Monday, December 04, 2006

"Your business is important to us"

I love American customer service. I love that you can usually return or exchange goods with no qualm. I love that you can sometimes call someplace and talk to a person... I had to call Qwest this morning to get a simple answer: What is their outgoing mail server setting? After holding for 20 minutes, hearing how important my business is to them, a person comes on asking me the same questions over and over, intermittently asking me to hold so he can verify something. Then he comes back saying they don't support Apple computers.

"Umm. This isn't a Macintosh problem. I simply need the outgoing mail server settings."

"Ma'am... I mean, Adele, you need to call Apple Support."

"No, that's not true. They will tell me to call my Internet Service Provider. Please just give me the information you'd give an Outlook user."

"Oh, you can call Microsoft Support."

"No, this is not a Microsoft problem. I simply need you to give me the smtp server information."

In the meantime, I get cut off, and despite the agent asking if he can call me back on this number should we get cut off, he doesn't call back. I call Qwest a second time, running through the whole story again. This time, the agent simply tells me, "MSN doesn't support pop3 e-mail... Contact your company to get their smtp server address."

ARGH! Oh, I love good customer service... At least I can access my e-mail the roundabout way, through webmail, but it's slower than doing it directly in Mac Mail. Oh, well.

Anyway.

4 comments:

  1. That's why I usually just search for things. (looks like the first result might have what you need...not sure)

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  2. I normally use the smtp out for the individual email provider. For gmail, I would just use: pop.gmail.com or something like that so even when u port the computer to a diffent ISP it would work fine.

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  3. Thanks, Gary and Amu (and Martha for calling). I've tried all the various options. Still no success. I appreciate your advice, though. I love how techie people are so helpful! :) I once had a post asking for advice on growing roses, and noone responded. Not that gardeners aren't helpful. They just don't read blogs or respond. :) (And in case you're reading this and have advice on roses, I've since figured that you can literally just put a rose into the ground and it'll grow into a bush!)

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