YuckBerry?

[r0k]

Some time ago I was praising RIM for their choice of a server infrastructure to make email easy for the masses. Not after today. When RIM breaks something on their server, they break it bad and they seem to be slow and clueless about fixing it.

At 7am this morning, I got an email that my email password had stopped working and I needed to go to my provider's BIS page to fix the problem. Ok. I haven't been there in a year. What's my login again? Password? So this meant a call to customer service to retrieve my login. Ok got it. Log in. Sure enough there is a wastebasket with a red line through it next to my gmail account. So I go in, enter what I know to be the correct password and it fails. Again and again. Multiple calls to customer service. Several hours wasted. Finally, we isolate the problem. It's RIM's server. I get transferred to RIM. They give me a case # and their 800 # and ask for my land line so they can call me back if we are cut off. We are cut off. I call RIM's 800#. No go. No answer. I put it on speaker while I do other work and let it ring for about 45 minutes. Nothing. I call a buddy at my provider and give him the scoop. Basically, I'm thinking of ditching RIM for a dumb phone if they can't fix their server without me lifting so much as a pinky finger.

Later, things slow down and I find time to call my wireless provider again. I go through the usual suspects - send service books, delete and recreate my email setup, reset this reboot that. In fact, they even have me turn off my phone so they can tie my account to another phone and reproduce the problem on their end. It's DEFINITELY RIM's server. On an identical phone at the mail does not go though to the phone.

About this time my buddy calls with tech support and I tell him I think I'm getting close to having it figured out so he hangs up and I stay on with support. Now they ask me to dial *228 to reactivate my phone now that they are done with their test and we connect with RIM to fix the real problem. RIM comes on, my carrier drops and the first thing RIM asks me to do fails. It seems my internet connection is down. Argh. RIM now brings my carrier back on the line. Meanwhile I have my phone rebooting, hoping the data will start working again after rebooting. It does.

Now my carrier drops off again and I'm left with the architect of today's misery: RIM. They ask me to delete and recreate the email account. This time we notice that RIM's server treated it as pop when it was really imap. No problem, I change it to pop. No workee. I change it back to imap. No workee. I change the password on the gmail end and on the RIM end. Allofasudden it works. I change it back to what it was this morning before this crap started. It still works. WTF?

So I lost 8 hours of email connectivity because RIM and Google got in a pissing war over a password I haven't touched recently?

Well, at least I got my email working again. I call my buddy back to let him know and I also ask him about future phones. I mention that I'm so disgusted with RIM I might switch to a dumb phone. Is there an iPhone or Pre coming? He says he doesn't think so. The tone of his voice makes it sound like a certain bridge has been burned with Palm. Yikes! So if I want a smartphone on Verizon, my choices are RIM, Android (maybe) and WinMo, at least until 4G comes out and we can all take our simcards to any phone we like. WinMo makes my skin crawl but if RIM quits abruptly on me again I might opt to simply dump it.

Even after more than a year of nearly flawless email delivery, losing a big chunk of my day to fix something I didn't break bothers me a lot. Am I being impatient? I don't think so. For the amount of money I pour into these devices and services they should just friggin' work. They shouldn't crop up and distract me from the real focus of my day. They just shouldn't. Do I feel strongly enough to go back to a dumb phone? Not yet, but I came pretty close today.

Incidents like this one help clarify my priorities and gadgets that don't work simply don't make the cut. But no. I'm not as detached as I say I am. Somebody who was really detached might opt to walk around for a few days with broken email to see if it "healed itself". I'm not that detached because I'm paying extra for the service and I do check my email often throughout the day. So if this RIM server issue rears its ugly head again, I may opt for a "timeout" but I can't claim I'd walk away from mobile email "forever". One thing that came up while I was on the phone with RIM was the number of emails in my inbox. 30,000 seems like a lot. Ok, so I may have to create a special account with less than 900 emails in the inbox just to make BB work smoothly but I'll cross that bridge later, if I have to.

Does this mean I was wrong about RIM? I don't think so. I went through a good dozen of these kind of days with my Treos and it was never the server. It was always the phone. And the issues were never really fixed. It's quite possible I can go another year and a half with nothing like this happening again. However, if this crops up on a weekly or even monthly basis, I'll have to revisit my choice of a Blackberry phone. And this definitely makes me hesitate to run out and buy a Tour or Storm 2.

After today, I'd say the needle on "r0k's next smartphone ometer" is broken.

[headcronie]

Welcome to cloud computing, where you don't control your own data. Lovely isn't it? Cup of tea? Biscuit?

Another argument for owning your own data. I can't emphasize it enough.

If I can't get my gmail, it is because gmail is down. Not because some 3rd party syncing server that controls my every connection is bungled up.

If you don't like the way RIM died today, wait until it happens to the super cloud Pre. I seriously think you need to reconsider ever getting the Pre if you don't like what happened today.

[jigwashere]

...I change the password on the gmail end and on the RIM end. Allofasudden it works. I change it back to what it was this morning before this crap started. It still works. WTF?

So I lost 8 hours of email connectivity because RIM and Google got in a pissing war over a password I haven't touched recently?

This scenario sounds familiar. I'm not sure why it sounds familiar, but it does. Anyway, it sounds like it took 8 hours to solve a simple problem related to a corrupt and/or mismatched password between gmail and RIM. It shouldn't have happened in the first place, and it shouldn't have taken 8 hours to resolve. You shouldn't have gotten disconnected while trying to resolve this, and tech support should have been more helpful.

Hmmm....I'm starting to remember why this is familiar. The memory is vague, but I had a similar issue with voicemail many years ago. I think it was on AT&T or Voicestream. Messages were getting garbled. Tech support couldn't help and I lost many hours trying to fix the problem through them. In the end, I fixed it myself, somewhat accidentally, when I simply changed my greeting. Very strange.

Anyway, I sympathize but these things happen. Stuff breaks, and even though the resolution may be simple, it's not always easy getting there.

[harpgliss]

Hi,

r0k, you have my sympathy over this.

Between this and your home network issues last month, maybe a little away time from high tech gadgets would be a good thing.

Just kidding there, I know I could not ween myself off my gadgets very easily.

The stuff you went through today is just the price for using this kind of technology.

Frustrating as all get out but the alternative is worse.

As for alternatives to the Blackberry, I would be very little help as I just use a dumb phone.

David

[r0k]

Well I got home this evening and Missing Stynk is down again. It's thrown off by the mess that my phone went through today. You see calendar events on bb are associated with an email address. So deleting an email address throws all calendar entries into some sort of double secret probation. I actually had to force quit missing sync. I'm definitely ready to ditch this bb vs Mac deal. No more cable based sync. Cloud only. So I tried google sync. It's down. So my data is stuck on only my phone and is partially corrupted on both my phone and my Macbook. I'd like to do a restore from the other day when I had all those sync problems, but I took so many notes since then. I'll be doing data double entry for days to get beyond this. But wait. While I typed this, google sync came back. It looked like it worked but nothing transferred up to google.

f this.

Perhaps I'll wind up using my bb as a dumb phone for contacts/email only and my ipod touch as a pda until I can find a phone that gets along with the rest of the world whether that world is my Macbook or somebody's cloud.

[jigwashere]

They still sell Franklin Planners.

[r0k]

I've decided to limp along like this a little longer. An iPhone is looking pretty good right now, but so is windows with outlook running inside parallels. I know. Hairball. Windows on my Mac. But if Outlook is the only reliable non bullship calendaring thing I can find then so be it. Anyway, I went through Mark/Space's painful reset everything and overwrite device and I got my data back. I can get through a sync without an error now. But I'd really much rather be able to sync wirelessly. Still, I'll take what I can get. Whew.

As for franklin planners, I remember when Palm weened me off of those heavy things when I became convinced my data could "live" indefinitely. Now I'm not so convinced. My data can get eaten by the RIM server fairy. The Missing Stynk fairy. The Blackberry fairy. The google fairy. The Macbook fairy. There are so many dogs waiting to eat my homework, it's like living in a kennel.

[lelisa13p]

As for franklin planners, I remember when Palm weened me off of those heavy things when I became convinced my data could "live" indefinitely. Now I'm not so convinced. My data can get eaten by the RIM server fairy. The Missing Stynk fairy. The Blackberry fairy. The google fairy. The Macbook fairy. There are so many dogs waiting to eat my homework, it's like living in a kennel.

< lelisa13p is very ashamed of herself for being so entertained by this last bit posted. >

[Hook]

The thing you have to remember with BB is that one of the reasons it is such a great solution for push is you are putting all you eggs in one pipe, so to speak. It doesn't happen often, but when you lose that pipe, you are fraked. And it IS going to happen from time to time.

I used to live near the Tappan Zee bridge in New York, a main choke point on the NYS Thruway that someone had brilliantly decided to locate so that it spanned the absolute widest point on the Hudson River-- meaning adding lanes or widening is very cost prohibitive. I lived on one side of the span and worked on the other. Well, guess what. Every so often, luckily rarely, there was an accident blocking the bridge. For Hours.

When that happened, I learned to drive 50 miles out of my way to the Bear Mountain Bridge. It wasn't convenient, but I got home much faster.

Anytime you have heavy traffic going through one pipe, there is going to be a disaster sometime. If it is a good pipe, it won't be often.

[r0k]

You remember the scene from the Godfather? Marlon Brando turns to Michael and says...

"I didn't know until this day that it was Bodzini all along."

Well I now have a line like that...

I didn't know until this day that it was google all along. Bye Bye big G. Cya

And ain't no android phone on my list of next phones. My OS pool just shrank to BB OS, webOS, WinMo and maybe something from Nokia. But I don't need another farking thing from google. It's been a long hard couple of years. Most of the time walking around with flawless email with the best spam filter I've ever used. But the common thread in my email problems from Eudora to Thunderbird to the Palm Treo 650, 755p and now Apple Mail and my Blackberry? Gmail. Cya Gmail! I'm done.

So this morning, I went into the domains I have forwarding to google and turned them off. For now, I have them forwarding to mobile me. I've got until May to decide my next step, but I'm definitely done with google. Free but sometimes broken is just too expensive for this user.

I must give google credit. Their "one huge mailbox" and "free unlimited storage" paradigm changed the way I use and view email. But two outages in two days are more than enough. And no it wasn't RIM's server. It was google shutting off imap and pop access to my account at random. Enough google. I'm done.

Will it start working tonight like it started working yesterday night? I don't care. I'm not giving a second day of my life to find out. My email is flowing flawlessly again now that gmail is out of the loop. And I didn't have to spend 5 seconds explaining my problem to anybody in Bangalore either. I just had to find the cancerous tumer in my email setup and cut it out. Luckily, today I was in front of my macbook and my ipod. When all 3 pop/imap clients died at the same instant, it ruled out anything Verizon or RIM could possibly be doing. Even Comcast isn't a suspect. My email woes lie at the feet of google and their random server availability. How do I pick up the phone to call the world's second largest tech company and yell at them for something I'm not even paying for? I don't. I walk away. Sorry I was so stubbornly devoted to google and their sometimes unreliable crap.

Here's an article from 2007 when users were trying to find a way to get free of google's grip. I saw it then but thought I didn't need it. I do now. Unfortunately the article spends too much time on "cloud" apps and not enough time on decent free alternatives to gmail.

That's ok. I'm paying $150 a year for a 20 gig family pack of email storage at mobile me. I'm going to start using it. Apple's web hosting is broken but their email service has worked every time I've tried it. Their spam filter isn't as good as google's. Oh well. I can spot male enhancement and bank scam emails for myself from now on. My other family members are still using google but since they aren't using imap on any mobile devices, I think they'll live. But if not, I'll change their redirects to their mome boxes and leave google completely out in the cold.

I will relegate google to the place it deserves. Search. Just search. I'll pull my picasa stuff all over to flickr and my blogspot stuff over to wordpress. That doesn't guarantee google won't come along and swallow those services up someday but for now I can be free of google for anything other than search. No. Wait. I'll still use grandcentral, I mean google voice. That still works. For now.

Edit: BTW, Hook, this time the pipe that clogged was gmail. However I agree with your point about one pipe when it comes to BB. This is a definite advantage for Pre. It has multiple pipes. If one or more of 'em are down, the rest still work. I have to start exploring alternatives to gmail for pop/imap email besides mome because mome only plays nicely with ithings. I want a (cloud|pc|desktop|notebook|pencilandpaper|whatever) that plays nicely with all the kids on the playground, not just devices of its own brand (I'm thinking of Apple, M$ and Google when I say this ). I would have to say google is a good pipe because it has only clogged a few times over several years. But the procedure for getting it unclogged does not exist. No help links. No customer service. Just take it like we serve it and like it is Google's motto. So I'm walking because of google's nonexistent customer service business model more than I'm walking over a few email outage incidents.

BTW, perhaps this thread doesn't need Yuckberry as its only title. Perhaps a more apropos title would be Goofle. Oh well, it's in the RIM forum and RIM infrastructure is so keenly sensitive to email disruption. Deleting an email account on RIM's web site caused my sync to stop working and all my appointments to change to a different calendar. I wasn't asked what I wanted to do. It was done for or should I say to me by BB software.

I decided to go over to google to see if I could contact them. I was horrified. I can email them but they will not answer unless they need more information from me?

First I'll provide the quote...

Need to contact our support team?

If you think your issue is new or can't be resolved without our assistance, we provide email support for specific issues that may prevent you from using Gmail. Just follow the troubleshooting steps provided in the article related to your problem, making sure to answer all the questions. If the steps provided don't resolve the problem, you'll be able to send us a report. While we do read each email, you'll only hear from us (generally within a few days) if we need more information from you.

We recommend using the search box at the top of the page to look for your answers. We won't be able to provide any more information on issues we've answered in our Help Center.

Now I'll provide the translation (Imagine you are in a large echo-filled hall facing a huge image of an angry man with flames coming from all sides)...

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain! Go get me the witch's broomstick and I'll fix your IMAP access, now begone or I'll revoke your page ranking!