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Confession
raindog308
Administrator, Veteran
in General
Over the years, I've received a lot of new VPS emails that start like this:
"PLEASE READ THIS EMAIL IN FULL AND PRINT IT FOR YOUR RECORDS"
I just searched my email and found 9 different providers who've emailed me since 2020 with this exact language at the start of their new VPS notification email.
Confession: I've never printed a single one.
LowEndBox & LowEndTalk.
Comments
email is the records
Thanks for saving our trees.
confirm it @raindog308
Not even Microsoft Print to PDF?
No point printing it, they'll only migrate your machine to a new IP next week anyway.
What would I do with a PDF?
I do put the pertinent details from the email into my Postgres CMDB, which is backed up.
The data in the mail is protected against pretty much any disaster (Gmail, BackBlaze, my home would all have to be nuked).
yea i can't imagine what i'd do with a hardcopy, details i care about are in a spreadsheet, urls are bookmarked, passwords in keepass.
I was expecting a Reddit-like Confession.
Hi,
we start our accessmails with:
does also not help... so no worry, you are not alone for sure
Ok issue yourself a mild warning
Yeah, we need an AMA about his printer habits
genuinely interesting emails don't require all caps telling you they are interesting...
Did they all happen to have servers hosted in Buffalo and no IPv6 connectivity?
Just needed to ask.
Hi,
well, we tried without first ( as we assume that people will read information they get from a serious source they request business with ).
Then we tried with, got a bit better, but nothing more.
But its just like with our website. People seem to be used nowadays to be confronted with endless trash info without real information, just close to meaning less bla bla.
So some customer simply expect trash, and dont read it. Others are so trained with trash that if they visit a website/communication that is packed full of information, its too much information on too small space...
If we receive questions that are answered on the website or inside the email, we dare to assume that it was actually genuinely interesting
Only 9, eh??
Pretty sure this is a stock WHMCS message. Actually, my statement about 2020 was incorrect...some go back to 2011. HostSolutions was one. So was Hostable, a shared hosting provider I barely remember. Limitless, VWT, LetBox, DediRock, etc.
I mean, I did read it...I just didn't print it.
How’s reddit style confession goes?
What a bastard
Okay so this is embarrassing but I (28M) need to confess something that's been eating me alive for the past three years and I genuinely think I need therapy for this. Back in 2022, I matched with this girl on Tinder - let's call her Sarah - and we hit it off immediately. Like, scary good chemistry. The kind where you're texting until 3 AM about whether cereal is a soup (it's NOT, fight me) and you both send the same meme at the exact same time. Soulmate energy, you know? So we decided to meet up at this fancy Italian restaurant for our first date, and I wanted to impress her SO badly that I spent the entire previous day watching YouTube videos on "how to eat pasta like a sophisticated person" and "wine tasting etiquette for beginners" because I'm normally the kind of absolute savage who just shoves spaghetti in my face like a vacuum cleaner and thinks a "good wine" is whatever's on sale at the grocery store.
I even practiced in front of my bathroom mirror. My roommate walked in on me doing the whole wine swirl-sniff-sip thing with a glass of chocolate milk and I had to pretend I was "checking for freshness." He hasn't looked at me the same way since.
Anyway, the big day arrives and I show up 15 minutes early because I'm nervous as hell and need to scope out the bathroom situation (always important), check the menu prices (why is water $8??), and mentally prepare myself. She walks in looking absolutely stunning and I immediately knock over the bread basket while trying to pull out her chair. Smooth. Real smooth. But somehow she finds it endearing and we start talking and it's going AMAZING. Like, better than I could have ever imagined. She's laughing at my jokes, she thinks my story about accidentally joining a pyramid scheme in college is hilarious, we're vibing on a cosmic level.
The food arrives and I'm doing my best impression of a civilized human being, twirling my pasta all elegant-like, doing the little napkin dab thing, not talking with my mouth full - basically the complete opposite of how I normally eat. I even did the wine thing correctly! She seemed impressed! I'm thinking "holy shit I might actually have a second date in the bag here."
Then she excuses herself to go to the bathroom, and this is where everything goes catastrophically wrong. I see there's one last meatball on my plate - this beautiful, perfectly seasoned, absolutely MASSIVE meatball just sitting there calling my name - and my lizard brain goes "bro you can totally just pop that whole thing in your mouth real quick before she gets back, nobody will ever know." It's like that scene in Lord of the Rings where Gollum is arguing with himself, except instead of a ring it's a meatball and instead of Mount Doom it's my esophagus.
So I do it. I commit to the bit. I fork that bad boy and shove the entire thing in my mouth in one go. Except - and I cannot stress this enough - this meatball was MASSIVE. Like, legitimately the size of a tennis ball. And piping hot. We're talking surface-of-the-sun temperature. And right as I'm sitting there with chipmunk cheeks, unable to chew because my mouth is completely full and everything tastes like pain, she comes back early.
She sits down, looks at me, and I can see the confusion spreading across her face. I'm just frozen there, eyes watering, making these weird muffled grunting noises because I literally cannot do anything else. She asks "Are you okay?" and I try to nod but it comes out as this weird jerky head movement that probably looked like I was having a seizure. She asks again, louder this time, "Are you OKAY??" and now other people are starting to look at our table.
She thinks I'm CHOKING. Like, genuinely dying. So this absolute angel of a woman - who I've known for exactly 47 minutes - jumps up, runs behind me, and starts performing the Heimlich maneuver on me in the middle of this fancy Italian restaurant. She's going to TOWN on my diaphragm, really putting her back into it, and I'm trying to signal that I'm fine but my arms are flailing and it probably looks like I'm fighting for my life.
On the third thrust, the meatball shoots out of my mouth like a cannonball. I'm talking PROJECTILE. It arcs through the air in slow motion, spinning like a meteor, and nails the waiter who was walking by with a tray of drinks. Direct hit. Right in the forehead. He goes DOWN. The tray goes flying. There's broken glass everywhere. Red wine is spreading across the white tablecloth like a crime scene. The meatball rolls under a nearby table where a family is trying to enjoy their anniversary dinner.
The entire restaurant goes silent. Like, you could hear a pin drop. Everyone is staring at us. The manager comes rushing over. Sarah is horrified. I'm coughing and trying to explain but all that comes out is "meatball... I'm sorry... wasn't choking... just big meatball..." The waiter is on the floor being attended to by other staff members. Someone's grandmother is clutching her pearls. A child is crying.
We got kicked out. Obviously. They didn't even let us pay - just told us to leave immediately and never come back. We walked outside in complete silence and stood on the sidewalk for what felt like an eternity. I tried to explain myself, I really did, but what can you even say in that situation? "Sorry I fake-choked on a meatball and assaulted the wait staff"? She just looked at me, shook her head, said "I can't do this," and walked away. Blocked me on everything. Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, even LinkedIn (which honestly hurt the most because like, why LinkedIn?? That's professional networking, Sarah!).
For the next six months, I had to take a different route to work because that restaurant was on my usual path and I was too traumatized to walk past it. I still think about that meatball every single day. Sometimes I wake up in a cold sweat, remembering the sound it made when it hit that poor waiter. I've tried other Italian restaurants but I can't even look at meatballs anymore without having a minor panic attack. My therapist says I'm making progress but honestly I think she's just being nice.
The worst part? Last week - THREE YEARS LATER - I'm at a photography equipment store comparing lens prices, and I hear someone behind me say "Oh my god, it's meatball guy." I turn around and it's the WAITER. He still has a tiny scar on his forehead. We made eye contact. He shook his head and walked away. I left immediately and ordered my lens online.
Reddit, AITA? Was the meatball worth it? (It wasn't. It really, really wasn't.)
Edit: Yes I know I'm an idiot, you don't need to tell me in the comments
Edit 2: Stop asking what restaurant it was, I'm taking that secret to my grave
Edit 3: To everyone saying "at least she gave you the Heimlich" - she thought I was DYING. That's not romantic, that's traumatic
Edit 4: The meatball was pork and beef blend with Italian herbs if anyone cares
In all honesty, I've almost never ever read any of these e-mails.
For instance, my newly created Hosthatch server. Saw the mail arriving toast about it being provisioned, so I just headed over to the control panel to get the IP address. Added that to my DNS records, and ssh'd to the IP. Momentarily thought "oh, that's odd, I thought I'd added an ssh key to hosthatch" and then discovered I hadn't. From the control panel, I grabbed the root password, pasted it into my ssh prompt and manually added my SSH keys.
Only if something had gone wrong - e.g. no root password in the control panel - would I have checked the e-mail. And honestly, if the provider has sent the root password by e-mail, I'd be more concerned about their approach to security.
I can't remember any control panels that don't show me the IP address or won't let me see and/or change the root password anyway.
I think the only problem I've had was with Advin servers years ago when they were doing a weird tunneling thing and the e-mail told you to reduce your MTU. I think that's the only provisioning e-mail I've ever had that was worth reading.
Oh, and the mxroute one, but the offer page had enough warnings about definitely read the email, if you don't support won't help you, that I did.
Hi,
then you belong to the customers who have enough knowledge to manage things on their own with the support of the nowadays control panels if they run into issues -- and without needing to contact the technical support of the hoster.
And for the others we have the emails :-) Some read it, some, well, dont.
If ever @raindog308 will loose his accessdata and he will come to the support and ask for help, first thing they might ask is if he printed out his data
Its as usual.. you dont need it until you need it. And usually we assume we dont need it because we are too cool to mess it up/loose it/what ever. 99,999% of all times we sail "safe" this way. And the rest of the 0,001% will hopefully hit someone else
This is not a place for fiction writing. ;-)
When the password is sent in an email in clear-text....
Sorry, @allthemtings! I needed to borrow the PFP for the reaction
Iconic
Good. You minding the environment.
Ours says:
And we make you check a box agreeing to read it. People still ask AI how to set up MXroute so I had to make a mail server at mx1.mxroute.com that rejects every inbound email begging, for a third time, to please read the email.
I don't envy you.
Ever questioned your life decisions
Yea but you actually have to with mxroute and your 37 different panels with different settings! Most vps aren't that.. intense.
Naturally I had to test it.