Customer Care Center is dead & gone

Part of a canned response I received from postmaster@netidentity.com was the following:

To go to the customer care center, please point your browser to:

http://support.nameplanet.com/bin/customer.exe

This link is dead, and nameplanet.com URL requests get redirected to the NetIdentity login page -- so it appears that NamePlanet is dead, and the Customer Care Center is gone.

After I informed the support team at contactus@netidentity.com about this situation, I received a followup message (again from postmaster@netidentity.com) asking, "How is the link dead? Can you not log in? Do you receive an error message?" -- so evidently the new Tucows support crew at NetIdentity are using the obsolete old help-desk scripts from the pre-Tucows days. It appears that the blind are leading the blind there at NetIdentity Central.

Here a patch, there a patch, ...

Ross Rader (General Manager, Domain Direct) wrote:

... we've applied a patch to www.netidentity.com that fixes the primary login bug that has been plaguing the system for the past three weeks. This was a huge problem for us to fix resulting from the way that the old mail system handled cookies vs. the new one. If you were having problems logging into your webmail from www.netidentity.com or you had not received any email since September 23, this fix should correct the problems you were experiencing.
[note: this was written on October 13]

Yes, it "should" correct the problem, after only three weeks of failure -- but sometimes it doesn't.

"Here I come to save the day..."

Ross Rader (General Manager, Domain Direct) wrote:

A lot of our subscribers have asked how they can change their default mailbox name and sending address to something more meaningful than "DefaultMailAccount" and "mailbox@somename.tld". If you have these same questions, the following video and instructions should be helpful.
... it is accompanied by explicit instructions that you should follow to make the changes described.
I'll look into ways to increase the quality of the video, unless your [sic] telling me that this level of assistance is undesirable.

It's not that "this level of assistance is undesirable" -- it's that this level of "assistance" is moronic and ineffective. The poor-quality silent Macromedia Flash videos that Ross produced and uploaded to YouTube are here and here. Enjoy.

The Post-Mortem

In October, Ross Rader (General Manager, Domain Direct) wrote:

The NetIdentity Control Panel fixes will address, amongst other things, one of the more vexing issues that you've been experiencing. If you've been getting a webmail login error, or haven't received new webmail since around September 21, you are affected by this problem.
[note: this was written October 3]

We are planning a reimport of all contact data over the next few days. This is taking longer than expected because we have had to request a new export of your contact data from the old mail provider. We received this data this morning and are now normalizing it for import into our system. The impact of this activity will mean that you will lose all updates you have made to your contact data since you started using the new webmail system.

One fix that we won't be able to deal with effectively over the short term is the screwed up login screen for Opera users.

Lots of problems, lots of talk, lots of service *not* delivered.

Damage Control

Following the September Disaster, Ross Rader (General Manager, Domain Direct) wrote:

I wish we had assessed this differently.
[yes, we all wish you had assessed this differently]

We don't normally staff the office on the weekend...

My credibility is definitely shot - I realize that.

... we don't have a long term commitment to this iteration of the webmail UI. The original plan was to turf it by the end of the year in favor of a more modern implementation.

... we have a pretty solid plan to improve the interface over the coming months, and a very substantial upgrade to the UI coming towards the end of the year.
[in the meanwhile, the interface is a train wreck]

My planning process was rushed, which lead to corner cutting, which lead to mistakes and problems and a decreased focus on getting the quality equation just right.
[the "quality equation": NetIdentity + Tucows = train wreck]
...
The good news is that the fixes are well underway and ahead of schedule.
[another lie: the fixes are still not fixed as of this writing]

The September Disaster

During the third and fourth weeks of September 2006, my NetIdentity webmail service became spotty, and I began to get the following error message instead of my e-mail:

Error while establishing a imap connection as myaccount@mydomain.com on n103.sc1.cp.net:143. : * BYE disconnecting; nested exception is: com.sun.mail.iap.ConnectionException: * BYE disconnecting

Then on the 26th, somebody at Tucows hit the "Enter" key for the new system, resulting in a 10,000-car pileup on the Information Superhighway. All I could see on my webmail for the next six days was the now-infamous "5 minute message":

Please accept our apologies for this delay. You've caught us in the process of automatically migrating your existing email from our old email service to our new one. Under most circumstances, this process may take up to 5 minutes. If you have a large amount of email stored on the mail system, this migration may take considerably longer (up to one hour per 300MB of mail stored). The migration of your data will only happen once during this upgrade. We appreciate your patience.

Details of this disaster have been chronicled on Wikipedia.

Storm Warnings

In August, Ross Rader (General Manager, Domain Direct) wrote:

We will be conducting a major upgrade to the email service during the middle of September.
...
It took us over three months of planning and implementation to deploy this new infrastructure from a hardware and network perspective, and almost two months of application development work to fully integrate it into the services provided by Domain Direct.
...
Your email, web hosting, domain forwarding and parking, and other services will *not* be offline or negatively affected by this upgrade.

One month later, NetIdentity e-mail was rendered useless.

Round Two -- more lies

Ross Rader (General Manager, Domain Direct) wrote:

Tucows is planning to run NetIdentity *as is* for the near future. We will continue to evolve the service and ensure that it gets the care and feeding our subscribers deserve. NetIdentity will become part of Tucows retail webhosting services group along with Domain Direct, Blogrolling.com, and other services we offer directly to the general public.
Our first priority is to take care of a few small housekeeping items and then work on ways to help make NetIdentity easier and more enjoyable for you to use.
...
Tucows has no plans to substantially change the services offered by NetIdentity and NamePlanet. Everything will be run "as is" for the forseeable future. That's not to say that there won't be any changes, we do want to evolve and improve things, but we're not shutting anything down either.

This was written even as plans were being laid to reverse the 2004 transition of e-mail provider from Critical_Path in San Francisco to Outblaze in Hong_Kong. While the 2004 transition went smoothly, the 2006 reversal would prove to be a disaster.

Tucows reputation

When the takeover was announced, some NetIdentity users who had been unhappy with poor customer service began to think optimistically that things would improve with Tucows running their mail server -- others were not pleased with the idea, pointing out the following:

Tucows is Number Five on the URI Blacklist

Spammers Protected by Tucows Whois_Privacy_Service

Tucows is Helping Spammers

Round One -- of lies...

On 21 June, Ross Rader (General Manager, Domain Direct) wrote:

When I said that we are going to continue running NetIdentity and NamePlanet "as is", I said it to mean that we would not be shutting down the service, getting rid of features, arbitrarily increasing our rates, and so on."

That's three-for-three: the service was shut down for six days (for me, more for others), many features were eradicated, and rates were "arbitrarily" increased. Those empty promises turned out to be lies, all lies.

Prelude to a Train Wreck

15 June 2006, a press release announced Tucows would purchase MailBank/Netidentity for $18 million cash plus 3 million shares of stock, explaining that "Tucows expects this acquisition to add between US$3 and $4 million in cash flow in 2007." Someone at Tucows was either dreaming, or else sold a bill of goods.