Yargh. I related last week about how, when I got back from my trip to the U.S., I could no longer send email, though I could receive it OK. My entry focused on how the tech support people for the ISP (KDDI Dion) insisted that I do all of this stupid stuff to “fix” the problem, all based upon the assumption that they were not at fault for the malfunction–this after they did a quick and cursory “check” to confirm that they were not the culprits here–despite the fact that I had all kinds of evidence showing that it was them.

One thing I specifically asked about was whether they had made any changes to their system. They said no; I pressed them on it, and they swore that not a single change had been made to their service. They even went so far as to claim that Google and my two separate web hosts had all changed their outgoing email protocols within a 12-hour period.

What’s more, to probe the problem further, they promised to set up my Dion email account again so I could test out their email service; if it worked, they claimed, then the problem would not be with them, but with someone else. Since it contained a password, they would have to send it by regular mail.

This was 6 days ago. I have still not received the promised package.

But it turns out that this is unnecessary. Today I figured out what the problem was. It was the ISP, like I suspected all along.

Turns out they did change their system. They switched on a security feature which requires all outgoing email to go through their SMTP servers. So all I did was change the SMTP servers to Dion’s, and it all works smoothly now.

Not only that, but had they set me up with the email account that never arrived, it would have worked–and they would have claimed that this proved they had not changed anything, when they actually had.

I called up the same support line and got the same person. Before telling them what happened, I asked them to confirm that they had assured me last week that KDDI Dion had changed nothing; they agreed that this was the case. Then I laid out what I had found, and got the expected reply: oh, they had told me all about changing the SMTP servers the week before, didn’t I hear them say that? Of course, it was easy to demonstrate that such was untrue, at which point they switched to telling me about how some setting had been changed at KDDI, but still the main fault was somehow my email providers. And then finally, after I’d pinned them down for causing me a week’s email outage for no good reason, they resorted to saying that this was all just stuff they were relating to me from the Japanese tech support people. They ended by having me specify what I had done to fix the problem, expressing surprise that such was the way to fix things.

Swell.