For many years I have had my own .com domain name hosted by a former colleague. He has recently shut up shop and although I no longer have any real use for a website my personal email address has been used as my principal contact for so long that it seemed challenging to unwind. So I moved the domain name hosting to GoDaddy and paid for a couple of email addresses.
It wasn't anything like as straightforward as they'd have you believe. Their problem, not my fault. Bottom line, after various help desk calls they finally made it work. Not that my Thunderbird email client on the laptop or the Android mail client on my phone could auto-discover the settings. After reaching the limits of my technical abilities (yes, more than one) I figured it out and now the email is up and running on phone and laptop. So far so good.
When I sent some test messages between my .com address and my hotmail account I found that messages from hotmail didn't appear in the .com inbox. There was no error message, no failed or returned warnings. Hotmail showed them as sent and they never arrived.
This continues to be the case if I use the (correct) address suggested by the hotmail address book. However, if I refuse that and type the entire address myself the email magically arrives in the .com account.
I have tried clearing out old address books, yet the problem persists.
Of course, I have no idea if people are writing to me and their messages are going undelivered. Mail does arrive from people and companies, but I can't know if any messages are missing.
Why does the email do this and is there something I can do to fix it?