Complaint Rating:

Company information:
Verizon DSL
United States
www.verizon.com

To Whom It May Concern:

I erroneously attempted to send the following email to Verizon's Volume Support email re a recent experience (3-14-08) I had with their email on my DSL account Verizon Website. I received an automated reply to it that was not at all helpful:

To: Verizon DSL Support Persons

From : Email User

You guys have a crummy email system, and have for years, despite all the supposed changes in the past several years.

I'll give you an example from last evening. My brother responded to a Verizon email I had sent him about rock musician Lou Reed. I hit "Reply" on my standard Verizon email account, and it opened a reply email, with his email inside of it. This is all well and good, that is, standard operating procedure. It is supposed to do this. Yippee, something works correctly.

So I compose a thoughtful and somewhat time-consuming reply to him. At the end of it, I remember NOT to hit "Save Draft" at the end of it because I recall your email system eating the draft of an email I attempted to save sometime last year. After that email fiasco I ended up not having anything to send either. Grrrrr!

So this is problem #1: Fix the friggin "Save Draft" part of your email system.

And no, I don't have a special computer, a faulty DSL line, or any special software on my computer such as security software that gums things up. It is a vanilla computer that works fine on Yahoo and Google email systems.

But this time, sending an email to my brother, I think to myself that I will be smarter. I simply hit "Send", last evening, hoping that my lengthy email to my brother will not only be sent, but that your crummy, primitive email system will save a copy in my "Sent" folder, as I have instructed it to do. I like to have a record of what I have emailed.

So what happens? Your dumbass email system flips me over to the Verizon account sign-in page. O.K., perhaps this is some sort of hypervigilant email security system, in order to guarantee that nobody unauthorized is using my account. I had signed in about a half hour beforehand, and had not left the Verizon email Web page during the entire encounter.

So I dutifully sign-in to my Verizon email account as requested of me, even thought I had signed in previously. And what happens? I get returned to my Verizon email page and my long email to my brother has vanished in the nether regions of cyberspace, never to be seen again. It wasn't in the "Drafts" folder. It wasn't in the "Sent" folder. It wasn't anywhere to be found.

It was gone.

Not cool, Verizon Support People. Not cool at all. )-:

There is a half an hour that I won't get back again, not to mention the information in the email.

How is it you expect people to want to use your email system if it wipes out a lengthy, personal reply due to shear incompetence?

This is the sort of crappy Web interface I used to regularly run across 8 years ago on the Internet! There is simply no excuse for such garbage from a major Web player such as Verizon in 2008! No excuse whatsoever. None.

I am writing this from a Google Gmail account of mine. Why mention this? Because it is saving drafts of this complaint letter AUTOMATICALLY! Without me asking it to do so! Wow! Somebody is thinking at Google, aren't they?

Want to know what else rarely comes into my Google inbox? Spam email. Almost never. And I have only had a few false positives in my Google Spam folder. How do they do it? I don't know, but somebody is on the ball at Google. In fact, it is a bunch of somebodies who are on the ball at Google.

And in my Verizon inbox? Quite a bit of Spam, especially for as little as I use that email system. Its address is not in a lot of circulation around the Web. What do you guys have? A Spam folder, where obvious Spam email that I have to move into the Spam folder just sit there until I delete them. What is an obvious Spam email? Email with gibberish words in the subject box. You know, like "yenottie more length obadogle badie"

Why don't I use your standard Verizon email more? Because it is a piece of crap email system that I learned to avoid years ago, and now have, once again. learned to avoid it even more. Fix it, for the love of God!

Now you are probably going to suggest that I try your NEW email system. Don't even go there. What comes with the standard Verizon DSL account should not have the sort of obvious bugs, flaws and crummy, email-losing features that it has.

So problem #2: what is with making me re-sign in to my Verizon account when I go to send a time-consuming reply to my brother, after I had only signed in about a half an hour prior? Stupid, stupid, stupid. What, does Verizon think that my computer got hijacked while I was still using it? I never left the Verizon email page while composing my lost email.

Just plain crummy all around. How much does Verizon collect monthly from me for my DSL account? Over $30/month. Multiply this times the thousands of DSL accounts Verizon has, and that sum has got to be enough to get some technically competent code monkeys in there who can figure out how to make a properly functioning, basic email system in 2008. At least, I would think so.

I am very disappointed in my Verizon DSL email system, and the rest of the Verizon site as well, which is very Web unimaginative. What are you guys doing at Verizon, watching too much You Tube when you should be working? Get on the ball.

Signed,

Rob Little, aka "ThomasHopkins981 at verizon dot net"