Malicious entity that runs the universe - 1, Corbett - 0

Why must everything be so freaking hard?

I try to send an email to my little cousin congratulating him on winning a race and then Thunderbird asks for a password to connect to the SMTP server. It's set up to receive emails fine but somehow sending them doesn't come into the ordinary account set-up process. Fair enough though, I think I can still remember the password so I try it and a few variations. No luck.

I then check with my dad, who remembered it last time, but he can't recall it either. But, luckily, I'm sure that I wrote it down last time, since I had so much trouble tracking down the damned settings without using any importing functions. So where would the piece of paper with this precious information be?

Uh-oh.

Chances are my mum filed it. This meant having to argue with her for several minutes, listening to complaints about why I should be able to remember a password that I never came up with and that's probably been put in only once since we switched ISPs and then eventually getting the keys from wherever she hides them and going downstairs to the filing cabinets. After 5 minutes of scrabbling around in there and being blamed for every technical problem in the house, I gave up and went back upstairs.

Then I figure, hey, I'll just boot up the old Windows laptop and send it from there. I know it works because I used it for my ISP email account before I set it up on my iMac. So, I copy the message over, re-insert the image I want to use and hit “Send”.

Hurray, I think. It's over.

No, says technology. It isn't.

A few minutes later, I get an email telling me that the message has not been delivered. I know that the address was right – it was a redirect and the failure message tells me that it came from the Hotmail address it redirects to – so I have no idea what went wrong. I don't think I'd sent any emails off the laptop before so maybe it needed a password as well and, for no good reason, decided not to tell me.

I'm going to try one more time using my Gmail account because I don't want to disappoint the little guy, who's been told by his dad that I'll be sending him an email. Apparently, he doesn't use email a lot and my uncle wants to convince him to do so more often. Anyway, if that doesn't work, I'll give up, go to bed and lie awake, marvelling at the lengths the universe and software developers will go to simply to inconvenience me.

Well, that didn't work. I got the same failure message back so I'm just going to give up now. I'll probably end up walking Hamish through setting up a Gmail account over the phone tomorrow, if I can't make this work.


Ranting about technology aside, I'm sure I had some topics for today's post, some of which were actually interesting and had surprisingly little to do with the apparent ancient conspiracy to keep me miserable.

Ah, well. They'll keep till tomorrow. For now, I need to follow through on my plan and go to bed. Writing the above has helped me work off some excess rage, so I should be able to get to sleep.

I guess it's just a perfect example of how a well-planned and simple thing can go ridiculously wrong and screw up a load of other plans in the process.