Darius
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Joined 9 years ago
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Will Yahoo let me store messages outside of Yahoo?
I use Thunderbird, and I'm very happy with it. One thing I do routinely is use filters and similar devices to store messages outside my Cox account's message space. For example, all messages sent via my Cox account, as well as other email accountsm are stored in another email-provider's storage space; all incoming Cox emails containing the word "unsubscribe" are stored in another folder ("subscriptions") on another provider's storage space, so I can view them when I can and they don't fill up my inbox. Will I be able to do this with Yahoo email? (Please note. I deliberately avoid email apps on mobile devices, except MacBooks, because I have not found a mobile app that affords this level of functionality. So, I'm really only talking about Thunderbird on MacOS.)19Views0likes1CommentWhat's happening to my incoming email?
Since January, Cox has been warning me of the switchover to Yahoo. I finally received notice that my account was ready to switch on Apr. 7. I tried to follow the instructions but when I seemed to have done everything they required, I got a message to the effect that the system was unavailable and I should try again later. But I had a plane to catch, so I couldn't try again later. Furthermore, I am out of the country for most of this month. Nonetheless, I notice that I am not receiving messages sent to my Cox account, even though I never successfully completed the switchover process. I understood that nothing would change to our Cox accounts until we had succeeded in switching over. But obviously, something has changed. What's happening to my incoming messages?86Views0likes1CommentRe: Scheduled Outage
No. It does not. In fact, the evidence contradicts your explanation. Cox also put a hang tag on our mailbox. The tag has only two pre-printed time slots: morning and afternoon. It also says outages usually last less than four hours. Dividing 24 hours in a day by 4 yields six possible time slots. But apparently Cox does not want to pay overtime or take other steps less likely to inconvenience end users. For example, Cox could monitor totaltraffic in a neighborhood and then select a 4-hour slot when traffic is minimal. The fact that the hang tag has only two preprinted time slots speaks volumes about whose convenience Cox values most.5Views0likes1CommentScheduled Outage
For the first time, I received advanced notice of a scheduled outage to my service. It's on 2/27. Hooray! But 2/27 is a Monday, which is a day when I, along with most people I know, will be planning to get work done. When I was a systems programmer on a mainframe computer, we always scheduled major, planned outages for Sunday mornings from 00:00 to 08:00. Why doesn't Cox do something similar?701Views1like3CommentsRe: Outage
I suggest you, and the rest of us, contact our state and federal representatives. Ask them to enact lawsrequiring companies to compensate consumers when companies waste their time. The first encounter should be no-fault, but after that if the company does not address a legitimate issue, the consumer will be compensated for their time spent on it at the same hourly rate as the company compensates its CEO (complete with benefits, stock options, etc.). This under the theory that a consumer's time is as valuable to him/her as the CEO's time is valuable to him/her: we're all born and we all will die. In your case, your situation is a bit different. Most people who've posted here, tried to get Cox to addressa problem, and Cox keeps jerking them around. In your case, it sounds as if Cox might have known about the outage, planned for it, but failed to notify you. So Cox wasted your time. If so, then there should be no no-fault excuse; instead, you and other customers should be compensated for any reasonable amount of time you spent due to Cox's negligence. Not notifying you for a planned upgrade would be negligence. The one legitimate excuse in your case would be if the outage was unforeseeable, Cox responded to it immediately, and Cox had no way to contact youto let you know what was going on. OTOH, failure to staff phone and chat support adequately would be negligence, and therefore your time trying to get such support would be compensated at the CEO rate. Such legislation would have three positive effects. (1) It would create an incentive structure for spatial monopolists like Cox to providedecent service. (2) It would discourage the outrageous growth in CEO pay (since 1978: 940% for CEOs vs 12% for workers; the ratio of CEO:worker pay has grown from around 20:1 to as much as 278:1). (3) It would serve justice by compensating persons who did nothing wrong but must subscribe to Cox because of lacking alternatives.1View0likes1CommentRe: cox email and VPN
Superbigwaff, Do you know this works, or are you just suggesting giving this a try? The last time I asked Cox about the problem, the Tier 1 support person(s) were completely unhelpful. (I.e., they were ignorant about the issue and just wasted my time.) Apparently, VPN is not part of Cox's training.26Views0likes0Comments“The user is currently already connected to a known proxy”
I have used the STARZ app for a couple years now by logging in through Cox Internet via various devices (Android TV, Amazon Fire TV). Today I got the message “The user is currently already connected to a known proxy” when I tried to log on. What does this mean? I'm not even asking anyone to tell me what's wrong or how to fix the problem. Please just explain the error message.2.9KViews0likes0CommentsRe: White-listing IP addresses? C'mon!!!
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.0Views1like0CommentsRe: White-listing IP addresses? C'mon!!!
Open, Unfortunately, what you say is not what Cox says. It says it does provide the service in foreign countries, and it does so by white-listing. Some Cox representatives say Cox white-lists email addresses, but most say it white-lists individual IP addresses, something I find absurd. Instead, I think representatives in the latter group, all of whom have lower technical status than the ones who say email addresses, don't really understand what IP addresses are or how they're assigned. I agree with you about using a VPN. In fact, if you look at some other threads, you will see I made the same recommendation for the same reason as you. The VPN I usually use, IP-Vanish, is installed on all my computers. But even when I select a U.S. location for the server (Chicago, Seattle, etc.), usually I still can't access the Cox SMTP server. If I use a foreign SIM card in my dual-SIM mobile phone, I can still get a U.S. IP address because I have IP-Vanish installed on the phone. But I doubt this alone will solve the SMTP server problem, because it doesn't solve it on my laptop or tablet. I've been very happy with IP-Vanish, and think adding another VPN to the mix at this point will only make things more complex and make the real problem harder to isolate. I think the next step is to get someone at Cox with a technical education and who really understands TCP/IP either to explain how it's practical for Cox to white-list individual IP addresses or to admit that the lower-level support personnel are confusing IP addresses with email addresses, which are an indirect form of addressing through mail servers, and therefore are indifferent to IP addresses changing frequently.9Views0likes2CommentsRe: White-listing IP addresses? C'mon!!!
Lots of Cox representatives have sent me emails, but when they say something STUPID and I question them about it, they often don't reply. I did get one response from an agent who identifies himself as "Dustin" but he still won't explain how it can possibly be practical for Cox to white list IP addresses. Instead, he asks me to provide the following information every time my IP address changes: Country, Cox.net user ID, IP address (he doen't say public or private), is the IP address static or via DHCP (Earlier I told Cox than anyone traveling necessarily is using DHCP, so just assume DHCP all the time. But apparently reading is not one of the skills Cox requires for its tech support.) But based on my recent side-trip to Tibet I came up with the following calculations. I realize a DHCP server may assign the same IP address more than once, so in some sense these calculations are a worst-case scenario. But because the user has no way to know if they have the same IP address as before until after the DHCP server has reassigned the address, the customer still has to do the same amount of work Here's what I wrote back to Dustin: Just take my recent experience in Tibet as an example. I flew from Nepal to Tibet on an airplane -- this was IP address 1. Then from the airport it was 1 hour drive to Lhasa. If I could have gotten a SIM card, this would have been IP Address 2. Then at the hotel there was one WiFi network for my room and one for the dining room. These were IP addresses 3 & 4. But then when I came back to my room after eating dinner, the DHCP server for the network in my room would have assigned a new IP address, as would the dining room when I went to eat breakfast the next morning. These are IP addresses 5 & 6. Going back to my room would add IP address 7. If we assume breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day, we'd be adding 7 IP addresses daily. We spent four consecutive days in Lhasa, so we're up to 35 IP addresses. Then, as a side trip, we went to the city of Shigatse. Along the way going we stopped for lunch. Add 1 IP address for the restaurant where we ate lunch, one for the hotel room, and one for the hotel's dining room where we ate breakfast the next morning. So we're up to 38 IP addresses. Then it's back to Lhasa, and another IP address at the restaurant for lunch. Then it's back to the original hotel: add one IP address for the hotel room, one for the dining room, and another for the hotel room after dinner. So now it's 42 addresses. We stayed at the hotel another two days, so add 14 IP addresses, and we're up to 56. Then it's back on a plane, and we have 57 different IP addresses. Multiply this by 2 for my wife and me, and you have 114 different IP addresses. Now multiply this resulting product by 3 -- for laptop, tablet, and mobile phone -- and you have a possible 342 separate IP addresses. And we haven't even begun to count dynamic IP addresses that the DHCP server decides to reassign. And this is for just nine days in Tibet. I'm traveling for almost two months! So multiply this number by 6: that's 2,052 distinct IP addresses! ARE YOU KIDDING ME? DO YOU REALLY EXPECT CUSTOMERS TO CONTACT YOU OVER TWO THOUSAND TIMES SIMPLY BECAUSE COX CAN'T FIGURE OUT HOW TO WHITE-LIST INDIRECT ADDRESSES, LIKE EMAIL ADDRESSES, INSTEAD OF IP ADDRESSES? ALSO, WHY ARE OTHER COMPANIES LIKE GOOGLE AND YAHOO ABLE TO HANDLE CUSTOMERS ROAMING OUTSIDE THE U.S. WITHOUT KNOWING INDIVIDUAL IP ADDRESSES, BUT COX CAN'T FIGURE OUT HOW TO DO THIS? YOU'RE JOKING, RIGHT? And I should have added, but didn't think of it at the time: AND HOW IS A CUSTOMER SUPPOSED TO CONTACT YOU WHENEVER AN IP ADDRESS CHANGES IF YOU BREAK THEIR EMAIL EVERY TIME IT DOES? I think the above clearly demonstrates either that this Cox technician and others who have also said Cox has to white list individual IP addresses don't know what they're talking about, or that Cox really hasn't thought this through.2Views0likes4Comments