My ISP has been dismal for several months. Periods of time pass where I can’t maintain a connection (dial-up) for more than a few minutes, such that it will drop 12x in 6 hours. The next day, it’s great. My local telco provider has been consulted and they have given it to me in writing that they are not at fault, e.g. no line noise, etc.
To make matters worse, my ISP has begun arbitrarily blocking email from various entities, and doesn’t give me the option of allowing content from specific addresses. Having complained, they basically tell me it is what it is, and if the sender can’t accomplish a workaround, it sucks to be me.
I really don’t want to change providers, get new email IDs and all of that. Would a complaint to the Public Utilities Commission in my state be worthwhile? What other entity is capable of exerting oversight on behalf of the consumer in this scenario?
Are we talking about dialup here? If so, be sure it’s not an equipment problem on your end. I had similar issues a while back when I had dialup; it was slow, wouldn’t connect sometimes, and dropped out more or less randomly while other times it would seem ok. Turned out to be the modem. Got a new one and Bob was my uncle.
So why would you want to continue to give them your business?
Yeah, it’s putzy to change your e-mail address, notify everyone, etc. But there are ISPs that put the blocking control entirely in your hands, instead of blocking stuff before it even gets to you so you can decide if you want it. I ran into this when my host started blocking all mail from BigUniversity dot edu, which happens to host one of my professional mailing lists. They claimed it was SpamCop’s fault and wouldn’t whitelist the list address. SpamCop told me to suck dick. The university’s hands were tied. So I shopped around and found a new host that blocks nothing and has an excellent domain- and user-controlled spam filter/blacklist/whitelist setup. I’m self-employed and use e-mail a lot to communicate with clients, and when I’ve changed ISPs over the years, yeah, it was annoying, but everybody lived through it.
If you have the scratch, it’s also not terribly expensive to just set up your own domain and permanent e-mail, say, yourname at danceswithcats dot com. Then you can switch ISPs all you want. That’s the setup I had for this last switch, and my clients never knew the difference. Neither would your friends and family.
Another thought: I had a similar problem with disconnects and lost dial tones on my last dialup account (I have satellite now). The phone company looked at our NIC box (I think that’s what it’s called) outside the house, determined it was older than God, and replaced it with a shiny new one. No more disconnects. I see that your telco gave you a guarantee in writing, but you might want to make sure that they checked that as well.
To me, this smells like ITSBS: Ill-informed Tech Support BS.
Have you reported this to their Abuse department?
Try and get someone who is not able to send you mail keep a copy of one of the bounce messages that he/she receives, including the extended headers (with timestamps and IPs) and send it to whatever free webmail address that you can readily access. Send that in with your report.
If you end up taking the plunge and switching ISPs, I recommend basically ignoring the email address the new ISP givs you and switch to a web-based email like Yahoo or Gmail. So, next time you have to switch ISPs you just keep using the email you’ve been using.