Whenever you call customer support for a product that is not a closed system, that seems to be their philosophy. I’m having the same problem with my ISP right now.

I went on vacation in the U.S. for two weeks, and when I got back, my POP email wouldn’t work right. (POP3 email is what you use with an email client like Eudora or Outlook Express, as opposed to web-based email like GMail or Yahoo Mail.) I can receive email all right, but I cannot send; the software says that the server doesn’t respond. Whenever I have had that problem in the past, it has always been the ISP either having some problem somewhere, or demanding that you set your email software exactly to their specifications.

When I called KDDI-Dion (they have an English-language help center, though you don’t get to talk to tech people, they mainly translate), they said that they ran a check of things on their end, and everything worked OK–so the fault must be on my end. I don’t know how extensive their check was on their end, so I can’t really call them out for not doing everything they could. And everything after that vague “check” was a suggestion that something was wrong somewhere else.

The thing is, it almost can’t be somewhere else. Let me explain. I went to the U.S. on December 12. At that time, my email was working fine. In the U.S., I used my PowerBook, my laptop computer, and email worked fine. Then I came back to Japan On December 28, and immediately, the email didn’t work. But that’s not all: I have three computers, two email programs (three, if you count different platforms), and three different SMTP (outgoing mail) servers. On three computers, I have two Mac OS’s and two Windows. I use Eudora 6.2 on both Macs, and Eudora 7 and Outlook Express on Windows. And I have two different web hosts with different SMTP server software, in addition to using Google’s GMail POP service.

And on all computers, and on all software, using all the different SMTP servers, the problem is exactly the same: I can receive mail, but cannot send it.

That sends a clear message: it’s not a software package problem, as three versions of two programs across two platforms cannot all simultaneously have the same problem. It’s not a problem specific to the computer, because three different computers running different platforms all have the same problem. And it’s not something different about the outgoing mail servers, because the same problem manifests itself with three different mail servers run by three different companies, and all started having the problem within a 12-hour period. While it is possible that all three companies involved all changed their mail server software within 12 hours of an upgrade, it is stretching things way too far to suggest that (a) this event just happened to occur exactly as I returned to Japan, and that (b) none of them released notifications of a change that would effectively disable outgoing email. Hold this up against there being a problem with my ISP somewhere, and there’s just no comparison.

Naturally, logically, all the evidence points to a problem with the ISP somewhere, that at some point in the two weeks during my trip to the U.S. that something got out of whack and caused this problem–but because that would involve KDDI-Dion having to do some work to suss out the problem, they seemed unwilling to admit that possibility. So I went through the motions with the support person trying out all the different email programs on all my computers with different things turned on and off, rewiring my network this way and that.

And when all these efforts failed, they tried to claim that it was the people running the email servers who had somehow all secretly upgraded their security software at the same time. When the rep told me about it, she even declared it as if it was an actual, reported event that had been announced somewhere. She didn’t say that they may have upgraded their security software, she said that they had upgraded it, and that was the problem. Had I been less well-equipped or less well-informed, I would have had no choice but to accept that line of bull, and would have been forced to deal futilely with my web hosts from then on about the SMTP server status.

All I can say is, thank god that I have so many different computers, programs, and email accounts available, otherwise I could not have insisted that they were almost certainly wrong on that one.

And of course, whenever you call tech support for just about any company that makes a product that in any way interacts with others, you get the same attitude: when it comes down to us doing actual work to solve your problem or blaming someone else, we blame someone else. That way, you make the other guys do the work before you do, even if all the evidence points to your system being the problem. I remember that even with Apple, in fact–one of the first things they would insist you do before they got involved was to blank out your hard drive and then reinstall everything from scratch, and only if the problem persisted after that, they would get involved. Well, thanks! All I have to do is a full day’s work, probably unnecessarily, to prove to you that it’s not my problem, but yours instead.

Now, that doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate the tough job tech support has. Believe me, I have had more than enough experience trying to solve computer problems for people over the phone. It can be painful. Being the most computer-savvy person that most of my friends, students, and co-workers know, I tend to get all the requests from people to help them when they have a problem. Which is why I am a very good tech support client, as I know to alert them to the details of my computer hardware and setup, tell them all the technical details about my software, and the precise nature and process of the malfunction, giving more detail rather then less.

Unfortunately for them, it also means that I don’t accept BS cover-your-ass answers either.

But at the very least, I ask them to work with me and not tell me to waste time hunting down by-the-book problems that I can logically eliminate as described above. In the end, I got them to do this. They were down to asking me to change the ports used by my SMTP servers when I insisted that we check out ISP equipment problems first. So soon I will do their local-equipment check of turning off the vDSL modem and router, then rebooting them while connected directly to just one computer. In the meantime, they are setting me up with a new password for the KDDI-Dion email account (I never use it and can’t recall the password I chose 3 years ago), so we can test whether I can send mail through their servers.

I hope it’ll clear up soon (and if anyone has any ideas about the problem, let me know!), because it can get really tiring dealing with a service which seems to be set up to do nothing but talk and slough off responsibility in every way possible before actually doing something.