White-listing IP addresses? C'mon!!!
Like many others, I've been having trouble accessing Cox Email (specifically its SMTP server) while traveling. Cox personnel keep telling me Cox has to "whitelist" the IP address I'm using. But to m...
Forum Discussion
I just read your other posts reference Cox email. It appears you attempted to sort out any possible Cox email issues before you left the country. White-listing your email address would seem like the most effective solution. Cox forum moderator Becky seems to think this is possible and that the Tier 1 agent you spoke with did not have the proper training. Becky also mentioned that other Cox users traveling abroad have not been experiencing any issues. Becky did not indicate she would look into the matter to fix the issue which leads me to believe you are out of luck. I highly doubt you will get reimbursed for any of your email problems. I did notice you said you could login and access Cox Webmail. Can't you use just use Webmail until your trip is over?
Open,
You sound like a realist. And you're probably right: I'm just out of luck. But from a customer-service standpoint or justice-for-paying-customer standpoint, IMHO the whole situation is deplorable. I do intend to complain to Cox when I return to the US, not only for the lack of service, but also for the stonewalling -- for example, not being able to get a straight answer how Cox thinks white-listing individual IP addresses is even close to being practical.
For me it would have been far better for Cox to tell me it doesn't support email from outside the US, when I first called before I left (and as you said a short time ago). Then I could have thought about alternative solutions and set them in place. Instead, I was told everything would be fine, only to find after I was outside the US that sending email does not work, and now I have to try to troubleshoot from places like Tibet or Bhutan.
I don't know how Becky or anyone else from Cox can say other travelers are not having issues. There's a whole thread on this forum regarding problems with Cox email when traveling in Europe.
As for using WebMail, there are many reasons why I don't use it. Thunderbird lets me program filters, so some incoming mail is automatically sorted into folders ("Family," "Financial," "Solicitations," etc.). These folders are located on a Google Drive, where I have free storage many times larger than Cox's measly 2GB. Moreover, the five different email accounts I use are easily integrated, so I can look at them all at once or individually. Because Thunderbird is FOSS, I also can use many helpful extensions, that do things like synchronizing address books across all my devices, integrate calendars and emails, remove duplicate messages, save and schedule messages for sending later, convert emails to tasks or events, let me use LaTeX in emails, etc.
In particular, I have systems for keeping track of sent emails, emails used for Internet commerce sites I share with family members (e.g., Amazon), urgent to-do's, etc. Because my Cox account is the one I mainly use for personal affairs, having it broken is a major headache. When I get back to the US I'll have to track down and write to all correspondents who received emails from one of my Gmail accounts and have them switch to my Cox account. Good luck with that.
Because I had to come up with workarounds on the fly, the substitute systems were kludges and unreliable. An excellent example is that yesterday was my granddaughter's second birthday, and I had (thought I had) written my son about setting up a Skype or Whatsup video session. Ordinarily I would have sent this from my Cox account, but because it is broken I tried to work around using a different account. My son never even acknowledged receiving the message, and now I can't even find it. You sound like someone who's been around computers for a while, so you know that untested quick kludges are often error-prone. If Cox had been honest with me before I left, or if Cox had provide good customer service and actually fixed things when I called on 22-Sep., kludging would have not been necessary. Happy Birthday, Cox. Thanks a lot!
Maybe you're right. One way or the other, using Cox WebMail or using other accounts as substitute for Cox, would cause problems. If Cox had told me my regular email would not work, maybe I would have considered WebMail more seriously. But Cox told me it just had to white-list my wife's and my email addresses, after which everything would be hunky-dory. So I didn't consider WebMail. In the meantime, Cox did not white-list my wife's account because "there was a typo," and Cox still hasn't explained how there could be an undetected typo in its data-entry system, who made the typo, or why it took Cox over 3 weeks even to tell me about it.
