B10[mg]

Last night my dad called me to inform me my server was not functioning correctly. Funny, 'cause I was working on it as he called, so I asked him to explain his problems in a little more detail. The problem, or so it turned out, was that he couldn't send any emails and the Ziggo helpdesk told him it was my server.

Quite strange, for he does indeed uses my IMAP/POP3 server, but SMTP is handled by his ISP, Ziggo. And since he can't send any mail the problem is most likely to be at their end. So after explaining the difference between incoming and outgoing mail, I told my father to call the helpdesk again and demand some help, not some ignorant answer.

After a while, he called me again. The helpdesk this time deemed it necessary to reset his password. My dad had to wait for half an hour and login to the webmail of ziggo to see if he could send mail from there. Again a rather odd reply in my humble opinion, but hey, it might be a known workaround of ziggo. In the meanwhile I asked my dad what error message he did get and the answer to that question made a lot of things clear. The error was (translated, the original error was in Dutch):

550 - this is unwanted email and will not be delivered.

Nice, right? I had no clue how a password reset was going to help, but I wished my dad good luck with the spamfilter that was obviously too strict.

A little later the phone rang again and my dad was getting more and more annoyed. He waited for 30 minutes, logged into the webmail, did send a test message and all that went fine. However, his mail still couldn't be sent from Outlook and now he had a new phone number that he was going to call tomorrow. The phone number of the Microsoft helpdesk.

I literally was in shock when I heard they send him to Microsoft. Did Outlook create the 550-SMTP reply? Nope. Why on earth didn't these moronic hell-desk employees simply tell him to reformat the mail and try again? So I had to call them myself and asked them for a motivation for sending my dad of to Microsoft. The explanation was rather simple according to the friendly but completely clueless guy. "Webmail works fine, but Outlook gives an error, so it must be an Outlook problem and thus Microsoft.". I asked him what part of the error message he didn't understand, if he looked the '550'-code up, why he didn't simply send my father to the 2nd line support if he couldn't solve the problems and what the email address was to complain to.

He kept mumbling and even wouldn't agree on the spam filter being too strict. Apparently, false positives are completely acceptable to him. I asked him why three helpdesk employees who get training (I hope) and money for helping people weren't able to help my dad, while I could help him over the phone in less than two minutes. That he didn't know either.

So I drafted a fine mail to the complaints department of ziggo to complain about the competency of the helpdesk. Not even do they not help, the even don't call in the 2nd/3rd line support and I'm fairly sure that would be procedure. Fire the guys, give them a decent training, do something about it, SickoZiggo!

Update I: I don't seem to be the only one who didn't like ziggo's customer service ;-)

Update II: I just read that Ziggo lost 265.000.000 euro last year. Well, try to improve your customer service instead of scaring people away!

clueless, helpdesk, ziggo, athome, @home