News & Information

I keep hearing y'all say how good y'all are doing at catching up. Perhaps someday my original (early October) support request e-mail will be formerly answered. A more recent attempt was answered twice: once with an automated thingy--several days (a week?) later-- and the second with level 1 telling me it was getting kicked up to level 2 and they would be contacting me or I could call. I guess they were counting on the call because they ain't contacted me yet.

signed,
grumpier old man

OK, get this. This should really go in the previous section on spam. Probably nothing new but here goes nuttin' ('cuz that's exactly what got through per the most excellent interphase):

BEGINNING OF QUOTE

The following was a failed attempt at reporting a failed attempt at reporting spam. (No I didn't mistype.) The original report is below starting with Hello. The attachments are named such that you should be able to figure out which is which-- pretty self-explanatory, eh?

Hope y'all get this here thingamajimmy fixed eventually. I'm still waiting for a level 2 response from a problem I reported a while back. And I really have no idea if you will even get this message, but it is likely to at least make it to the support blog.

H-E-L-P!!
Hello,The following message is SPAM. I tried to report it via the improperly placed "report spam" button in the message viewer (this really, Really, REALLY, R-E-A-L-L-Y needs to be placed in the Inbox!! :-( ). However, received an error message telling to contact my administrator. Would that be you?The spammer was good enough not only to forge my domain name, but to also guess a name that is familiar to me and therefore not unexpected. This brings another issue. I should be able to detect more header information than just what the appearance string contains. What is more, you should be able to detect this as spam as it comes from a domain name under your control (lastname@tld) and for which the user name (randomstring) does not exist. So therefore a simple database comparison would have easily found this to be of questionable origin.Please do something about the reporting utility. Please do something about the spam filtering (whitelist+blacklist = good idea). Please do something about the interface so I know what the header looks like before I get into the spam. Please, PLEASE, P-L-E-A-S-E! :-|Please see the forwarded message for the offensive e-mail and the attachment for a partial screen capture of the event.Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.Sincerely, (username) (lastname)

END OF QUOTE

Will we all look back on this some day and laugh?

Should I just keep sending emails into the blackhole that is NetIdentity customer support? I've had no webmail at all for over two weeks! Will I be reimbursed for services not delivered? Frankly all I want now is to cancel my account with you but I'm afraid that will take months if it involves contacting your support address.

Oh, look at that graph for November, you've answered more questions then you have been given. Thats quite funny, because I've sent five in so far that have't got a single response.

What suprises me is the very low September responses. You should've started to hire more staff to serve your customers back then. We should've had that support by now. Why don't you hire more staff? What have you done with our money? Its time to wake up Ross.

I have been waiting for 50 minutes now on your support line.

Trent.

I also have sent in numerous e-mails to "Black Hole Support". Ross states that all messages from September have been answers. I know many of mine were never answered.

Perhaps the messages I sent in by both Voice Mail and e-Mail are the only ones to have died in cyber space. Somehow I doubt it.

The message I sent in over a week ago has no reply, not even and auto generated "we got it" response.

At this point it would appear (at least to me) that messages sent in via the support page land in the bit bucket and the cows eat them for lunch.

Please ignore most of my last post. It was mainly phone rage.

55 minutes...

I sure hope there is relaxing music on hold :-)

Here is something funny. I was having problems because the server they were (are) using is not letting me contact a group because the server being a black list spammer. Well I guess instead of fixing the problem, they just stopped sending me the error message for mail not received. How is that for fixing the problem!!

Why do we have to wade through all of this old rubbish? I was perfectly happy with the old netidentity.com until they sold it to this riffraff outfit. When things first started going topsyturveyI wrote to cancel my account. I heard nothing and they re-upped me without my consent. Isn't that illegal? And now they are posting all this endless crap about how tough their life is and how unfair everything is .... when the simple answer is to get back to the way the old guys ran it. Some change is great. This change bites the big one. And why in the hell does e-mail not disappear from m webmail when I download messages to OE? It used to do that. Now, under the new world order, I must needs wade through 100 million old messages on my web mail when I find myself traveling and checking webmail away from home. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!!!!!! Abas TwoCows, or whatever your bleeding name is.

Hunkir - Let me look into what happened with your requests. As I mentioned, our processes are not as durable as they should be. Geoff will be working hard to make sure that incidents like this aren't repeated going forward.

Micmath - Have you contacted our telephone support? please feel free. Otherwise, drop me a note offline and I will make sure that someone gets back in touch with you quickly.

Trent - The problem with the graphs is that they don't show that tickets are rolling over month to month. There is still a backlog of more than 4000 queries that Geoff's team are dealing with. We are hiring more bodies. This takes time however, which is why we've brought in five additional temporary staffers, which has increased the quantity of tickets that we've been able to deal with, but not the quality. Geoff will be focusing closely on quality and getting our response times back to a more useful level (measured in hours, not weeks). I've also mentioned to Geoff the length of time that you spent on hold his morning. He is looking into the problem. Please accept my apologies for the delay in dealing with your request. I actually call into our support group on a regular basis to make sure that delays like this don't exist, but I haven't yet today - my apologies for not being more diligent for you.

Chatachak - many of our customers have requested that we provide them with more insight and information about our day to day operations and what progress we're making with dealing with various issues. I apologize if my posts sound like we are complaining about how tough and unfair our lives are - this was not my intent. As far as your Outlook Express issues go, you need to turn off "leave a copy of messages on the server" in your mail configuration. This will ensure that every time you download, your email is deleted from the server. Or if you want a more elegant solution, I'd recommend that you use IMAP instead of POP for your local mail, thereby, any mail you delete at home is automatically deleted on the mail server and vice versa. I hope this helps.

Unable to compose an e-mail.

I have been sending all main from another accout. I finally tried to compose on on Netidentity. This should be easy, right?

I can view my mail, look, at preferences and delete e-mail. When I try to compose I am logged off and prompted to login. I have tried this several times.

Ironically I tried to send an e-mail to myself to document a problem I sent to the cow support group.

I have not heard a response for more weeks than I can remember. I sent one last week, no reply, sent another one.

I know this is not a support forum but it seems to work better that the online form to send into the bit bucket.

Perhaps support e-mail is confused for milk and is transported offsite for further processing.

Ross, I would use your phone number except I don't happen to live in the US, and I can't afford to wait on hold for 45 minutes whilst on an overseas line.

I wouldn't sign up with a service that didn't provide email support, because that is the easiest, cheapest method for me to contact support. I was under the false impression that NetIdentity did provide email support.

While I admire your personal offer of "blog support" that really isn't a sustainable solution is it. In any case I don't know what your offline email address is: care to post it?

Customer Support - Good News, Badnews

The Good news is I actually received a response from Customer support.

The bad news is ... It did not solve the issue.

A response is an improvement ... Right??

First of all, Ross, I do appreciate the fact that you are trying to help with this blog. I am as frustrated as others with the support, but I can see that you are making an effort to try to improve the support and the communication and I do appreciate that.

My problem (ejTag:911006) is that I was told to call in to tech support to have an issue resolved. I asked for a direct line as waiting 45 minutes (which I have twice now) was not something I could right now. I was asked to provide a call back number (which I did on the 11th). But I still have not received a call or even an email back about the issue.

The issue I have is the Critical Path login that is given to users trying to login with a PDA. It does not work. I sent the email requesting help, then called over a week later and waited the 45 minutes. I was told by the person I talked to that it would need to go to level 2 and I would be contacted. Nothing from that call, but I did get the response to my email asking that I call in. When I travel, the PDA is all I have and Pop3 does not work on it. So web is what I need.

Also, I was working on a project around Harry Potter. I lost this project because I could not send or receive an email with more than 5 characters from Harry Potter in it. I received a reply on the 7th stating it was going to second level and expect a call shortly. I have had no response since that email.

That is the issue with tech support. Even when you do get to talk with them, the problems do not get resolved.

Hey Ross

How come whenever you come into the blog and address problems mine are never included? Trying to make me feel left out? :(

I am so tired of this whole thing - ever since the 'migration' from Nameplanet to Netidentity I have had problems with my webmail, and have been trying to get 'help' from Customer Support, but to no avail.
To this day, I am still unable to open attachments in e-mails, add attachments to e-mails, or forward e-mails.
I am getting so frustrated with it all. Nameplanet worked absolutely fine before this takeover. Now it is appalling.
I am using Mac OS X with Safari. Customer Support simply told me to download Internet Explorer. No thanks - my Safari works perfectly well with every single other thing I need to use...
Please, please fix this! I feel I have been very patient, but now I have had enough.

feebee42:

It is interesting you were told to download Internet Explorer. I was told my problems are caused because I use Internet Explorer.

According to the e-mail I finally received after several weeks, the Netidentity system has problems with IE. They said the development team is currently working on those problems.

Think that maybe the number of complaints going down is because people have decided it's a waste of time? I know that I have, the failing to report as spam failing is the expected response when I hit the button not the exception, so I don't report it anymore. Also, I'd love to be able to block domains, but that's not an option. I'm really surprised that you think the current interface gives me more than the old, netidentity one did. This one looks too much like outlook, and is almost as hard to navigate as that POS software.

Some day I'm sure you'll get it all figured out, until then we'll just live with it. But that's what you counted on all along.

First, excuse the repost. I placed this under the SPAM thread in error. It belongs here in the Customer support post.

*************************************************
Customer service and Security at an all time low.
*************************************************

OK, here is my most recent experience with Customer support.

I am able to login to my account and view mail.

I had previously set my account to forward as a way to get some mail early in this migration from h***.

Now I want to disable forwarding as nearly everything forwarded is SPAM.

In order to accomplish this I tried to login via the normal home page (www.netidentity.com).

I am told I have the wrong password. Of course it is the SAME password as used to login to check mail.

I send an e-mail request to the support team.

Long pause ... I finally receive a respose over a week later.

They said the problem could be that I used netidentity.com rather than www.netidentity.com. They also want me to send them my password to verify I am using the correct one.

I wrote back saying that I was sure I tried www.netidentiy.com. I also let them know that if using netidentity.com is a problem they can forward that to www.netidentity.com.

I further made it a point that I did not want my password sent via clear text over the Internet. (Can we say a problem with security boys and girls?)

They let me know this is a known problem with IE and asked that I provide the version of IE which I am using. I provided the version number.

NOW GET THIS!

The brain trust at netidentity sent my password back to me on both my netidentity account as well as a seperate account!

Not only are our passwords stored in a way they can be read, they can be accessed by any of the support cows.

In addition these guys send passwords to people who have specifically requested it not be sent.

The messages says "Here is your password".

As a network admin I would be (and should be) fired on the spot if I did this.

Ross - You need to find people who know at least a little about security, common sense and / or common courtesy.

I am really upset over this one. The support team is a joke and a bad one at that.

Now don't quote me on this Ross, but I think I;ve found your priblem. Quit going to the morgue and hiring bodies for Tech Support, and start hiring live people instead.

And please stop always coming up with the same old "we're ramping up support" story. We're sick of it.

And what do those support graphs proive - that you have a graphics package or a PR assistant?

I eagerly await the next chapter of your serial.

...paul

It seems this entire blog is more about psychology than anything else, keeping people from either sueing tucows or flinging stones or bullets towards their staff. This blog will probably be online until the last old customers will be gone and until only newbies will be left and who know no better tool yet. These poor guys will pay for a year or two and will then after a few months abandon tucows again, frustrated and an internet experience richer. Therefore backing up all this might become a social obligation to protect other people from ever signing up with a company like this! Yet i feel i must admit that Ross is doing a good job writing, he stays friendly and avoids being concrete enough that anything might be concluded from any of his answers. But in the name of all here i dare state: Nobody has ever asked for one to calm down our emotions, but rather for one or more people to actually SOLVE the issues mentioned. Rather than paying 300 people for answering emails better pay one programmer who is really GOOD and let him/her take care of everything. You save a lot of money and get back even those customers like me who have already given up to hope any longer.

A Blog is the absolute WRONG place to maintain customer-targeted feedback. You need to be emailing your customers. Folks, this is not rocket science--your billing department certainly has no problem doing it. I manage 3 Netidentity accounts for family members, and if I hadn't taken the time to find this Blog, they would never have known why they have been having problems with their Web mail. Yes, you sent an email pointing them here, but come on, stop taking the lazy, passive way out. Try being proactive and SHOW your customers that you are interested in THEIR satisfaction. Contrary to your popular belief, your customers NOT all computer experts--far from it--many are very novice computer users who decided that a vanity email address would be practical.

As customers, all they want is to be kept in the loop. And that could have been done so easily by simply sending periodic email messages to your users explaining what's happening, why it's happening, and when they can expect things to reach a semblance of normalcy. Obviously email cannot be used when email is down, so initially, your Blog was a good resource, but now that email is working as you stated, please use that tool you provide to communicate. Your customers want to know.

In all 3 cases in my family, I've now just forwarded the Netidentity email addresses to Gm*il accounts, and everyone is now happy as can be. Yes, Spam is still there, but it is handled in Gm*il's expert way. And the Web interface is now intuitive for them, easy to use, reliable, and isn't full of surprises, flaws, and frustrations. The sad truth is that over time, their Gm*il addresses will probably become more popular and more recognized than their Netidentity addresses.

Anyway, enough of my venting. Time and time again, you have failed to properly inform your customers as to what is going on. Please try spending less time coming up cute graphs and charts, and spend more time actually communicating with your customers...while you still have them.

Well, 'til now, the inconveniences I've dealt with have felt fairly minor compared to others posting here--an increase in spam, a newsletter that I subscribe to not being delivered for a while. I hardly ever use Webmail so the new interface isn't an issue for me.

But then, yesterday, I found out that email from my brother has not been getting through. No good. And now I wonder what other messages are not getting through. No good at all.

It's time to transition to the email service that begins with a "G." I've been a NetIdentity customer since Feb '01 and I really thought I'd be happy to keep paying a premium for it indefinitely. But not if it simply doesn't work.

My wife & I are the only ones with our domain name who have left any tracks at all on search engine results. I really wish you'd consider selling us our last name domain name. Barring that, I can't think of how you might get any more business out of me.

-Chuck

I wan't my old Nameplanet back.. ASAP..

I don't pay money for this just to have to forward emails to another account just to read the attachments(.vmw is impossible to open).. I'm also struggling replying in some cases.. Sometimes the window not opens, sometime it opens but it's impossible to write in it.

I am so tired of this..
Get me the "old" and functionable Nameplanet back..

I thought you said you "heard us" about more frequent communication. It's been a week since your last update. You may have "heard" but you obviously didn't LISTEN.

Of course this Thursday is Thanksgiving in the States so Ross probably took the whole week off thinking that no one could possibly want their e-mail this week - and it's not like he has anything important to do.

And yes, I know that Tucows is based in Canada and their Thanksgiving was in October, but Ross needs some excuse for taking a week off - even it it isn't a good one!

LP...oh, they LISTEN, they just don't RESPOND.

I am getting an increasing number of correspondents who dont receive my e-mails. I can only assume that somewhere along the line I am being treated as SPAM. The biggest problem is that neither I nor my correspondents have any idea that the message has been trapped.
Is it going out or coming in?

Posted by Ross on Sept 19th

Ross spends a lot more time keeping up his blog on byte.org. Here is what he had to say about starting this blog.

Please note why he thought this blog would be a "smashing success".

www.byte.org/blog/_archives/2006/9/19/2341370.html

You're right, Jim. This is absolutely the wrong way to keep customers updated. But since no other avenue provided by Tucows is working we users have found a way to share SOME information.

It has now been two weeks since Ross' initial "weekly" update.

Is that not testimony to his commitment to keep us updated?

KP - I'm not sure what you're referring to. The blog is being updated quite regularly and we are sharing information.

If I wasn't committed to communicating, I'd shut down the blog and stop sending out email announcements.

We are committed to sharing the information that we have, but I also have to caution that I'm not providing information about what might happen - i.e. I'm only reporting what has happened and how those changes will affect you (for the better or the worse...)

Todd - the comments I made on my personal blog were clearly referencing the Tucows corporate blog. It would be helpful to other readers if you could check your facts more closely before posting information like this.

Jim - the majority of our customers prefer not to receive daily or weekly updates from us. We will continue to publicize this blog and use it as the primary source of indepth communications. We will also continue to post status updates to our customer service center, and less regularly, we will send out more formal email bulletins (or as needed on an emergency basis). This blog is but one piece of our communications strategy. I'm sorry that you are not finding it useful. If you have specific ideas for how we might improve this inside the constraints that other users are imposing on us, I'd be more than happy to take them into account.

Ross:

I stand corrected, I realized that after my post and should have corrected it then. I will check my facts more closely in the future.