Management Think II (OR AOL/Time Warner sucks)

Ok, long, long ago when angry and massive 286’s ruled the Earth I was on AOL. Prior to the internet AOL was actually pretty cool stuff and I had a young boy and AOL had gobs of age relevant content. As he aged AOL had very nice tunable parental controls I could inflict on him.

Anyway, I gave up on AOL long ago with the exception of Instant Messaging (IM) which was free so even though I was “off” AOL my account was still active since I used IM a lot. Then they tied a free e-mail account to IM and then I had a spam account! So anytime I would have to give an e-mail account to sign up for something I would use the AOL account.

Case in point, when I signed up with blogger I used my AOL account because I had no idea how much spam they were going to send me. (it turns out none)

I have Time Warner Cable internet at home so my “real” e-mail account is a Time Warner account. Now, Time Warner web-mail SUCKS nards! It is very basic, has a lousy editor and no spam filtering. Then it is SLOW. It is acceptably fast when I am at my house but from outside their “network” it is terribly slow. Since I live on the road it’s mostly real slow.

So, as I started actually reading my blogger mail on AOL I started to realize the free AOL web mail is actually a very good product. So a few months ago I started auto-forwarding my Time Warner mail to my AOL account. Hell AOL runs my Time Warner e-mail through a spam filter to boot! So I got to where I almost exclusively use my AOL account again.

So in short, the Time Warner e-mail that I pay for is terrible and the AOL e-mail that is free is pretty good stuff!

Until yesterday.

Most of you know that comments on your blog posts are e-mailed to you. Yesterday I thought I was getting no comments because I was getting no e-mails. Then I checked last night and I had a slew of comments! Then I got an e-mail from Google saying that AOL was blocking my emails from blogger.com.

So perhaps this e-mail I sent to the AOL post master this morning will sum up nicely:

You are blocking my e-mails from blogger.com. Please stop that.

I just finished a very long and frustrating call with someone who barely speaks English who repeatedly explained to me that *I* can not ask you not to block my e-mail; only the sender of the e-mail that was blocked can ask you not to block my e-mail.

I have to tell you that ranks pretty high on the “stupidest thing I have ever heard” scale. It's my mail and I have NO control over what mail I get? Who came up with that idea?

For example, if I get a newsletter from say Toyota every week and you decide to start blocking it does Toyota care enough to expend the effort to jump through all your hoops including dealing with call reps who can not speak the customer’s language so that I start getting my newsletter again. I don’t think so.

What ever made you decide to start blocking e-mails from large reputable firms anyway? What ever led you to the decision that the account owner should have ZERO input on what e-mails get blocked and what e-mails don't.

No wonder you continue to loose market share.

Then it occurred to me. Who Owns AOL? Time Warner does! DUH!

I recently got a G-mail account. I guess it’s time to start using it now. {Sigh}