It's interesting that you bring up AOL, because I remember dealing with this kind of crap with them. It was annoying, but didn't feel like it was as big of a deal.

I guess the only real difference is that with AOL it was less insidious... You knew it was only for aol.com emails and that you weren't dealing with business info. Not that emails to personal addresses aren't important, but at least it wasn't suddenly SomeRandomFortune500Customer.com that sales is trying to email a proposal to right before the deadline that "is make or break for the entire company!"...

AOL had a highly competent mail administration outfit, at least compared to other big shops at the time. It could be annoying to deal with them at times, but they had fair, mostly sane processes and I could always get in touch with a technical person with authority there. (They may still be this good, I just haven't had reason to deal with them for quite a while.)

Google - well, I haven't had to, but can get in touch with a competent person there, but not officially. Which is not the case with ATT, with whom I have had a mail issue for over a decade. At this point I'm thinking either their postmaster died in his closet office back in about 2006 and nobody noticed, or they simply don't give a damn.

Didn’t AT&T outsource all their email to Yahoo! a decade or so ago?

Not sure I agree about being able to reach a tech person at Google, even informally. Bitching on Twitter can get some results, but that’s hardly the way to operate a business...

Didn't mean to imply that Google's stance is a good thing.

It absolutely should not be the case that you need a pal in the right department to get something done, but that seems to be where we are - our Politburos are just privatized.

Edit - My mail issue specifically is with WorldNet. I believe that's run by an ATT spinoff call "Maillennium", but maybe that changed. I don't especially care from a practical perspective; there is exactly one person whom this affects and we worked around it forever ago. I just see it as a barometer of ATT's interest in being a competent network operator.

> It's interesting that you bring up AOL, because I remember dealing with this kind of crap with them. It was annoying, but didn't feel like it was as big of a deal.

I do too, because there was an actual useful URL that had contact info in the bounces and SMTP errors. IIRC, I actually managed to get a human being on the phone and got this sorted right quick!

You might have grounds for a lawsuit if it broke your company.

>It was annoying, but didn't feel like it was as big of a deal.

Perhaps because email itself wasn't as big of deal back then? Phone calls and snail mail were used with a lot more regularity back then.

Heh. I’ll be honest, that sounds a lot like a millennial projecting onto all the old people in this thread.

Sure there’s an element of truth to it, but email was insanely popular before the iPhone too...

He he, this. E-mail rised in the 90s and was hugely popular very soon, because it brought real benefits. I was under impression that in today's world the number of emails is going down (on account of social networks and whatnot).

>like a millennial projecting

Well, I am almost 40, so not really a millennial at all, but a gen x'er. And I remember being in college and going days, maybe weeks without checking email. I also remember my university giving me an a .edu address, which I was technically supposed to use (supposedly there was important information sent to it from professors), but never logged into once.