On huge ISPs and multi-level support requests.
They just told you how to get past their front lines: Call their business support on the toll-free phone number she gave you. Here's my take at what happened:
- You entered a question on a web form which is intended for user support questions.
- A first-line technical support person called
Irene
(who, most likely, is not trained as a computer person; since 90% of all calls can be fixed by going with the customer through their connection and email settings, you can train anyone to be a first-line technical support person in one day, with most of the time spent inHow do I handle the phone
andHow do I handle the ticket tracking system
) had a look at your request, saw that you had problems with sending email from remote systems, and copied a standard text about mail bounces in her reply to you. Remember that there are many peopleout there
who think they know a lot about computers because they know how to startregedit
and know a few buzzwords; the presence os such words in a support request is not necessarily a sign that there's some clue at the other end of the line. - You replied that no, this does not apply, and that yes, it's really
a problem at your end, because lots of words Irene does not
understand. She then decided you're totally out of her league, and
redirected you to their second-line support; second-line supportlines do
consist of people knowledgeable about computers, because at that point
it's no longer a trivial problem. Since you happen to be an ISP, which
is a company in her book, she referred you to the Business support line;
such a Business support line usually consists of people even
more knowledgeable about computers in general and the Internet
specifically, because companies usually have rather specific needs that
go a bit further than
I have an ADSL modem and a Windows box
.
Really. Call them. You'll find that you will be talking to someone
knowledgeable about what SMTP
is, and who is able to put a request with SMTP
administrators to fix this issue if that is required.
Take it from someone who used to work at one of Belgium's largest ISP's (at least, it was that when I used to work there—they've lost some market share since).
There's one big problem with the standard "call 888-123-4567 in office hours" reply. Foreigners on the Internet.
For starters, the numbers Adam are quoting aren't valid from here; I'm assuming they're valid from where he is. A bigger issue is that you just can't guarantee that I'm going to call at an hour where the technically clueful staff are around, or that my spoken English is sufficiently good to make myself understood. I've had the fun of dealing with the English speakers at an Indian ISP; their written English was impeccable. When my manager insisted that we move to phone calls (because they're more "professional" than e-mail), communication broke down completely. Our respective accents and idioms were too different to work via the phone.
Finally, if I phoned a US number at a sensible hour from my perspective, I'd get the ISP between 1am and 5am. Most of the really good staff aren't in at that hour, so any phone conversation would have to be put in writing to be passed on anyway.
I called Belgacom's (I think you were talking about them?) helpdesk for leased line clients once[*], about 6 years ago. The person I was talking to didn't even know what an MX record was...
I hope they do better now.
[*] We changed ISP shortly after that, because they managed to put us off-line for 3 days without being able to explain what was going wrong.
I was actually talking about Planet Internet. Which had been declared the "best Helpdesk" several times by Clickx at the time. They're not worth much these days anymore, though