* * * * *

  So frustrated that I have no one to scream at, which may be the point why
it's so hard to get ahold of customer representatives at tech companies these
                                     days

I'm so frustrated right now.

Bunny can't receive email, and we have no idea why that is. All we get is
that there have been too many attempts to log into her account and she needs
to reset the password. Now, her account is with bellsouth.net which is now
owned by AT&T (American Telephone and Telegraph) but email for customers is
handled by Yahoo, but trying to track down a human being to talk to is a
Herculean effort these days, and even if we get ahold of someone, can they
even help? Forget the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, it
appears these days that the left hand doesn't even know it has fingers!

Going to the AT&T login page mentions something about currently.com, but
going to currently.com goes to yahoo.com (which, to be fair, is handling
email for bellsouth.net). Man, is this confusing. We go through the process
of changing the password, only to get redirected back to the login page,
which fails because the password we set seems to be incorrect, and thus, we
get more and more failed logins until we're forced to change the password yet
again.

And the cycle continues.

Doing a search shows that we aren't alone in this, and that this issue has
been an ongoing problem for several years now with no solution in sight.

Does anybody at AT&T or Yahoo know what's going on?

To add further fuel, I can't find the current server settings in the Apple
Mail application, adding to my frustration.

Eventually, I gave up and set her up with Fastmail [1]. It's not as big as
Google, and it's a pay service, so there's a decent chance that talking to a
human is possible. Also, it was nearly painless to set up. I say “nearly
painless” because it did take me several minutes to figure out the DNS
(Domain Name Service) settings I needed to give Bunny her own sub-domain in
conman.org (because if she's going through the pain of changing an email
address from one she's used for years, I'd rather she use a domain not in the
control of the email company in the off chance we need to switch providers so
she can keep the same email address, and I don't want to hand off my own
email to Fastmail since I'm comfortable using mutt directly on my server).
Then there was one file to download that installed information on her Mac
laptop that informed the Apple Mail application of the Fastmail settings and
that was that. She was good to go.

It just sucks that she has to change her email address.

[1] https://fastmail.com/

Email author at [email protected]