Verizon's Aggressive New Spam Filter Causing Problems 311
aviancarrier writes "Verizon DSL has turned on a very aggressive spam filter that is blocking lots of long-time legitimate emails. Emails get bounced with an error: 'XX@verizon.net: host relay.verizon.net[206.46.232.11] said: 550 Email from your Email Service Provider is currently blocked by Verizon Online's anti-spam system. The email "sender" or Email Service Provider may visit http://www.verizon.net/whitelist and request removal of the block.' That whitelist web page lets you request one address at a time to be whitelisted with no guarantee for their response time to process it. I have tested multiple email sources and only one got through. As a VZ customer, I just spent 28 minutes on a call to tech support, eventually got a supervisor who knows nothing about the new spam feature, and would only agree to email a manager who doesn't work weekends about it. I warned her that VZ has a public relations problem but she was too clueless to understand." Many users have submitted this problem so it seems to be a pretty far reaching problem. There is also a discussion going on over at Google about this problem.
the times they are a changin' (Score:1, Insightful)
I think that's a different job (Score:5, Insightful)
Having worked in tech support for a large company, I can assure you that the position of supervisor for a tech support call centre really doesn't have nearly as much influence on coprorate public relations as you seem to think that it has.
Most of the people in her position would be surprised to find out that any one from the head office even knows that they exist, let alone cares about what they do or asks their opinion on issues like PR. It's normal to be annoyed when a company like Verizon screws up like this, but lashing out at the tech support staff just because they're the easist people to reach really doesn't help anybody.
Re:There seems to be some mixup... (Score:3, Insightful)
Much ado about nothing?
It has probably not reached epidemic proportions yet, but as a former Verizon DSL customer, it does not surprise met that their idea of SPAM filtering is to block most legitimate incoming traffic. They tend to have a brute force approach to technical problems. Their tech support has been spotty for a long time; I would sometimes get really sharp people who could scope something out in minutes, other times I wondered if the tech knew what a router was.
If this goes on long enough, you can bet there will be a pretty strong backlash and the last thing Verizon needs is egg on its face. They'd hate to see customers flocking to cable and dumping their DSL, especially if those customers take their phone service along with them.
Re:Messages in bottles. (Score:4, Insightful)
> The worst offender that I've found so far is Comcast;
Sorry, but you're sending email from a residential IP with a rdns of something like "dsl-123-234-12-56.dyn.myisp.net" and you're calling comcast the offender?
The days of running your own mail server on a residential account are over -- blame the thousands of zombie spammers on your
You can get mail hosting for like five bucks a month. It's the cost of spam. Deal with it, because we sure as hell are.
Signed,
the world's mail administrators
that's sort of a ridiculous attitude (Score:5, Insightful)
Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I think that's a different job (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I think that's a different job (Score:3, Insightful)
What you say is true, of course. It's not the fault of the support center. But there's no one else who can take the heat, and Verizon has set it up that way deliberately. I'd rather we continue to fume at the support center until it becomes clear to them that they're being screwed by Verizon corporate as much as we are. Eventually Verizon will get a reputation for only being able to retain unskilled idiots in their support center, which will hurt their name brand. Which will hamper their attempts to branch out into other areas of business where they're not a monopoly.
Re:Update on the blocking (Score:3, Insightful)
This has been posted a bit in the main thread, but I'll restate it: the "customer service supervisor" you were talking to may have very few, if any, connections to Verizon corporate. For almost all large-scale customer service operations (where there are thousands or even millions of customers, and hundreds or thousands of customer support calls each month), the main company outsources their customer service department to an outside company (not necessarily overseas; there are a lot of companies that operate call centers within the US and Canada). This is because it would be too expensive for the company itself to hire the 24/7 staff, the call center telephone switchboard infrastructure, the office space, etc. to host its own customer service department. The staff under these companies are trained in the product (at varying levels of completeness, unfortunately), and have the customer service calls routed to their call center, where they attend to them. If the first customer service representative is unable to satisfy the issue with the tools at hand, they escalate to the next level, which could be ANYONE (a regular-hours engineer specialising in the issue, a call center representative with more experience in the product, or yet another pool of customer service representatives). Customer service trees can grow to have many levels, so if your issue actually did go to the top, you might be on the phone for hours or days at a time (or more likely, have to leave your number and be called back at some time).
Customer service operations are "outsourced" because the company providing the product does not want to spend the money to develop their own customer service infrastructure when they could just contract another company to use an existing infrastructure to receive service calls after an agreed-upon training curriculum and procedure policy. This is becoming a lot more common these days since businesses have been looking at ways to cut costs from every aspect of business, usually with disregard to the company's long-term well-being and public image. And of course, these call centers are only connected by their contract to the company producing the product, so there really is no way for them to relay company image issues, short of a weekly call statistics report.
Well, that about covers it; welcome to the brave new world of consumer products and services. This is the price of lower prices.
Not that simple. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's the fact that there is nothing to distinguish his email server from any of the hundreds (thousands?) of zombies on that same network.
In cases such as this, the best solution is for the home user to over-comply. And that means learning about relaying and getting a relay account on a server that does not look like a zombie.This is not about anyone being an idiot.
This is about making it as easy as possible for the other competent email admins to see that you are not a zombie.
The more concessions you expect from all of them, the more problems you'll face.
Re:Ah, yes, the "mailing list" defense (Score:2, Insightful)
It's not a solution, it's just a new problem.
Re:28 minutes? (Score:5, Insightful)
From that page:
That's very nice, but it doesn't seem like a very intelligent way to measure customer service. As a trivial example, suppose you want to know your credit card balance. A decently programmed voice response system can give you that information quickly and clearly, and in much less time than it would take to get the same data from a human. If you're lucky, the IVR won't even try to sell you something that you don't need.
Yes, I know that there are times when the available pre-programmed options are not useful and speaking to a representative is the only option. But do you want to have to wait in queue for an agent who has to handle ninety-twelve "what is my balance?" calls before it's your turn? Now ask yourself why the call centers are being outsourced to overseas providers
This "I only will deal with a human" attitude is pointless. Better to demand that corporations fix their IVR systems, because they're not going away. (And maybe I'll get hired to write more VUI specs instead of having to implement what 'the business' thinks it wants.)
Re:28 minutes? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:28 minutes? (Score:3, Insightful)
When I call in, it's because I have a problem or a question that isn't answerable by automated systems. After spending the last few years exploring phone trees exhaustively before finally saying "Yep, they can't handle it" and getting to a rep, I'm perfectly happy to rate companies on how easy that last step is.
Re:Not that simple. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:28 minutes? (Score:2, Insightful)
On the contrary. When IVR systems suck less, I'll use them more. (There are a couple good ones that I actually use regularly.) But until then, the way I demand better IVR is bypassing them. So when you get asked why the IVR system isn't meeting goals, tell 'em that it's the sucky UI.
Re:I think that's a different job (Score:2, Insightful)
So the mail team at verizon runs off and does this spam change, they don't notify anyone, and if they do, you can bet your wallet the outsourced contracted call center will not get a memo stating the change. (should they? yes, you figure it would do nothing but help, but we all know every company does everything perfect 100% of the time).
So your going to fire the call center guy who is probably hearing this from the people on the phone who are now yelling cause of lost email, etc. When this person has no power, no way to change a thing. (accept maybe your password). Kinda harsh.