rojomo
map-marker Rochester, New Hampshire

ATT - AT&T Blackberry Email Changes

I travel a lot, and I manage a number of websites. As such, you shouldn't be surprised to learn that I both own a Blackberry and am pretty well dependent on it. My service is (post "re-branding") provided by AT&T. As most people know, AT&T used to be Cingular. Thus, when I signed up for service, the email address associated with my Blackberry ended in "@mycingular.blackberry.net". In setting up and manageing systems, I frequently need to provide an email address for alerts. Well, I could play forwarding games and expose myself to service outages (thought I), or I could just send them striaght to my Blackberry "@mycingular.blackberry.net". But then SBC ate AT&T, and the "new" AT&T ate Bell South and suddenly, the folks at the "newer" AT&T had complete operational control Cingular. So, AT&T ate Cingular as well, and renamed it... AT&T. Suddenly, according to AT&T, my email ended in "@att.blackberry.net." Now, even I need to admit that a "@mycingular.blackberry.net" email address seems kinda silly when Cingular doesn't exist any more. But that's what all my systems know about, and it still seemed to work, so life was good. Until two weeks ago. It seems that AT&T has decided to stop forwarding "@mycingular.blackberry.net" to "@att.blackberry.net", so I lost a substantial amount of email, and continue to lose it. I called AT&T, and they said it was "IMPOSSIBLE" to forward from @***.blackberry.net to @***.blackberry.net (even though they'd been doing it for months) and that all I had to do was "tell my friends" about my new email. Now AT&T was nice enough to put me in contact with RIM (the folks who actually run the email services for all Blackberry users). The guy at RIM was very upfront when he said "the only reason we turned it off was because AT&T told us to. It would be easy to turn it back on." So, now I'm out several thousand dollars of lost billable time (plus, I'm sure, some rather outraged customers if I fail to detect a service problem because of this snafu). It's ubelieveable.
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Loss:
$5