough for them to actually employ enough staff so that someone can speak to you without a massive wait), you finally get to talk to a human being who enters you into their system and gives you a ticket and a promise that someone will look into the problem and get back to you. Of course, they never tell you when they might get back to you, and that’s because they just don’t know.

So, then you sit and wait for it to be fixed, at best, or to be told the problem isn’t actually theirs. This is where some prior knowledge comes in.

Check which provider actually provides what service

Unless you’ve bundled all your technology services under one provider, as we’re often urged to do for a pile of services (such as electricity, gas, mobile phone, internet and email) by energy companies, don’t assume that the person who manages your website also manages your emails as there’s a good chance that they don’t.

And don’t fall into the trap that the domain name used for your website is the same one used for your email account, because it won’t be, even if it looks similar. And a similar trap is thinking that ‘DNS’ and ‘Domain Name Registration’ is the same, or even slightly related to each other. They aren’t.

DNS is for emails and domain name registration is for websites – they are two completely different services. The internet works as a collection of independent services that can be provided by different providers; that’s what gives people the power to choose what services they want to use and what provider they want to provide them. Think of it like using different trades people to perform specific jobs. Plumbing company for plumbing work, electrical company for electrical work, or a single company that can provide a combination of relevant trade services.

Don’t assume anything

While Expert once provided email services to some of its clients, this has been largely phased out over the past few years. We mostly concentrate on providing support for websites and applications only these days, and just because we sorted out the hosting of your website, it doesn’t follow that this includes managing your email accounts too.

If Expert manages your website domain name registration and subsequent renewals, we are known as the registrar (agent) for the website domain name and our client is the registrant (owner) of the domain name, for as long as the domain name registration is renewed and paid for. We also provide the website hosting, but we don’t provide the DNS (email) hosting; that’s all done through other providers and is often managed by the in-house IT support team if the organisation is large enough, or an external agency, if it’s not.

As the DNS (email) is hosted with a third party (internal or external), we don’t have access to a client’s account, so we can’t view or make changes to the services the third party provides.

Before you contact any service provider, it’s always wise to figure out where the problem sits (if you can) and to contact the company or team that actually can fix it for you. By using a scatter-gun approach of putting it out to the universe to deal with, you’ll likely rack up a pile of costs from the group of experts who are bending over backwards and cross-communicating with each other in an effort to solve your problem. This will cost you dearly in money, time and frustration.

Fortunately, problems like these are not that frequent, but are a real pain when they occur, so it’s helpful to understand how things work and who to call before they do.