Jellybob's Journal: Tech Support Fun

Well, I've spent a large chunk of this afternoon on the phone to our ISP's tech support department, and finally managed to get pushed up to first level support, after only a day of trying.

A month or so ago, our ISP (Redstone Communications... avoid them like the plague, we're on a 1 year contract) decided to install DSBL based blacklisting without telling any of their customers about it. Since then, we've had e-mails bouncing from people, the biggest set being our satellite offices around the city, who use Yahoo's SMTP servers to send their e-mails. We've also had reports of bounced e-mails from funders, which is a major problem to us.

So I rang tech support, and asked for anything sent to safe.org.uk to be whitelisted. The first two levels didn't understand what a whitelist is, or why we'd need one. Third level then went on to claim that whitelisting e-mails to our domain alone, would cause all their customers to receive more spam, and anyway, the software they use doesn't allow you to change the DSBL list.

Why whitelisting involves changing DSBL's listing is beyond me, or how they picked commercial spam filtering software which doesn't allow whitelisting (God forbid I ever need to e-mail their postmaster address).

I've now finally hit first level, who after I convinced them that the fact it hasn't been a problem in the month they've been running it for people, doesn't make it not a problem now that they have a paying customer on the phone telling them it's a problem. I think when I mentioned that we were paying for a service which wasn't doing what we needed it to in a "so we might stop" voice, they figured they should do something.

So now first level are looking into whether their software really doesn't support whitelisting, or if they just couldn't be bothered to read the manual earlier.

Update, 16:27 - I received a reply from their tech support via. e-mail, which effectively said "this incident shouldn't happen now, just put up with the fact we're deleting e-mails that may or may not matter". I also checked the feature list for Mailshield, the software they said they use - included in the feature list is... whitelisting. It actually looks like nice software if it's being used by people who know what it can do.