Liberty's Blog

The RoadRunner Comcast Shaft.

No one ever claimed that the the Roadrunner-Comcast switch over in this the Houston area was for the benefit of the customer. Apparently the switchover is going real smooth over at Time Warner. They simply pulled the plug on the @houston.rr.com accounts. Real painless... at least for them they aren't even taking phone calls over it. Dwight Silverman explains all.

At the bottom of a May 21 post about the Road Runner/Comcast e-mail changes, I mentioned that several RR customers had e-mailed me to complain that their e-mail service was down. They said they were told by tech support personnel that the outage was the result of the switch from Road Runner to Comcast.

Both Comcast public relations Vice President Ray Purser and regional Senior Vice President Tony Speller said that wasn't true. Someone was giving out bad information, they said.

But today's Computing column about the change has generated more of those e-mails. They have a similar thread, in which customers are told that 7,000 to 14,000 e-mail accounts were affected as a result of the Comcast switch. Purser and Speller say that's not possible, because the changeover won't happen until July.

Another customer who e-mailed said he was told that sub-accounts -- secondary accounts created by the holders of primary e-mail accounts -- were removed by accident as part of system maintenance. In many cases, the accounts and the mail they contained were wiped out. But at least one person followed up to say he had his e-mail restored by Comcast's tech support.

Changing ones email address can be traumatic, notifying everyone is just about impossible. Preventive measures is not a bad idea. I use an email forwarding service from www.mail.com and use the email address liberty.freedom@revolutionist.com Its just a mail forwarding address. I have had this email for 10 years or 2 ISP changes and been pointed to at least 3 different Mail boxes. It's also my oldest email address. It cost me about $25 a year.

There is always a web based email client, these things are pretty good. I use gmail (liberty@gmail.com), but hot mail or yahoo are just fine also. They are free and most can be read with with a regular email reader.

The other option is to buy a domain. Its not that expensive or difficult. Godaddy.com host this blog, and much of my email these days.

The point is not to give anyone your ISPs provided email box. Other than spam, and communications from my ISP all my real email is forwarded into the box. Don't give anyone your ISP provided email address. That way if your forced to switch ISPs you won't lose your incoming email.

Dwight also has some suggestions. If you have a houston.rr.com account the time to start moving accounts is now.

Labels: Tech

posted by Liberty @ 2:09 PM