Frank Eliason from Comcast…can you hear me…hear me…hear me…

Just got done reading the Social Media Insider e-mail newsletter from MediaPost titled, “All A-Twitter About Comcast’s Twitter Guy“.

It’s a great post about how Frank Eliason from Comcast has been tracking RSS feeds and Twitter to keep up with commentary on the company. It’s very cool and innovative, so I’m going to give it a try by talking about them here about a specific nasty little problem that’s developed with our use of Comcast at our home/office. It all started on April 3rd of this year when all of a sudden my wife called me while I was on business in New York to tell me that she couldn’t send e-mail. She was receiving e-mail just fine, but was getting errors in sending e-mail. My first thought was that she’d gone and done something weird and just needed to reboot and everything would be fixed. That didn’t work. Then I went and looked at our domain service and our hosted e-mail service to make sure those were operational, and sure enough they checked out. On my end, I was having no problems sending and receiving e-mails to my Crackberry so I knew the basics were working just fine.

When I got back home a day later, my computer got on our wi-fi network without a hitch and I was able to get on the Internet and was receiving e-mails with no probs, but guess what? Sending e-mails wasn’t working. Actually, the more I diagnosed things the worse it seemed. Not only could I not send e-mail to the SMTP servers from our domain but I couldn’t send e-mail through Yahoo! Mail or Gmail from her machine or mine. Note, she’s using a MacBook with Microsoft Entourage and I’m using a PC running Vista and Microsoft Outlook 2007. This was nutty. So I booted up my old PC with XP and Outlook 2003 on it to see if that would work, and surely that too didn’t work. Note that the POP protocol was working fine since we could receive e-mail, but sending through SMTP both where it was secured and where it wasn’t didn’t work.

In calling Comcast support, I knew this would be out of the league of a general support person as this was a very nuanced problem. Considering we have been living in the same house for nearly three years without a problem other than the occasional reboot of our computers, the wi-fi router or the cable modem, and all of a sudden computers using three different operating systems and three different mail clients stopped working, it wasn’t going to be easy to diagnose. He recommended that we try our Comcast mail account which we had never used. It was easy enough to add it to the list of e-mail accounts and once again, this too was able to receive e-mail through the client apps but not send any. Yikes!!! He then mentioned that they didn’t support Outlook, only Outlook Express, which sounded like an immediate cop out. For Pete’s sake, given the dominance of the Outlook platform, you’d have to be an idiotic company not to support your users’ use of all flavors of Outlook. More importantly, it was clear that it wasn’t the problem since we had been using our e-mail clients for nearly three years without incident. I did also try to “ping” the e-mail servers and in a twist of irony I could ping all of the SMTP servers and get responses except for the Comcast SMTP server. Too funny, but weird at the same time. Why can I get a response off of “ping” but not from the Outlook test sends to the accounts. Hmm…

Well, since this fiasco I’ve been relegated to using Gmail through the Web client which is perhaps a good thing as it’s helping me virtualize my system and reduce my dependency on my PC’s software, basically I’m now working off the cloud ;) However, it is frustrating having to change my organizational system.

With this said, I hope Frank catches my blog post so that I too can write about the awesome Comcast service that I’ve grown accustomed to and have found to be reliable. My wife is not as pleased with the virtualization experiment, so it would be helpful to resolve this issue so her life could be made easier since she finds using the Web e-mail clients impractical for keeping track of her e-mails.

Frank, can you hear me?!!! Please…

*** UPDATE 5/2/08: I hadn’t had a chance to check my e-mail yesterday, but Frank responded with some thoughtful consideration.  We haven’t fixed it yet, but at least we’re in a dialog.  This guy ROCKS!!!  That he saw my post and responded shows that Comcast has some really bright people who understand and care about their customers.  Some times bureaucracy gets in the way of people being able to do the right thing, but every now and then a few get together to overcome this and do the right thing.  Frank and whatever team he has working with him on keeping up with these channels of communications deserve a big fat round of applause.  I’m totally blown away that this story about Frank is actually true and someone at Comcast is helping me get through a really tough time.  This is how to keep a customer, and in an age where customer acquisition costs are growing rapidly and making a switch to another service is fairly easy, this kind of behavior will always be rewarded with loyalty and a story I will tell any friend who disses Comcast.