One of Canada’s largest telco companies and ISP’s is our old Ma Bell, Bell Canada.
If you use Bell as your ISP, the default domain created for e-mail is email_address@bellnet.ca
In fact many smaller businesses simply have their e-mail address as; MyBusinesessName@BellNet.ca
(I don’t recommend doing that – but that is a different story)
E-Mail Failure For Non-Techies!
If you send me an e-mail, there are dozens of areas that can cause problems and that would cause your e-mail to fail.The issues can begin at your personal computer, through problems with your ISP, (Internet Service Provider) to problems with the routing from your ISP to my ISP, and down to problems at my email server.
So failure of e-mail can generate a few things that technologists need to check out!
The Story
Quite simply, a micro business that we deal with was not able to e-mail us. Every e-mail they tried to send just disappeared into the wild Internet. And as I mentioned above, this micro business has a simple e-mail address of Business_Name@BellNet.ca
As our technology support provider – I had to figure out; why was this e-mail failing?
My first step to was test and to check a few things at my end – all looked normal.
The next step?
As I mentioned above -there are a lot of places where e-mail can break.
So my next logical question was this;
Is this problem limited to this one email address? Or is the problem more general with all BellNet.ca addresses?
I did not have this answer, so I called BellNet support and asked them to send me an e-mail!
The logic is easy – if some Tech_Support_Name@BellNet.ca can successfully send me an e-mail, I know the problem is not in the deep technical server to server stuff, the problem our business friend was having would be specific to some configuration problem at their end.
BellNet Support Would Not Send An E-Mail!
Seriously!
Twenty five minutes on the phone – trying to help one of their customers – and they would not send me one lousy e-mail???
They said it was because I am not a BellNet customer.
I asked if they cared that one of their customers could not send an e-mail – they told me no.
The 5 seconds it would take to send me a test e-mail, vs forcing that non-technical customer to contact them to go through the arcane DNS & MX testing required is absolutely a customer service failure.
Rant is now over.
Hi. I don’t read many blogs, but yours is of thefew I read.Have a awesome day!
Bellnet is even worse than you know… trust me on this. It worked very well for me for five years, but they moved their technical support to India. I didn’t mind this, except that their tech support people don’t speak Geek when they need to and they only follow a narrow manual of procedures. It takes hours to get anything done. I moved my home office nine months ago, and it took them 20 days to get my DSL cable moved and all the problems sorted out.
Bell Canada is incompetently staffed and the problem has been getting worse in recent years. I like long business relationships, but Bell shows no loyalty to its customers. The only department that is efficient — too much so — is its payments. I used to drop the cheques I wrote every month for five different Bell Accounts in a mail-box in a Bell service centre, but after a while Bell stop checking their own mailbox. Cheques I wrote in April 2008 didn’t get cashed until July. In the meantime, there were five sets of computer generated “Why have you not paid yet? When can we expect the money?” calls all following the same script. It really annoyed when the late payment charges came in plus interest on the same, when they had the payments in hand and hadn’t processed them.
Things became even more Kafkaesque when I finally worked out what the problem was in July 2008 (just after I had paid the monthly bills again) and was told that the box was now closed (after having found my way to a VP of Administration). I told him a notice could have been posted to that effect and reminded him that several customers besides myself had just deposited our most recent payments there. Nobody in Bell checked until March 2009, when our July payments were finally processed.
Being foolishly optimistic, I tried using the Bell Internet Unplugged wireless modems for my laptop last May. This worked really well… they sent three, none of which worked and each time I spent about three hours with the Indian tech support line (following the same damn script every time) to no avail. Seeing as BIU never worked I sent their modems back with all the ancillary equipment. Bell wouldn’t accept them and keeps still trying to bill me for a service it never provided. Fat chance.
Oh yeah, and they keep sending me bills for a cell-phone account I’ve never heard of, have no contract for, and with a number that is totally unfamiliar.
Recently told a friend of mine in the Toronto Metro Police that if he ever hears of somebody going postal in a Bell office in Toronto, it’s probably going to be me. He told me not to worry, the cops wouldn’t show up for at least an hour and if I ran out of ammunition, arrangements for resupply could be made… not sure he was joking.
Thanks for dropping by! Please avoid the postal idea
that we don’t need!
And that is a story that qualifies as a pain in the ass!
And I guess that is what happens when a business is too big – to many silo’s,and probably cutting too many costs under its new ownership!
Regards!
So i complained to Bell about this misleading practice and the woman who answered my complaint tried to blame me for the intentional misunderstanding initiated by Bell, even going as far as to say, “if you truly received an email notifying you of excess usage,,,,”.
All I can say is welcome to the new world ruled by corporations, where nothing is real, and if the company gets caught doing a bald faced ruse to trick your clients, be sure to find a way to imply the client is the one who is dis-honest! GEEZ!