The latest on the Comcast service emails debacle

By | July 20, 2009

After my last email to Comcast, there was a brief period of time during which service-related emails were actually being sent to me properly, i.e., they seemed to have actually fixed the problem.  However, yesterday the problem returned, i.e., once again my wife is receiving service-related emails and I’m not.

I want back and forth for many iterations with an extremely persistent support representative who obviously wanted very much to solve the problem.  However, he was clearly in over his head.  Throughout our correspondence, he repeatedly claimed that (a) the problem was being caused by settings on my wife’s and my Comcast email accounts, and (b) it was “impossible” that any of the settings on our accounts could have been changed by anyone besides us.  Both of these claims were clearly wrong, and I explained to him at length why, and yet he continued to assert them both, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.

When, for a brief period of time, I actually did properly receive a couple of service-related emails at my email address, the well-meaning support representative took credit for having solved the problem, despite the fact that all he had done was to make me change a couple of irrelevant settings on my account.

The more likely explanation for why the problem went away, temporarily, while he and I were corresponding, was that it was in fact fixed on the day of my EECB, but the fix didn’t take effect immediately because the recipient lists for service-related emails already in the pipeline had been generated before the fix was put into place.

As for why the problem has come back, the most likely explanation is that, according to them, they fixed a “database discrepancy” which was causing the issue, they didn’t fix the underlying root cause of that discrepancy, and either that root cause happened again, or the two databases with the discrepancy were synchronized and the fix was undone.

I have been saying all along that if they want to solve this problem properly, they should have one of their engineers working on it, not a support representative who neither understands (nor should he be expected to) nor has access to the back-end systems in which the problem is actually taking place.

Perhaps they will finally listen to me and get the right person to fix the problem now.  Somehow, I doubt it.

Here’s today’s email to Comcast:

Mr. [elided] et al,

I’m sorry to say that although the problem with service-related emails from Comcast being sent to my wife’s email address rather than mine appeared to have been fixed temporarily, it has returned.

As you can see, the attached service-related email was sent to my wife’s email address, not mine. I have yet again checked the logs on my mail server and my personal spam filter, and the message was not caught there; as before, I can find no evidence that any attempt was made to deliver this message to my email address.

Mr. [elided], you previously asserted that the service-related emails were being sent incorrectly because of settings on my wife’s and my accounts. I told you that I believed this was incorrect, and that if Comcast did not find and address the root cause of the problem, it was going to recur, if not for me than for someone else. I hope you will admit now that I was correct.

I also hope that you will now do whatever it takes to find the real cause of this issue and fix it permanently for me and whoever else is impacted by it.

Thank you,

Jonathan Kamens

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