Saturday, July 31, 2004
NT-Hell-World
Grrr, my e-mail is down.
Whenever I try to collect it I get an informative dialog box saying my password is incorrect. Surely not? Employing skills I learned as a Sendmail consultant, I telnet into the pop server:
It's been like this all afternoon.
I check out NTL's web site for signs of problems and find out there was some spam activity in May.
I go to the NTHellWorld site and find out NTL have shut it down. For those who don't know NTHellWorld was a site for people who had been shafted in some way or another by NTL's customer service department. It consisted mainly of a forum where people bitched about NTL's service which was, I'm lead to believe, apalling. Eventually, NTL bought the site and now, after a decent interval, they have closed it.
I was about to file a support request on the handy e-mail form that you can get to after wading through NTL's site for half an hour (they don't like to make it too easy to contact them), when I realised I'd never get any response until the problem was fixed. Looks like it is time for the telephone. After another period of intense research, I found the support number and dialled it.
The prerecorded message goes something like (I paraphrase just a little):
I sit back with a beer and wait....
My e-mail is back, I just sent a test e-mail through, but all the mail that was sent to me yesterday has been deleted. I know for a fact of about 10 messages that should have arrived but didn't.
Whenever I try to collect it I get an informative dialog box saying my password is incorrect. Surely not? Employing skills I learned as a Sendmail consultant, I telnet into the pop server:
jeremyp@titania:gsg$ telnet pop.ntlworld.com 110
Trying 62.253.162.50...
Connected to pop.ntlworld.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
+OK InterMail POP3 server ready.
user myusername
+OK please send PASS command
pass w0uldn'tyoul1k32kn0w
-ERR mail storage services unavailable, wait a few minutes and try again.
Connection closed by foreign host.
It's been like this all afternoon.
I check out NTL's web site for signs of problems and find out there was some spam activity in May.
I go to the NTHellWorld site and find out NTL have shut it down. For those who don't know NTHellWorld was a site for people who had been shafted in some way or another by NTL's customer service department. It consisted mainly of a forum where people bitched about NTL's service which was, I'm lead to believe, apalling. Eventually, NTL bought the site and now, after a decent interval, they have closed it.
I was about to file a support request on the handy e-mail form that you can get to after wading through NTL's site for half an hour (they don't like to make it too easy to contact them), when I realised I'd never get any response until the problem was fixed. Looks like it is time for the telephone. After another period of intense research, I found the support number and dialled it.
The prerecorded message goes something like (I paraphrase just a little):
Thank you for calling NTL. All our lines are busy at the moment. If you called us about your e-mail problem, we already know about it and our teaboy is scratching his arse trying to think of something to do about it. If you wish to remain on the line, we'll take ages to answer because our switchboard is flooded with people wanting to know why their e-mail doesn't work.
I sit back with a beer and wait....
Update
My e-mail is back, I just sent a test e-mail through, but all the mail that was sent to me yesterday has been deleted. I know for a fact of about 10 messages that should have arrived but didn't.
# posted by JeremyP : 11:10 pm
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Yes, we have to suffer with NTL's 'customer service' too, but I have to say that there was actually a message about the lack of email service on the NTL homepage thingy (under Help, Check Service Status) which went like this...
"ntl Internet customers using the ntlWorld email service may currently be experiencing a degraded service, receiving errors similar to 'unable to connect to the message store' or 'invalid username and password'. Our engineers are aware and are working towards a resolution as soon as possible.
We would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused"
So that's all right then isn't it? Incidentally, it was logged on 31 Jul at 15:12, and resolved on 1 Aug at 07:53. Just in case you were interested. Not that it'll be the truth of course, but still... :)
"ntl Internet customers using the ntlWorld email service may currently be experiencing a degraded service, receiving errors similar to 'unable to connect to the message store' or 'invalid username and password'. Our engineers are aware and are working towards a resolution as soon as possible.
We would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused"
So that's all right then isn't it? Incidentally, it was logged on 31 Jul at 15:12, and resolved on 1 Aug at 07:53. Just in case you were interested. Not that it'll be the truth of course, but still... :)
Well I couldn't find the message - not yesterday evening anyway. If their e-mail servers were really broken, the engineers would have been in a flat panic and not thinking about little things like messages on the web.
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