This is part two of my post because of the disruption to our business using e-mail service from Cincinnati Bell. (Click here for part one)

If you are a business owner and having trouble with your business Cincinnati Bell e-mail service please send an e-mail to myself personally at webinsurancenetwork@Gmail.com  (I’m not sure that if you sent the e-mail to me from your Cincinnati Bell account that I would even get it.)

After the level 2 Cincinnati Bell technician flippantly told me that there was nothing they could do to increase the number of e-mails that we could send I immediately contacted our Fioptics business class representative.

Not being able to send our e-mail newsletter would severely impact our business.

Naturally I left a very heated message for the representative.  He called me back within 15 min. and said that he was checking into it.

A person by the name of Udeme Ukutt   (Synacor is the company Cincinnati Bell now uses to outsource their e-mail business.) contacted me to attempt to diagnose the issue.  He evidently is the head of the e-mail department for Synacor.

Previously I had taken snapshots of our batch e-mail system, plus the error messages that we were receiving to send to the technicians.  He looked at the e-mail and instantly discovered what the problem was.  He told me what to do to fix the issue and I followed his instructions and it did fix the issue!

I was finally able to send out our newsletter after three weeks.

On Monday morning we received an e-mail from the company that hosts this website advising us that Cincinnati Bell is having e-mail issues.  We ignored this e-mail because at that time, on Monday, May 28 we were not having any e-mail issues as far as we were aware. 

On Wednesday, May 30, 2012 in the morning I received an e-mail from one of my employees from the previous day, I felt that was strange but I didn’t think anything of it until my wife told me that she also received e-mails from the previous day from the same employee that were sent to her on Tuesday, May 29, 2012.  The e-mails that we received were dated from the previous day but I did not think much about it until Thursday when we discovered additional issues with our Cincinnati Bell e-mail service.

In our office we routinely e-mail fellow employees to provide needed information.  I noticed that our e-mails were not being received between employees.  We must’ve sent dozens of e-mails to each other that were never delivered but were lost in the e-mail netherworld.

Thursday of this week (5-31-2012) is the day I was going to send our regular newsletter to our clients.  Prior to sending the newsletter we have the option to send a test e-mail to make sure that the newsletter will not be formatted incorrectly.   I went ahead and sent the test e-mail. I waited 10 min. and never got the e-mail.  I did it again and again and again and never received the test e-mails.

Thinking that something is once again wrong with the Cincinnati Bell e-mail system, I contacted the individual from the outsourced company that I had previously spoken with. 

He did admit to me that some of their e-mail systems went down due to some type of “incident”.  He told me that he would call me back after his conference because he was going to attend a very important meeting.

I advised him that I would attempt to send our newsletter using our batch e-mail system and let him know whether or not it went through.  Surprisingly the e-mail system did work for a period of time and then it stopped and gave us the same error code that we had before.  60% of the e-mails were delivered but 40% were not with the same error message that we were sending too many e-mails.

In the meantime we are discovering that other business owners are having issues with Cincinnati Bell e-mail services just like we are.

As soon as I receive the error report from our software that the e-mails had failed to deliver I called this gentleman once again, and before I had an opportunity to explain to him that my e-mails failed once again, he told me that they had “fixed” the problem.

I then had an opportunity to explain to him that they had not fix the problem and our e-mails failed once again, he then told me it must be some other issue, but it’s not on our end he said. 

I told him that’s not possible that the issue is not on your end. I then asked him whether or not it was possible that someone had compromised your systems by hacking into them?

He did not immediately answer my question, so I asked him again.  He said I don’t think so.  I said is it possible that someone has hacked into your systems causing these issues; he said probably not but we can’t determine at this point what happened.

Regardless of what happened something is wrong with the e-mail service and it’s impacting businesses and perhaps even consumers from their own Facebook page Cincinnati Bell posted this:

We are aware some customers are not able to log in to their email accounts or access CincinnatiBell.net. Our engineers are working hard to restore email and portal access to all customers. We apologize for this inconvenience and we’ll post updates when we have information to share.

I did receive an e-mail from this gentleman late on Thursday evening that absolutely infuriated me and caused me to write this blog post, this is the e-mail from a representative from the company that Cincinnati Bell outsources their e-mail to:  

Because apparently they’re attempting to sweep this issue under the carpet I immediately sent him an e-mail from a non-Cincinnati Bell e-mail account:

We still cannot send e-mails directly to each other using our own e-mail system for some unknown reason.  The system is not fixed and Cincinnati Bell is ultimately responsible for any business disruptions that occurred due to this colossal disaster.

Our business is not unlike other businesses that we depend upon reliable e-mail services. 

PLEASE FIX THIS PROBLEM CINCINNATI BELL!

Whatever money you saved by outsourcing your e-mail business will be lost in customer defections to your competition!

If You Are a Business Owner and You Have Been Adversely Affected by This Cincinnati Bell E-Mail Debacle, Please Contact Me ASAP!

Send an e-mail to: webinsurancenetwork@Gmail.com 

Please describe in detail the issues that you are having and whether or not they are similar or different issues plus your contact telephone number. 

Sincerely,

Jack Thomas