4
2007
AOL MyeAddress, completely non-functional; Tech support, completely incompetent
I have been an avid fan of new services offered by companies, to compare different ones and find the best to use. So for my domain I have been using Google Apps for e-mail and it has been working flawlessly. Needless to say I have been very happy with them (kudos!). Support was quite non-existent but never really had a serious issue with them.
Then Microsoft came with their Windows Live Custom Domains. Even though the package was not as good as Google, a sense of loyalty to my company drove me towards using it. Using it was a no-brainer. Sign up with your Live ID and register your domains. Since I was already happy with Google Apps, I gave it a miss. But when they introduced support for sub-domains I was more than happy to try it out and my mail.smart-techie.com is hosted on it. Not a problem with that ever, yay Microsoft. BTW their support was just great!
Now enter AOL. Famous for its terrible ways (and how it was made to make everything on its site free!). For sometime, they didn’t even have free customer support. When they came with one, it was pathetic. Now, I registered my primary domain with them for their myeAddress service expecting it… to work. Big surprise, it didn’t (actually it wasn’t that much of surprise).
Finally I found a link to contact their live customer care. Live… must be able to solve problems quickly.
So I tried contacting one of them that their service failed to recognize that I had set up the MX records for my domain correctly. That guy had a pseudonym Leon and tried to help. But when things like MX records and mail servers and registrars came into the picture, it was apparent he was lost. He tried to begin at Step 1 for him which was the registrar. Since my registrar wasn’t one listed, he said I won’t be able to use the service. WTH, since when did the web start to discriminate people based on the registrar of their domain or was AOL so stupid that they checked the registrar’s site to get MX records (ROFL, are they doing that!). Anyway I persisted and finally brought some sense into that guy who agreed that my settings were indeed correct and promised to contact me after a day.
Hi! It’s me, Leon. We appreciate your patience with this matter. Please try setting up your My E-Address after 24-48 hours. I have already escalated this to my supervisor, and filed a report so the My E-Address development team would study this, and I asked for confirmation if your registrar is supported by My E-Address. Please let me know the result. You may send me an e-mail to this address. (AOLTECHLMP@AOL.COM)
Thank you so much.
Leon / AOLTechLMP
Customer Care Consultant
AOL LLC
When I didn’t get a reply after a day, I again fired the chat thingy on their support site. Now it is 4th July, the American Independence Day, so support guys in the US are on a holiday. Enter their Indian BPO offices… The first guy I get is Arun.
…
Me: I have access to the nameservers for my domain and had changed them myself
Me: the registrar is not involved in setting up these settings for me
Me: I am not using the registrar’s nameservers
TechLiveARM: Ok. So you are the domain owner is it ?
Me: right
Me: I have checked the MX record configuration on third party sites like dnsstuff.com and mxtoolbox.com and they are showing the updated settings
TechLiveARM: All right. Please Log in to your registrar’s website and go to the MX record maintenance page. And provide me that link please. I will check information on that.
What, didn’t I tell that guy that I have my own domain and nameservers?
Me: The registrar doesn’t maintain MX settings for me, that’s what I am telling here. He just has NS records pointed to my nameservers
Me: My nameservers mentioned in the NS records have the MX records with them
Crash course in DNS 101 to a tech support guy.
Me: You can use a site like http://www.mob.net/~ted/tools/mx.php3 or http://www.davidj.org/tools/whatmx.php to see my current settings as visible to computers on the Internet
TechLiveARM: This could be the problem. Because as per AOL requirement, The MX settings configuration has to be done by the domain registrar. And we don’t provide technical support on the same.
TechLiveARM: All the help information and configuration information are on the help pages given to you in the earlier chats.
Me: Hey I know what I am talking about here and the information can be retrieved from any computer and not specifically GoDaddy or any other domain registrar’s computer
Me: the computer called the NameServer takes care of these settings
Me: and it has been verified that the settings made by me are correct as per yesterday’s chats
Me: so it means you can see the correct settings from your end
Me: You can look up the chat transcript to see that the support person says that
TechLiveARM: Yes. I understand. But what i mean to tell is (he’s an Indian, look from the way he builds the sentence… can be directly translated in Hindi word-to-word), Although everything is set right, It could be still giving you that error because the MX is not maintained by the Registrar. And unfortunately we don’t provide troubleshooting for this issue.
TechLiveARM: I have seen the previous chat transcripts.
Me: it doesn’t matter if the MX record is maintained by anyone, just that the MX record should be retrievable by the computer trying to send mail.
TechLiveARM: Unfortunately AOL doesn’t mention that. AOL’s help pages say that it has to be Maintained by the registrar.
Me: can you point me to the location where it says that specifically?
TechLiveARM: Sure.
Me: that MX records have to be maintained by registrar else this won’t work?
TechLiveARM: It’s doesn’t say that anywhere. But it doesn’t say that it would work if it is not maintained by a non registrar too.
TechLiveARM: And therefore, Since there is no technical support on this, We would advice you to go with the help information.
Me: Your statement was "AOL’s help pages say that it has to be Maintained by the registrar."
Me: now you are backtracking on what you have said
Me: It is clear that there might be a problem with myeAddress registration service
Me: and its Lookups
TechLiveARM: Oh.. I am sorry. I apologize for that.
Sure you apologize for blaming the system for your stupidity.
Me: rather than the problem being communicated to the team,
Me: you are advertising the service as fully functional
Me: Also in the support mail, there was something mentioned about escalation
Me: can you say something on that?
And then the most classic thing, just like you say "hello… hello…" on the telephone line when you don’t want to talk to the other person, this person starts types in quick succession (actually 2 seconds, then after a mandatory pause by the system, the last line).
Not to rush you, but are you still with me?
Please send a message that you are still with me, or I will have to end this session to help the next person in line.
Unfortunately, we are not able to communicate for some reason. I will have to end this session now.
Not wanting to be outdone, I go to the chat again and guess what, it’s the same guy. As soon as he reads the transcript of the earlier chat, 3 lines pop up which have already been reproduced earlier for your reading pleasure.
AOL has started its aol.in portal, but with more morons posing as their tech support, its only time before they bow down to the likes of Microsoft.
Aftermath
Free IMAP server for your domain with unlimited storage is a big thing. So I kept trying to register at their site for 2 more months. Finally, they actually canceled my previous registration request and this time, their site actually worked! It accepted my registration and within an hour I was able to send and receive mail using AOL. Their service is a little buggy (you can’t put a name on your outgoing messages which forces me to use Google or Yahoo SMTP servers 
) and their service intermittently goes down. But I think I can live with that. SO the moral of the story is "try, try and try again until you succeed even though the Tech Support says otherwise!".
Seriously FUNNY
Poor Tech Support Guy
[...] guess Rohit got a taste of the Indian BPOs when he contacted the AOL Tech Support. The Tech Support guy was totally dumb and incompetent like people in most Indian BPOs. He told [...]
I’m so really pissed at this whole eaddress crap… I somehow have an error in the info I used to set the thing up and I can’t even get into the thing… now I have a domain registered with them that I cannot access and there is absolutely NO support on this to reset the account… I try to use the password reset and that is where I made the error… I must of missed a digit on something /bdate or zip code and I cannot for the life of me reset this thing so I can get in… SO… do you have any ideas or contact info I can have to get this corrected!
seriously frustrated,
Roy
ARRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGG…. why do they even offer this service if they are not going to give some sort of support??? I can’t even log into my account at all…. I can’t reset the password or anything…. now I have my company domain registered with them and cannot use it!!!!! What am I to do? They have no support for this service that I can find… I would just like to be able to get into my account… but something is wrong… any ideas?
The easiest way to get out of this rut is to go for an alternative free service like Google Apps or Windows Live Custom domains.
You can try banging your head by calling/chatting with their reps but as I showed, they are useless.
I think the only way is to bid your account goodbye and switch to Google. The advantage of Google is free email forwarding which you can use to redirect ALL your mails to your personal account, which means you can access them even if you are locked out.
Did you ever get resolution of this, or did you go elsewhere for your hosting?
Never got resolved, i shifted back to Google !
Any idea on how to get your domain name from AOL if you registered one through myeaddress?
I don’t think there is a way yet, they say that they are working on a procedure so that you can get the domain, but nothing as of now.
I am going through these problems right now! My account has been unaccessable since yesterday, it keeps on telling me that my password is wrong! After trying for over 30′ to get my point across with a AOL live customer support assistant, she finally understood what I was talking about, just to tell me that no support is provided for myEaddress.
I am so mad I want to scream!
ARI
I am trying to get back controll over ownership of my e address at AOL but it’s driving me nuts. I can only think that maybe cancelling my AOL will release the name from dis-use. Anybody come up with anything else yet?
I am trying to get back control over ownership of my e address at AOL but it’s driving me nuts. I can only think that maybe cancelling my AOL account will release the name. Anybody come up with anything else yet?
Technically AOL remains the owner of the domain name… trying to get it back from them will take a long time (till they decide not the renew the domain name themselves).
I wonder if you guys have come across this – I have my own domain which I (stupidly) forwarded the email from to AOL myeaddress. It worked intermittently at best, so I changed the DX settings on the control panel and have it directly routed to my outlook. It’s working 75%. Some emails to my address are bouncing back to senders, with the message “rly-dd09.mx.aol.com #5.1.1 SMTP; 550 MAILBOX NOT FOUND” so it looks like it’s still trying to go through aol? I cannot, as your previous people comment, cancel myeaddress. I can’t even send an email to my own address from aol as it still thinks it’s a screen name, but one which is unrecognizable… I am going round in circles!
No idea exactly what is happening here, are you still able to access the MyEaddress control panel for your domain?
I have the same problem. AOL owns the domain name I want and there is no way to get it from them. There should be a class action lawsuit against them. I really am displeased with their service and their utterly incompetent customer service dept and I am now LOCKED IN WITH THEM! We need to warn others!
Well I a having a huge issue with their stupid service (AOL MyeAdress)… About a year ago I found out about this service and I was like oh cool a domain name that I want for free! YAY! and what made me even more excited that it said on the registration page that I would be able to build my own page “SOON”! Well it’s been about a year now and there’s no such thing as “Building my own page”.. and I haven’t logged onto my accountfor about 8 months now.. I called them twice to tell them that I want to cancel this myeaddress account.. Their response was that if I don’t log onto my account for about 3 months it would be automatically cancelled. well it’s still not cancelled..
Anyways, what I am trying to ask here is HOW THE HELL DO I CANCEL THE EFFING ACCOUNT.. it’s driving me crazy.. I want to register it with Microsoft Office Live (the free account one)..
Any help would be MUCH appreciated..
I contacted http://www.icann.org and brought it to their attention that AOL is cheating people and in my opinion STEALING THE NAMES WE REALLY WANT!
We need to petition.
Regards,
Dina
I am furious!!! I opend my AOL Eaddress about 7 months ago and SUDDENLY as of yesterday it stopped working. It WILL NOT recognize my PASSWORD!!! WHAT THE HELL is going on????????? I’m freaking out because I have clients and media writing to me and I can’t get my damn emails!!! Waht do I do?? I called AOL and told me I’m the only one who has access to my domain name and thus CAN NOT help me. They directed me to the AOL Control Panel and told me to click FORGOT PASSWORD and it will help me reset….NOT HAPPENING. It’s not working!
OMG I want to really SUIT AOL!!!
Hi All,
I am feeling more lost with my redicament now!!you are all so knowledgeble..yet these problems seem to trouble the way you used services.
I was using AOL for internet in Uk for years and when i left i was told i could continue using the
email service..which was fine until 2 days ago!!
I seem to have lost it!!can not access…..tried from different sources,cannot!!
I feel very traumatise due to all moving documents so much correspondence is in it..
Please tell me if it is possible at all to hope for a retrieval atleast.
PLease advise.
@ Dina… I also contacted ICANN and told them my story and I told them what you said that AOL are stealing out favourite domain names.. And I do think we need to sign a petition.. maybe even contact BBB.org..
The domain that I want is still registered for AOL.. This is starting to get on my nerves.. Is there ANYWAY we can get the domains that we registered in AOL back!?!?!?!???!
GREAT NEWS!!! I just got an email from AOL today and it says:
Dear AOL My eAddress User,
Domain name: farahfa.com
We’re writing to let you know that we are making changes to the My eAddress program that will ultimately give you more control of your domain name, allowing you to use it to create a more personalized Web identity.
(A domain name is the part after the @ sign in an email address. If an email address is you@thenameyouwant.com, then “thenameyouwant.com” is the domain name. When you originally created your personalized domain name through the My eAddress program, such as you@yourname.com, AOL registered the domain name you chose.)
As of December 31, 2008, AOL will no longer maintain ownership of domain names registered through My eAddress. Before we release all registered names, however, we are offering our users the opportunity to take ownership of the domains themselves, while continuing to use the My eAddress service. You must take advantage of this offer before December 31, 2008 to avoid disruption to your email service.
Working with eNom, an ICANN-accredited domain registrar, AOL will transfer ownership of your domain name to you. Your email will continue without interruption, and as owner of your #domain# domain name, you will be able to use that name to launch a Web site. In addition, users who take advantage of the eNom offer will also receive additional benefits, including:
A free three-page Web site
Free URL forwarding
Special discounts on robust Web hosting, SSL, and Web site creator tools
There is a fee associated with domain name transfer and ownership, which you will need to pay through eNom. AOL has arranged special domain transfer pricing for all My eAddress users, with significant savings over regular domain transfer rates from other major providers:
.Com domain: $7.50 per year
.Net domain: $5.50 per year
Important: Please use the following secure link to eNom’s Web site, which you must use to register with eNom and complete the domain transfer. It is important that you take action before December 31, 2008 to transfer your domain. If you do not complete the transfer by then, your domain and all email addresses under the domain will be permanently deleted. Completing the transfer before December 31 will ensure your email service is not disrupted.
Please visit our FAQs for more information. Additionally, eNom can assist with all aspects of transferring your service. If you have questions during the transfer, call them at (425) 974-4689 and select Option 1 (note: not a toll-free number) or email customercare@enom.com.
Thank You,
The AOL Mail Team
What? Is this true? I received no such email from AOL. I just checked with whois and my domain is still registered with AOL. What gives?