I Can't Log In!

Today's tip is actually going to be sponsored by...me!

As you may have noticed, my daily tips did not go out on schedule at the end of this week.  Starting Wednesday night, every time I attempted to log into my mail program, I was greeted with a message stating:

OOPS! The system is offline and will be available shortly.
We are currently working on getting your account back online.
Apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Assuming that they were having a problem, I did not contact them until Thursday evening, when they were approaching 24 hours offline.  Assuming that the problem was on their end, I simply asked them if they had an estimated time that their system would be back online.  They quickly responded to say that they were not having any problems.

After I realized Friday afternoon that I could log in on any other computer--just not my primary one--I knew that the problem was a setting on my computer.  My first course of action (and the reason for relating this story in today's tip) was to clear my browser settings, cookies, and cached pages.

The reason why clearing all those setting helped is complicated and would be best saved for another tip.  However, the point is this:  if you are having trouble with a website on just one computer or device, clear out those settings, cookies, and cache before you contact tech support.  This is especially true for websites with security or websites where you have to log in.  It may not be the solution, but it will likely be one of the first things that tech support will tell you to do.  By telling them you already did it, it could save you one step in your email exchange.