MobileMe woes.
I love MobileMe. I evangelize their services often. Over-the-air syncing saved me hours of time when I got my new iMac.
That being said, their service support team sucks.
Things to remember throughout the scope of this post:
- I am a developer, I am not an average Joe user, I understand things you are saying when you talk about mail configurations
- I have a coworker, who is on MobileMe, and sits right behind me. He uses the same internet connection I do.
- Every chat with them gets logged
I get intermittent connectivity issues retrieving email, via Mail.app or the web interface, or even MobileMail.app (the iPhone mail app). Typically this happens around mid-afternoon. I try to send an email, get a spinning wheel of wait, turn to Jeff and ask him if he’s got any issues with MobileMe, get pissed he doesn’t and I do and switch to sending the email using another smtp server.
After about 3 months of this intermittent issue, I’d had enough. I tried and tried to locate a phone number for contacting them by phone. Chat seemed to be the only way I could get a hold of technical support. Lo and behold, I was right. Yay. I get to chat with Elvis (this was one of the reps “actual” name) about an sometimes reproducible, intermittent connectivity issue that is clearly related to something wrong on their end. (See “Things to remember throughout the scope of this post item #2”).
The first support rep ran through a battery of tests, and set me up a test MobileMe account on another server to send mail from to see if that would work when I had issues sending from my main MobileMe account. Thanks! Awesome help, and when I do I’ll just chat with someone else, and they can read my transcript and be able to help… This will work great!
Well, no less than an half an hour later, I run into my issue. Mail won’t send. Send an email from my test account, and it works again. Back to support chat… shit..
Next up is Elvis. Ok, Elvis. I’ll play your game. I’ll change setting in Mail.app because you think my internet service provider is blocking port 25. (Impossible, see #2) I’ll clear my cookies and cache in Safari and Firefox and IE for the Mac and whatever other browser you want me to, because I got an error message that said “CAN’T CONNECT TO MOBILE ME SERVERS” in the web app
I’m irate, but I have kept my calm thus far. Elvis suggests we keep the test account open to send emails from when I do have issues. I simply state, this is not a viable alternative. This issue is clearly related to the server my account is located on, or something related to setup there. I quickly get escalated to the next level of support.
Don, my MobileMe support specialist sends me an email. Here’s a snippet.
I’m going to ask you to perform two tests… TEST A: Sending mail with your email application … TEST B: Sending mail using MobileMe Mail ….
Then Don wants me to “restart my network hardware and perform the same two tests”.
Don clearly didn’t bother to read the chat transcripts that have accumulated during this process. Because, I’ve clearly outlined that THIS IS AN INTERMITTENT ISSUE. THAT MEANS THESE TEST WILL MOST LIKELY WORK WHEN I DO WHAT YOU ASK ME TO DO, DON.
Also, Don, don’t you think I wouldn’t have been escalated to “higher support”, if everything worked like it should?
To be continued…
