"If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything."

[denny]

...as my mum used to tell me.

So today, I'm having an odd problem with email at work. I track it down as far as finding out that we've run out of disk space on the email hosting service we use, and this appears to be because one user has 2000+ emails in their inbox. However, connecting to that inbox gives me half a dozen emails and an error message.

Fortunately (I thought), the email hosting company has an unofficial presence on IRC. So along I trot to ask for their advice:


[ nicks changed to protect the... well, to be polite ]
denny> Error while Expunging folder. IMAP command failed: An error occured while updating keywords: No such file or directory.
denny> eek?
denny> I appear to have a user with 2066 messages in their Maildir/new/ folder, but only 6 messages in their inbox
denny> we just ran out of disk space because of him :)
denny> looks like there might be a malformed message in there or something - any idea how I could dig it out?
staff1> FTP? Webmail?
denny> shell account, I'm using evolution to access it
staff1> Er, well ssh then.
denny> and I identify the message that's blocking the rest by what process? read all 2000?
staff1> I don't know. I have never had such problems.
staff1> I don't know what the problem is but you seem to often report mail issues and then reboot the windows box and they go away or hit outlook harder and they go away. *
denny> like I said, I'm connecting from Evolution (on Linux)
staff2> Try mutt on the shell account?
staff1> denny: I'm not really sure what you're asking. We don't have magic wands. We don't konw what the problem really is but I'm sure you have the requisite knowledge to solve it.
denny> staff1: I was asking for help with trouble-shooting. If you don't want to help, that's fine.
staff1> denny: I'd suggest you run quota.
[ 20 minute delay while I fuck around solving the problem by myself instead of doing anything useful like say, programming. I hate infrastructure crap, it wastes time. This is why we outsource it, supposedly ]
denny> for your reference, should you wish to share the info with anyone in future, the mailbox seemed to have got into a confused state due to us having hit our disk quota (so presumably using quota ourselves would have caused the same thing to happen). Moving mail out of another mailbox gave it room to breathe and it all started working again.
denny> when I come in here with a problem, I'm not asking for official support - if I thought it was something wrong with your systems, I'd email support@ - what I'm looking for is the benefit of your or your other users' wisdom. If you can't be bothered to answer that's cool, but I don't see a need to be actively unfriendly.
[ 5 minute delay while he's either thinking or AFK ]
staff1> When people come in here and go "eek" it's hard not to translate it as "you've fucked up you evil people stop breaking things".
staff1> We often get told things are broken when they're not, but when they are we'd like to know so we can fix them.
staff1> Not being given details can be a very frustrating experience so letting people solve things on their own or asking if they're really telling us the sky is falling or not is a way to keep us sane.


Or am I just being touchy here?

I mean, if it was a free service, then fine. If I'd bothered their official support system with a problem that wasn't their fault, fine. In those cases maybe I deserve to be given the geeky superiority attitude problem you'd expect on usenet. But in the context of a paid service and an unofficial help channel, is it really necessary to be all superior at people who are having problems? If he didn't want to talk to me, he could have perfectly reasonably ignored me.

(For what it's worth, the second guy's suggestion would quite possibly have worked if I'd known how to get mutt to talk to an SSL IMAP inbox - Evolution is cautious about odd IMAP responses where pine and mutt tend to just bluff their way through.)

* They only offer IMAP using SSL and SMTP using TLS. It took me some considerable time when we first started using their service to find out that using TLS with Outlook 2003 required at least Service Pack 2 before it would work. Again, this was a technical issue with which they seemed to regard as entirely my responsibility to figure out.

Comments

[lusercop.livejournal.com]

What are they using for quotas, and as an MTA. This shouldn't be a failure mode of an IMAP server or of any MDA delivering to Maildir.

I think that there's a bit of both, honestly. One the one hand, you're probably being a bit touchy, and as with all text conversations, nuances are difficult to convey - even voice is better, as you get tone of voice nuances, though obviously in face-to-face, you get body language. On the other hand, if they are actually helpdesky support staff, their response is far from helpful.

This is also why I still run my own mail... ;-) (though in your case, that wouldn't have helped, as you hate that side of things - in my case, I hate dealing with helldesks even more...)

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

They're not helldesk, they're the main techs for the company - it's a small outfit, only a few employees from what I understand.

I'm tempted to install postfix on one of our machines and just get on with it - it couldn't be much more hassle than this arrangement is proving to be.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's a bit unnecessarily hostile. OTOH it's nice to have an unofficial channel where staff speak frankly, rather than the kind of place where you get a lovely automated email back as soon as you file a support request, followed by the answer to totally the wrong question by some human pattern-matcher a day later.

[lovelybug.livejournal.com]

Gawd, someone's in a bad mood! I'd be quite annoyed by that.

[megashrike.livejournal.com]

He was being a bit aggressive really, a simple "sorry I don't know" would have sufficed

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

:)

[sepheri.livejournal.com]

When people come in here and go "eek" it's hard not to translate it as "you've fucked up you evil people stop breaking things".
Bad self esteem anyone? Guilt complex?
I would translate "eek" as "oh nossssss! There is a problem, what do I do?"

[lusercop.livejournal.com]

Ah, fair enough. :-/

Even as techies, if that's a public face of the organisation, it's shoddy at best to behave like that to customers.

Postfix on a machine would probably end up being less pain.

[hythloday.livejournal.com]

staff1> denny: I'm not really sure what you're asking. We don't have magic wands. We don't konw what the problem really is but I'm sure you have the requisite knowledge to solve it.

Am I misunderstanding? Isn't having magic wands precisely what you pay them for?

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I thought it was more of a cry for help than an accusation. Ho hum.

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

I'm increasingly getting the feeling that what we pay them for is for there to be an email server available to us, but whether or not we can use it in any way appears to be entirely our problem.

[aca.livejournal.com]

Use official lines of support. Then when you cop this sort of attitude raise it with your sales droid / account exec. That attitude would be shameful for a free service. For one your paying for it's just completely unacceptable and unprofessional.

If I caught anyone I worked with doing that there would be hell to pay.

[reddragdiva]

I think in this case, you're taking tech response as if they're customer service when they're expressly not.

Remember: you and I are and know geeks with social lives ... but some geeks remind you why geeks are called "geeks".

[bluecassandra.livejournal.com]

I didnt understand any of the technical stuff, but they appear to be very unhelpful.

[mejoff.livejournal.com]

shit. even my fellow hive-drones are more helpful and friendly than that

[pooloftrees.livejournal.com]

Definitely very unhelpful. I must admit I can't provide support to my customers for every mail client out there, but I try to understand and troubleshoot the issue, and work out whether there is any issue on my server.

If you continue to have trouble with them, and don't want the hassle of setting up your own mail server, I can provide that service through my company. I'll not do any blatant advertising in your Blog, but you can reach me over IM or if you still have my email address(es)...