Shocked, shocked - No, really shocked
Jim Wiandt writes from Spain,
I thought of you and your site when I saw this the other day. I'm aghast that such a thing can even be legal. And by one of the largest U.S. companies.
I know you're very technically focused and international, so thought you'd appreciate it. I've run into this firsthand, as one of my coworkers just mysteriously stopped receiving email from me in December...costing us a month of missed billing/invoicing.
It's just really beyond belief. And the fact that they have remained glib even about this speaks to 1) their enormous stupidity and 2) the weight of their confidence in the legal draw fund.
I'm completely flabbergasted by this. I got not even a rejection message to all the emails I'd sent. No warning no nothing...just cut off from the U.S. And the ban is STILL on. From December through yesterday, I've been unable to get anything to Verizon customers in the U.S. from Europe. In addition to being highly annoying and wrong, it has the vague ring of something more insidious to it...were I a conspiracist.
Why am I hearing about this outrage first from Jim?
Comments
I'm not surprised at all. They are utter, utter cretins. They will always fabricate some pseudo-technical reason for changing their policy that makes no sense. One of the many reasons I switched from Verizon DSL to gloriously open Speakeasy.net was a similar policy change that they made but which had far lower impact. (Namely, they stopped letting people send mail from their SMTP mail servers with return addresses that were not @verizon.net. The purported reason was to block spam; but it's a moot point - they already had the correct protections in place to prevent non-Verizon subscribers from using their SMTP servers. I bypassed the idiocy by building my own mail server, which I ran on the Verizon network until I changed providers.)
The funny thing about Verizon is that a fair number of their techies are actually pretty smart, but they are submerged by institutional stupidity.
Less communication-blocking but equally conspiracist: see my post on Post Office forms.
The bastards at the biggest competitor in Boston, Comcast, are just as bad as Verizon. They just haven't tried this particular dumb trick yet.
Posted by: Max | April 13, 2005 12:44 PM
Thanks, Max, for the link to your post about the Post Office's dropping French. I ought to have done that myself.
Posted by: R J Keefe | April 13, 2005 01:03 PM