HELP ME! PLEASE CALL! URGENT! IMPORTANT!
Your service is really messing up my mail.
1. Email getting deleted randomly w/o archive.
2. SPF constantly being applied to mail making it unusable -- even my own OUTBOUND mail. What?!?
3. You have no phone #, so real-time problems cannot be solved. I found a phone # by doing an NSLOOKUP.
4. Your company's email "solution" has caused me significant business and personal problems.
5. There needs to be a better way of doing business than this. Some form of real-time premium phone support. Email is vital. Why do you think I am paying extra for spam filtering?
6. I reserve all consumer rights and rights of free speech. I will blog this issue (8daysoffline.blogspot.com), tell others about it, contact the BBB, and either recommend or disrecommend SpamArrest based on the feedback I get, or lack thereof. I might even write a book given the craziness email has caused me. There would be an entire chapter on SpamArrest. The good, the bad, and the ugly.
Please contact me! BY PHONE! 650-906-3134
-Peter Corless.
petercorless@mac.com
650-906-3134
petercorless.blogspot.com
8daysoffline.blogspot.com
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Into and out of the Rabbit Hole
This is the true story of how my Macintosh ate Sleeping Beauty.
A couple of years ago, I don’t remember exactly when, my Macintosh started eating my email.
For many years, I had so much email I just ignored it. Thousands and thousands of emails. Spam. Business correspondence. Personal friends. Non-profits I founded or worked for. Non-profits asking me for donations. People trying to send me money.
It was too much. Literally, I let over 10,000 messages pile up, and it kept piling up.
I stopped reading email.
So I got SpamArrest. I got a new Mac.
Slowly, but surely, I started emailing people again. People started getting in contact with me again.
Because of other emotional scars I bore because of my c. 2000-2002 personal meltdown, I often got emails but was an utter slacker. Even to this day I have more emails inbound than outbound. Time management and email management is a critical, urgent, and important issue in modern communications.
For a man who used to pride himself for riding the crest of the tech wave, I have to admit I went under. This blog is called "8 days offline." Yet I was unplugged from most of the day-to-day world of reality for years.
Where was I?
I was in cyberspace playing games. Peter Panning. Not growing up.
I had enough in the bank to pay my rent for years. If people played Castle Marrach (c. 2001-2006, off-and-on), or perhaps World of Warcraft (Nov 2007 - Aug 2008) they'd find me. Otherwise, mail and email piled up like trash, or eTrash.
Since 2006, more or less, I have been on the wobbly road to data and information recovery. Getting in touch with friends again. Starting new businesses. I still have more dollars than sense, so I don’t “need” a job. Though I can see the end of that runway. I'll need to take off within the next year, and get one of these enterprises of mine, for-profit or non-profit, into a stable orbit.
Today, I saw an email from a friend, who I will identify only as Sleeping Beauty. Oh! I was so glad to hear from her!
Then the Mac ate my email. Gone.
Nooooooooo!!!!
It happens. It's been happening ever since I got my email started up again. Perhaps it was eating them the whole time.
An email will pop up at the top of the queue. Then vanish! I hit no key. I did nothing. Just.. poof! As suddenly as it appeared. No viruses as far as Norton can tell. No restarting the Mac does nothing. I’ll give a hairy eyeball to anyone who makes lame-brained suggestions for solutions. This is a difficult problem to detect, or I would have resolved it by now.
Is it my Mac OS? Is it the Apple mail client? Is it SpamArrest, my email spam-scraper? Is it the MobileMe (aka .Mac) email infrastructure that somehow retroactively killed it?
When you know that Sleeping Beauty is a lovely, lovely friend, and you'd like to get in touch with her after all these years, and when you want to archive her tender, sweet, friendship letters to you, you do what you can to get them back, don't you?
If this kept happening to all sorts of important correspondence, you'd want to solve the problem before you lost more precious, invaluable treasures, yes?
I called Apple.
The IVR failed again. These were the terms it could not understand:
Macintosh OS X ("Ecks")
.mac (“dot mac”)
Mac.com (“Mac dot com”)
Mail
None of them were recognized. The IVR kept trying to suggest I had a problem with an Apple Color Monitor. Uh... no.
Finally I got to speak to a human. Chris, he's a nice guy. He had an easy laugh, and offered no resistance to helping me.
He could see why I'd want to get back in touch with a Sleeping Beauty, and why one would call to get this sort of thing cleared up immediately.
Chris also thought it was funny how this was all happening, and the sort of oddball, humorous, but positive process it was. If we ever turn this into a book, Chris deserves a picture on page 118 or thereabouts as an example of someone who intuitively gets the concept of helping the customer achieve their goals.
To be fair, I am not surprised at the technical problem, nor am I surprised that Apple has good people like Chris to answer the call. I myself worked at Apple 1991-1992 on the System 7 AnswerLine. I am a lifelong Apple fan because of how they treat me as a customer. I owe a great chunk of my professional career, my personal fortune in life, and my happiness to the Apple Macintosh computer.
When I came out here in 1989, I tracked down Guy Kawasaki at ACIUS, where he worked at the time. He introduced me to his beautiful wife, and I shook his hand to thank him for writing The Macintosh Way. I still have that book on my shelf.
Part of what I am driving at in 8 Days Offline is that spirit. The good-natured, positive, progressive human contact component of one’s business. It is the holistic yet quintessential element of the overall product and support process.
Like I said, though, here, the ideal failed. I did not get IDd with the right product, and so I did not get routed to the proper team at Apple. But with Chris, I got to the right guy!
He understood it was not in the Apple IVR, and honestly admitted there had been a few problems with the IVR other customers had commented on.
I offered to work for Apple to help solve the problem. “For today, the first call is free!” I asked him to take down my email and phone in case anyone wanted to get back in touch with me.
Meanwhile, he succeeded in one more way. When I asked for a Ticket number, he took about one minute and then gave me Case ID 105306592.
I also told him an expression I learned from Paula Montgomery, a Customer Service manager at Cisco Systems. She was also, briefly, my roommate in Newark, CA.
“You're killing me smalls!”
It is a quote from the movie, “The Sandlot.” Chris laughed when he heard the expression. He remembered the movie too. I loved it.
Paula used to use it all the time, when we'd have to call Manufacturing to get something straightened out. Or when a process had a small failure we could get cleared up easily if we could get someone to just make the change, but someone was giving us a sort of “I didn’t say Simon Says” no-can-do.
“You’re killing me, Smalls!” was her way to make it a bit of light humor. Suzanne Vega, in more earnestness, has the line, “It’s so small to you, it’s so large to me. If it’s the last thing I do, I’ll make you see.”
How often in life are problems so small for one person, but so significant for another?
This was the issue with me losing an email from Sleeping Beauty. “So what?” others can say. It was not a million dollars. No. No lives were lost in the misplacement of the email. No nations crumbled and no species were directly extincted by the scattering of those electrons.
Yet it is part of a low-grade fever of miscommunications that can frustrate people and prevent communications. After all, I have spent more real time documenting this problem here on 8 Days Offline than it took to read the email before it poofed out of existence.
I am sure I can cobble together how to get in touch with my friend — this time — yet I can clearly recall other emails I lost recently. It keeps happening. Like a demon in my hard drive.
At this point, I want to exorcise my Macintosh, rather than exercise my demons, to make my operating system safe for Sleeping Beauty.
A couple of years ago, I don’t remember exactly when, my Macintosh started eating my email.
For many years, I had so much email I just ignored it. Thousands and thousands of emails. Spam. Business correspondence. Personal friends. Non-profits I founded or worked for. Non-profits asking me for donations. People trying to send me money.
It was too much. Literally, I let over 10,000 messages pile up, and it kept piling up.
I stopped reading email.
So I got SpamArrest. I got a new Mac.
Slowly, but surely, I started emailing people again. People started getting in contact with me again.
Because of other emotional scars I bore because of my c. 2000-2002 personal meltdown, I often got emails but was an utter slacker. Even to this day I have more emails inbound than outbound. Time management and email management is a critical, urgent, and important issue in modern communications.
For a man who used to pride himself for riding the crest of the tech wave, I have to admit I went under. This blog is called "8 days offline." Yet I was unplugged from most of the day-to-day world of reality for years.
Where was I?
I was in cyberspace playing games. Peter Panning. Not growing up.
I had enough in the bank to pay my rent for years. If people played Castle Marrach (c. 2001-2006, off-and-on), or perhaps World of Warcraft (Nov 2007 - Aug 2008) they'd find me. Otherwise, mail and email piled up like trash, or eTrash.
Since 2006, more or less, I have been on the wobbly road to data and information recovery. Getting in touch with friends again. Starting new businesses. I still have more dollars than sense, so I don’t “need” a job. Though I can see the end of that runway. I'll need to take off within the next year, and get one of these enterprises of mine, for-profit or non-profit, into a stable orbit.
Today, I saw an email from a friend, who I will identify only as Sleeping Beauty. Oh! I was so glad to hear from her!
Then the Mac ate my email. Gone.
Nooooooooo!!!!
It happens. It's been happening ever since I got my email started up again. Perhaps it was eating them the whole time.
An email will pop up at the top of the queue. Then vanish! I hit no key. I did nothing. Just.. poof! As suddenly as it appeared. No viruses as far as Norton can tell. No restarting the Mac does nothing. I’ll give a hairy eyeball to anyone who makes lame-brained suggestions for solutions. This is a difficult problem to detect, or I would have resolved it by now.
Is it my Mac OS? Is it the Apple mail client? Is it SpamArrest, my email spam-scraper? Is it the MobileMe (aka .Mac) email infrastructure that somehow retroactively killed it?
When you know that Sleeping Beauty is a lovely, lovely friend, and you'd like to get in touch with her after all these years, and when you want to archive her tender, sweet, friendship letters to you, you do what you can to get them back, don't you?
If this kept happening to all sorts of important correspondence, you'd want to solve the problem before you lost more precious, invaluable treasures, yes?
I called Apple.
The IVR failed again. These were the terms it could not understand:
Macintosh OS X ("Ecks")
.mac (“dot mac”)
Mac.com (“Mac dot com”)
None of them were recognized. The IVR kept trying to suggest I had a problem with an Apple Color Monitor. Uh... no.
Finally I got to speak to a human. Chris, he's a nice guy. He had an easy laugh, and offered no resistance to helping me.
He could see why I'd want to get back in touch with a Sleeping Beauty, and why one would call to get this sort of thing cleared up immediately.
Chris also thought it was funny how this was all happening, and the sort of oddball, humorous, but positive process it was. If we ever turn this into a book, Chris deserves a picture on page 118 or thereabouts as an example of someone who intuitively gets the concept of helping the customer achieve their goals.
To be fair, I am not surprised at the technical problem, nor am I surprised that Apple has good people like Chris to answer the call. I myself worked at Apple 1991-1992 on the System 7 AnswerLine. I am a lifelong Apple fan because of how they treat me as a customer. I owe a great chunk of my professional career, my personal fortune in life, and my happiness to the Apple Macintosh computer.
When I came out here in 1989, I tracked down Guy Kawasaki at ACIUS, where he worked at the time. He introduced me to his beautiful wife, and I shook his hand to thank him for writing The Macintosh Way. I still have that book on my shelf.
Part of what I am driving at in 8 Days Offline is that spirit. The good-natured, positive, progressive human contact component of one’s business. It is the holistic yet quintessential element of the overall product and support process.
Like I said, though, here, the ideal failed. I did not get IDd with the right product, and so I did not get routed to the proper team at Apple. But with Chris, I got to the right guy!
He understood it was not in the Apple IVR, and honestly admitted there had been a few problems with the IVR other customers had commented on.
I offered to work for Apple to help solve the problem. “For today, the first call is free!” I asked him to take down my email and phone in case anyone wanted to get back in touch with me.
Meanwhile, he succeeded in one more way. When I asked for a Ticket number, he took about one minute and then gave me Case ID 105306592.
I also told him an expression I learned from Paula Montgomery, a Customer Service manager at Cisco Systems. She was also, briefly, my roommate in Newark, CA.
“You're killing me smalls!”
It is a quote from the movie, “The Sandlot.” Chris laughed when he heard the expression. He remembered the movie too. I loved it.
Paula used to use it all the time, when we'd have to call Manufacturing to get something straightened out. Or when a process had a small failure we could get cleared up easily if we could get someone to just make the change, but someone was giving us a sort of “I didn’t say Simon Says” no-can-do.
“You’re killing me, Smalls!” was her way to make it a bit of light humor. Suzanne Vega, in more earnestness, has the line, “It’s so small to you, it’s so large to me. If it’s the last thing I do, I’ll make you see.”
How often in life are problems so small for one person, but so significant for another?
This was the issue with me losing an email from Sleeping Beauty. “So what?” others can say. It was not a million dollars. No. No lives were lost in the misplacement of the email. No nations crumbled and no species were directly extincted by the scattering of those electrons.
Yet it is part of a low-grade fever of miscommunications that can frustrate people and prevent communications. After all, I have spent more real time documenting this problem here on 8 Days Offline than it took to read the email before it poofed out of existence.
I am sure I can cobble together how to get in touch with my friend — this time — yet I can clearly recall other emails I lost recently. It keeps happening. Like a demon in my hard drive.
At this point, I want to exorcise my Macintosh, rather than exercise my demons, to make my operating system safe for Sleeping Beauty.
Friday, August 22, 2008
WoW. My Return Key Broke...
From November 2007 to July 2008 I played a lot of WoW.
Like... A lot.
I was probably putting in more hours into the World of Warcraft than most people put into their full-time jobs. Over that period, I raced to Level 70 with two characters and created two more on my roster. Tons of PvP. Epic Season 2 gear. Tons of PvE, too. Awesome Badge of Honor gear. Was it the best gear in the game? Not really. But for someone who had played less than a year, it was real damn good.
Truth in advertising: My frenetic, addicted rate of play was like a “burning crusade” to get my characters up as far and as fast as possible.
Over time, I joined the raiding guild Demise on the Aggramar server. A great guild: strong leadership, good friends, and a lot of fun. If anyone plays WoW on that server, is a mature player who is serious about raiding, and has a Level 70 on their roster, I recommend to look into Demise.
We cleared Karazhan. Gruul’s Lair. We were making our practice runs and forays into Serpentshrine Cavern. Lots and lots of Daily Heroics.
For those in the world who are utterly unfamiliar with the World of Warcraft, that is alright. Stay calm. “Don’t panic!”
Just know these are the Major Leagues of the World of Warcraft. The Big Kahuna battles. Five-man heroic teams. Ten-man raids. Twenty-five man raids. Forty-man raids. It is much like joining the military. A company-at-arms. Squad-level and platoon-level action. Brothers (and sisters) in arms from all around the world. I was near instantly friends with people from the US, Canada, Trinidad and Columbia. I even made a real-world friend here in the San Francisco Bay Area. It was great to talk to all these people from all these different walks of life. Together, in a chaotic symphony of bloodshed and magical explosions, we’d tear apart some big bad monster and save the world.
But suddenly, the world was over.
At least for me it was.
Only the World of Warcraft. The real world was still fine.
Alas! My trusty Macintosh broke. The return key was kaput. No matter how often or how hard I hit return, it never did anything. Everything entered stayed on a single line of text. That sort of made writing documents difficult. I couldn’t enter a URL, because the browser didn’t accept the carriage return. (Though I could select that little green arrow beside the URL field in Firefox.)
It was really awkward to type.
On top of that, the right arrow key was apparently broken too. It was as if some invisible pinky finger kept it constantly depressed even though I never touched it. Because of this, in the World of Warcraft, my characters spun in place to the right constantly. Turning and turning like a whirling dervish.
After a bit of testing, I discovered if I clicked on the left arrow and also kept it depressed, I would straighten out. The left-and-right effects balanced out. Even so, it was like having a car out of alignment. I constantly drifted to the right.
As a warrior-class “tank” in the game, it was hazardous to play with me. My character was unreliable and could go into an uncontrollable spin at any time. How can I protect the other characters if I cannot control my own motion and direction? I was a hazard to their virtual lives.
Quite literally, because of my Mac’s mechanical failures, my WoW characters seemed depressed, spinning dizzily out of control and had no hope of returning!
So I did the only merciful thing I could do: I brought my MacBook Pro in to the Apple Store in Palo Alto for repair.
At the Genius Bar, I asked how long it would take to get my Macintosh repaired. They were a bit vague, since they’d have to get the whole keyboard replaced. Maybe even test the motherboard. It was all fine with me. I knew I had needed to take a break from WoW at last. I had played it out. Not to the extreme end of “End Game Content,” but that I was content with what I had played so far. I could take it or leave it at this point. So, I left my Mac in the hands of the powers-that-be.
As they say in the Grail Legends, I “let the reins drop free,” and surrended to where the fates would lead me. It was liberating. After I checked my Mac into computational rehab, I walked out into the sunshine of a brilliant California summer.
I would not get my Macintosh back for 8 days.
This is the story of how my life changed over that period, one day at a time. When it was over, I had committed my life to a new path.
Just imagine what you might do, if this had happened to you.
Me? I was happy as a clam. I had a smile on my face, and a plan in my head.
I'll tell you more soon.
Like... A lot.
I was probably putting in more hours into the World of Warcraft than most people put into their full-time jobs. Over that period, I raced to Level 70 with two characters and created two more on my roster. Tons of PvP. Epic Season 2 gear. Tons of PvE, too. Awesome Badge of Honor gear. Was it the best gear in the game? Not really. But for someone who had played less than a year, it was real damn good.
Truth in advertising: My frenetic, addicted rate of play was like a “burning crusade” to get my characters up as far and as fast as possible.
Over time, I joined the raiding guild Demise on the Aggramar server. A great guild: strong leadership, good friends, and a lot of fun. If anyone plays WoW on that server, is a mature player who is serious about raiding, and has a Level 70 on their roster, I recommend to look into Demise.
We cleared Karazhan. Gruul’s Lair. We were making our practice runs and forays into Serpentshrine Cavern. Lots and lots of Daily Heroics.
For those in the world who are utterly unfamiliar with the World of Warcraft, that is alright. Stay calm. “Don’t panic!”
Just know these are the Major Leagues of the World of Warcraft. The Big Kahuna battles. Five-man heroic teams. Ten-man raids. Twenty-five man raids. Forty-man raids. It is much like joining the military. A company-at-arms. Squad-level and platoon-level action. Brothers (and sisters) in arms from all around the world. I was near instantly friends with people from the US, Canada, Trinidad and Columbia. I even made a real-world friend here in the San Francisco Bay Area. It was great to talk to all these people from all these different walks of life. Together, in a chaotic symphony of bloodshed and magical explosions, we’d tear apart some big bad monster and save the world.
But suddenly, the world was over.
At least for me it was.
Only the World of Warcraft. The real world was still fine.
Alas! My trusty Macintosh broke. The return key was kaput. No matter how often or how hard I hit return, it never did anything. Everything entered stayed on a single line of text. That sort of made writing documents difficult. I couldn’t enter a URL, because the browser didn’t accept the carriage return. (Though I could select that little green arrow beside the URL field in Firefox.)
It was really awkward to type.
On top of that, the right arrow key was apparently broken too. It was as if some invisible pinky finger kept it constantly depressed even though I never touched it. Because of this, in the World of Warcraft, my characters spun in place to the right constantly. Turning and turning like a whirling dervish.
After a bit of testing, I discovered if I clicked on the left arrow and also kept it depressed, I would straighten out. The left-and-right effects balanced out. Even so, it was like having a car out of alignment. I constantly drifted to the right.
As a warrior-class “tank” in the game, it was hazardous to play with me. My character was unreliable and could go into an uncontrollable spin at any time. How can I protect the other characters if I cannot control my own motion and direction? I was a hazard to their virtual lives.
Quite literally, because of my Mac’s mechanical failures, my WoW characters seemed depressed, spinning dizzily out of control and had no hope of returning!
So I did the only merciful thing I could do: I brought my MacBook Pro in to the Apple Store in Palo Alto for repair.
At the Genius Bar, I asked how long it would take to get my Macintosh repaired. They were a bit vague, since they’d have to get the whole keyboard replaced. Maybe even test the motherboard. It was all fine with me. I knew I had needed to take a break from WoW at last. I had played it out. Not to the extreme end of “End Game Content,” but that I was content with what I had played so far. I could take it or leave it at this point. So, I left my Mac in the hands of the powers-that-be.
As they say in the Grail Legends, I “let the reins drop free,” and surrended to where the fates would lead me. It was liberating. After I checked my Mac into computational rehab, I walked out into the sunshine of a brilliant California summer.
I would not get my Macintosh back for 8 days.
This is the story of how my life changed over that period, one day at a time. When it was over, I had committed my life to a new path.
Just imagine what you might do, if this had happened to you.
Me? I was happy as a clam. I had a smile on my face, and a plan in my head.
I'll tell you more soon.
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