A lot of folks have written me to ask what my e-mail problem is with Time-Warner and if it's fixed yet. No, it's not fixed, in large part because it's not a constant problem, the kind you can analyze because it always happens…and then you can know when it's gone because it doesn't happen anymore.
What it is is not easy to explain so don't think you're dumb if you can't understand this: I have several e-mail addresses that are mostly "at" domains that I own. For instance, I own www.newsfromme.com. If you write to me at www.newsfromme.com, your e-mail is then forwarded to the address that Time-Warner gives me and I pick up that message via my account with them. As a back-up, that same e-mail is simultaneously forwarded to a GMail account I have.
It has come to my attention the last few weeks that I have not been receiving all my e-mails. I've also noticed that a few e-mails that do get to me arrive in my Time-Warner mailbox many, many hours — in a few cases, days — after they've been sent. I finally took the time to investigate and found that the messages that never showed up in my Time-Warner mailbox, or showed up late, turned up on time in the GMail backup.
This does not happen all the time. Around 85% of all messages sent to me show up in both at the same time. But I monitored both for a few days and discovered that about 15% weren't arriving in the Time-Warner mailbox or were delayed for some time.
During my marathon Tech Support calls yesterday, I had six other incoming telephone calls that I ignored so they went to voicemail. I have Time-Warner digital home phone service and when a call goes to voicemail, a nice little robot at Time-Warner sends me an e-mail to inform me. All six of those messages showed up instantly in my GMail account. Only four showed up in my Time-Warner account. So messages that Time-Warner was sending me weren't making it into my Time-Warner mailbox.
And no, I did not have any incoming messages blocked and no, they did not go into my Spam folder and no, the missing messages were not huge in size. The gent at Tier 2 Technical Support there who took 75 minutes to not solve the problem and then accidentally disconnected me insisted on operating on the following assumption: Time-Warner e-mail works flawlessly and if I'm not getting all my messages, I must have something set wrong on my computer. I could not knock him off that premise.
Finally, after way too much time on the phone, redialing and redialing when they hung up on me, I got to a guy in Tier 3 who acknowledged my settings were correct so the problem must be elsewhere. Unfortunately, as I mentioned, that problem does not happen all the time. It didn't happen with several e-mails he sent me. So we're monitoring the situation and I'm tracking when it happens and we're going to continue this discussion. I simply ran out of time and energy to deal with it last night.
Actually, the problem I think they should be working to fix is the one where you call Tech Support and they keep you on hold for long, long periods and then drop your call. That Undercover Boss TV show has what I think is an intriguing premise. If you own or run a company, you should be required to call your support people once a month and see what it's like to get them on the line and talk to them.