Migrating Email from GoDaddy Workspace Email to cPanel Hosting Email

I am in the process of migrating all my websites from GoDaddy’s Classic Linux hosting to the newer cPanel hosting.  As part of this migration I need to migrate over my websites’ email from GoDaddy’s Workspace email to cPanel email.

First thing I did was backup any emails that I wanted to keep.  Fortunately, for the domain email that I am moving, I didn’t want to keep any of the emails so I didn’t actually need to do a backup.  Note: it does not appear that there is an export function in the SecureServer webmail program.  If I find out more about this, I will update this post.

Next, was to delete the email for the domain on the Classic Hosting.  It took me a while to find, but the email is not under the Web Hosting, but at the Products level and is called WORKSPACE EMAIL.  Click the Manage button on the right.

Then, find the email address that you want to delete, hover your cursor over it, then select the Delete button.

It then showed as pending deletion.  I waited until the email address was completely gone from the list.

Then, I logged out of the Classic hosting.

 

Next, I logged onto the cPanel hosting.  In cPanel hosting, there is actually a complete section for Email, e.g.

Click on ‘Email Wizard’.  Then enter the email (e.g. support), domain (select from the drop-down list), enter the password you wish for this email, re-enter the same password, then select your mailbox quota.  I chose 250MB for my email address because that would be plenty of space for my domain.  Then, click the Create Account button.

I then waited a few minutes for it to set up.

Next, I went to the cPanel webmail login (https://a2plcpnl0814.prod.iad2.secureserver.net:2096/login/) and logged into my new email address.  It opened up and asked me what application to use to view my email.  I did some investigation and chose to use roundcube .

Next, I emailed my new email address from another email that I have.  The email was not received.  I waited overnight before trying again.  Again, it did not work.  I then tried sending out an email from the new email address and it worked!  So, my problem was that I was not receiving emails.

 

Next, I called GoDaddy technical support.  They investigated and determined that the M record needed to be updated.  They updated this record for me and in about an hour I was receiving email properly.  So, my email was fixed and working properly.

The GoDaddy technical support person recommended that I call in every time I migrate my email over so that they can update the M record for me.  They recommended that I call in at the time when migrating my domain over.

I looked at the M record and it looks like it would be an easy change, but if GoDaddy wants me to call in, then I will call in.

I was still curious so I looked at the M records in the classic hosting and there appear to be 2 records, e.g.

Then, I looked at the M records in the cPanel hosting and there appear to be only 1 record, e.g.

Anyways, I will still call in when doing my next email migration.  I think that the information in this post will help you to minimize the down time when migrating your GoDaddy Workspace email to GoDaddy cPanel email.

 

 

 

How to find the most frequently occurring value in a column in a SQL Server table

Recently, I have been coding T-SQL Stored Procedures in a SQL Server database when I ran across something which should be easy to do, but probably wasn’t, that ended up actually being easy.  Specifically, I had to find the most commonly occurring item in a column in a table.

For example if I had a People table with a Name column with the values: Paul, Dave, Paul.  Now, I want to find the value “Paul” because it occurs most frequently.

Obviously, my first thought was to do:

select Name, count(*)

from People

group by Name

order by count(*) desc

which would give me 2 rows:

Paul 2

Dave 1

Then, I could add a ‘top 1’ to the select to only get:

Paul 2

 

However, this is not what I want.  I don’t want the ‘2’.  So, I played around with the SQL a bit and came up with:

select top 1 Name

from People
group by Name
order by Count(*) desc

This SQL gave me exactly what I wanted: ‘Paul’

So, it actually turned out to be easy!  I just wanted to share this with everybody in case you run across the same situation and need a good solution.

 

Google Chrome problems running on Windows 7

I am running Windows 7 and Google Chrome.  Recently, I updated Chrome to the latest version, 38.  After that I had nothing but problems with Chrome.   New tabs wouldn’t open, pop-up windows would be blank and hang, etc..  It was so bad, that I started using Internet Explorer again!

Finally, when I had some free time I Googled a bit, I found a fix.

The fix is to set the Compatibility Mode to Windows 7.  To do this, open the Properties (right-click on icon on Chrome icon on desktop), click on the Compatibility tab (see screen shot below), check the ‘Run this program in compatibility mode for:’ checkbox, select ‘Windows 7’ in the drop-down.  Note: you can also works for Windows Vista, Windows XP, and many other versions.

Chrome Settings

 

Since making this change, I have not had any problems using Chrome.

 

How to shutdown Windows 8 PC/Laptop

I just started using Windows 8.  One of the first questions that I had was: How do you shutdown a computer in Windows 8?

The answer is:

Swipe or move your cursor from left to right (off screen) on the right part of your screen THEN back onto the display to display a vertical menu.  This is a little tricky with a touch pad on a laptop.

Click ‘Settings’ on this menu.  Then, on the Settings menu, click on the ‘Power’ icon.  This brings up a small menu that has an option to ‘Shutdown’.   Click ‘Shutdown’ and your computer will shutdown.

Quite convoluted.  Hopefully, this has been improved in Windows 8.1

 

Buffer or Hootsuite for scheduling tweets for free

Scheduling Tweets for Free

After you use Twitter for a little while you may decide to take it to the next level.  This usually means building up content and tweeting out the content multiple times and at different times during the day.  When you first get started, you probably want to do it on the cheap!  FREE is good!  Here is my experiences with trying to schedule tweets for free.

Using Buffer to schedule Tweets for free

Buffer (www.bufferapp.com) was recommended to me as the best app to use to schedule tweets.  It was easy to get going, you just need to connect to your Social Media accounts (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, etc.).  I found that it didn’t always connect properly and asked me to re-connect a number of times to my Facebook account.  Once connected, it was very easy to schedule tweets and ‘buffer’ them.  It allows you to set up a bunch of specific times to send out tweets on any given day or every day.  For example, if you want to tweet out every hour on the hour you would set up tweet times of 1am, 2am, 3am, … 12am.  I then proceeded to schedule a bunch of tweets.  After scheduling 10 tweets, Buffer would not let me schedule any more tweets until I upgraded to the Awesome plan at $10/month($8.50/month on yearly subscription).  10 tweets is not a lot!

Using Hootsuite to schedule Tweets for free

Hootsuite (www.hootsuite.com) was also recommended to me to schedule tweets.  I found Hootsuite was a little more difficult to understand at first.  Once I figured out the Streams and how to actually schedule a tweet, it was easier.  So, you would go to Streams, then add your Social Networks.  To see your scheduled tweets, you select your particular social network in the ‘Add a Stream’ pane, then a new pane will open which lists the scheduled tweets for that social network.  To schedule a tweet is fairly easy.  You enter your post in the space at the top of the application window, then select the social network(s) to post it to, then you have the option to Automatically Schedule it or manually schedule it.  I found that when you automatically schedule it, it only will schedule about 4 tweets per day out.   I could not find any options for changing the automatic scheduling.  If you manually schedule tweets, you can schedule many per day.  The manual scheduling involved selecting the day, hour, and minute to send the tweet.  I scheduled tweets every 15 minutes for days and it worked fine.  So, it allowed me to schedule 100s of tweets.  There was also an option to schedule tweets from a file, but I didn’t test it out.  So, Hootsuite allowed me to schedule 100s of tweets for free!

So, what free scheduler to use?

This was an easy decision: Hootsuite.  Buffer just doesn’t allow you to schedule many tweets for free.  Buffer was easier than Hootsuite to schedule tweets for specific times.  Hootsuite just allows way more tweets to be scheduled for free!  Once it becomes economically justified to pay $10/month to schedule tweet, I will reconsider using Buffer to schedule tweets, but in the meantime, Hootsuite is my choice!

 

How to use PHP includes in HTML files?

Originally, I built my web sites with just plain HTML.  To make it easier and not have to duplicate HTML I used include files to include common HTML that I had on my web sites, e.g. Google Analytics code, Copyright, internal and external links, contact information.  For example, the html include syntax I used to include the common Google Analytics code was:

<!–#include virtual=”includeanalytics.html” –>

However, I wanted more functionality on my web sites, so I started using PHP 5.3 on my host (GoDaddy).  When I set up PHP to run for my websites, all my includes stopped working.  This is because the .html files were being interpreted by the PHP engine.  To fix this, I had to use PHP include syntax, e.g.

<?php include(‘includeanalytics.html’); ?>

After using this syntax, my includes worked correctly.  So, this is how to use PHP includes in HTML files.