Adelphia may have won themselves a reprieve (for now) in my opinion. I finally got some kind of answer from their tech support on the issue of the spam blocker. I’m not sure if I’m quite ready to let them off the hook or not. We’ll see.

It took me a half-dozen e-mails and two trips to their online tech support chat in order to get a correct method for turning off what they told me is the ‘Main switch’ for the spam filtering. This from an outfit who normally solves tech problems in one try and less than 10 minutes. Not only that, but they have put those spam controls in a place guaranteed to be missed by most tech-savvy people - inside the parental controls menus. These menus are only reachable by the registered Head of Household and that’s reached only by using their webmail site. Why this extremely important control menu isn’t under ‘Messages’, where any sane person would look, is beyond me. Then toss in that actually creating other mail filtering rules is in a completely separate area off the main menu.

They’ve also enhanced the controls some since I last saw these controls about 4 years ago. That’s good, since it was pretty much of a ‘yes / no’ thing at that point. This may have been part of the grand redesign of their web site that happened this year.

The bottom line, though, is that their menus need some major work and they need to get their tech support up to speed. I had some e-mail that gave me totally wrong directions for accessing the correct menu for controlling the spam filters.

The whole episode leaves me wondering what other little digital surprises they have up their sleeves. Can you say ‘loss of confidence’?