On Thursday, September 7th, I sent and received a few e-mails at a few minutes before seven PM. Then at eight PM, I discovered that my e-mail service was no longer working. Although incoming messages addressed to [email protected] were still coming in, when I myself tried to use the e-mail service to send a message out, a short note would appear in the lower right corner of the screen saying:
"Send/Receive error - click here" and so I did. Then another message appeared in a small, mid-screen window of which the following was a part:
"The server name you entered cannot be found on the network (it might be down temporarily). Verify that you are on line and that the server name is correct."
When on Friday, September 8th, the e-mail service was still not working, I called up my provider, Optimum, to seek service restoration. After much discussion with two tech-reps, I found out that Optimum had changed my e-mail address from [email protected] to [email protected]. The domain name had been changed.
I related this tale to a friend who sent back an image from an e-mail said to have come to him several years ago about just this very thing.

Checking back, I never saw this message come my way although I have been using the domain name optonline.net for more than twenty years. Now there are thousands of points of contact to whom that domain name has been part of e-mail address statements and I (and other users as well, presumably) must individually notify those thousands of entities of this seemingly arbitrary change. In my case, those entities include medical providers which at my age and my medical status can literally be a matter of life or death.
Imagine if your phone company were to surprisingly change your phone number and you had to notify everyone you know of that change. The action that Optimum has taken is almost as bad as that.
With much bewilderment and stress, I finally figured out how to change my Outlook settings to work with this new server domain name. The process was as follows:
First click on "Tools", then click on "Account Settings...", then click on "Change..." and make the following changes.
1) All e-mail address domains have to be changed from optonline.net to optimum.net.
2) "Incoming mail server" must be changed to: mail.optimum.net
3) "Outgoing mail server (SMTP)" must also be: mail.optimum.net
After restoring my own e-mail service, I found that my wife's PC had also had also stopped working for e-mail. Oddly, nothing seemed to be coming in to her PC from anywhere. I followed these same steps and suddenly a whole slew of new messages came rolling in. I had to let her sort through them all but still, I have a lot of people of my own needing to be notified.
In Robert Frost's poem, "Stopping By The Woods On A Snowy Evening", there is a line that reads:
"...but I have promises to keep."
It feels like that.