Warning: Wildblue switches to G-mail

[bumblebee]

At the end of February, Wildblue will switch their e-mail service to G-mail.  There are plenty of reasons not to be too excited about this change:

http://www.slate.com/id/2175651/

http://epic.org/privacy/gmail/faq.html

If you don't want to be Googled change your password to a 5 character word before the switchover and you will be notified that a e-mail account with Google will not be possible when the switch takes place. Simply ignore the warnings and you will not be signed into the new system. Your service will be unaffected.  Call customer service and give them whatever e-mail address you would like to use for a contact if your previous one was @wildblue.net.

If you currently use a password with 6 or more characters you will have a g-mail account automatically built. Your e-mail will remain @wildblue.net but it will be fully administered and housed on the google computers.

[Nixxy]

You must be a blogger for them, it's not as simple as you state, the customer service techs are usually unqualified.

Heres my experence with Wildblue, which I will  :angry:soon terminate.

I've used the Internet Service Provider (ISP) Wildblue for over a year. I had problems right from the start because of their equipment, the modem, was defective. For 4 months I logged many complaints because of it, and they always blamed the problem on my hardware. Finally after my continued complaining they had a serviceman come out and he quickly pinpointed the problem that their installed modem was defective. He switched it out and all was fine from then on with connectivity issues. They gave me a free month of service ($49) for my troubles, for which I think I should had gotten the whole 4 months the service was a problem. But I let it go.

Next problem, customer support, extremely long waits on the customer support line. The message when you dial in always says your wait will be 10 minutes, but that is never true, this week-end I called them twice and was on hold for over an hour each time. Most of the time when you finally get the tech, these people are not qualified to handle tech issues, and have limited knowledge in that area. Most of the time they will waste your time without solving the problem.

Next problem, a few weeks ago Wildblue sent an email out that they were going to no longer provide email service for their customers (they were going to merge all wildblue email tasks to gmail, which is a free service to anyone already) All ISP's provide email service to their customers as part of the monthly fees. I view this as a cut in their services, or changing the agreement. Yet it looks like the price of $49.00 a month will remain the same. Isn't this bait and switch?

Well, Saturday morning (3-1-08) was when they switched the email part of their service. Now I cannot send email through Wildblue because of some glitch at Wildblue. They blame the problem on Outlook, my email program, which is not the problem because I sent send through webmail with no problem. Once again they put the blame on something else. 

The first tech took me through steps configure email accounts that I completed before I called. When I could still not send, she was stumped. She then admitted Wildblue was having problems with some people that use Outlook. And that I should try my send email in 48 hours.

I called back thinking this tech wasn't very good either hoping to get someone better. This one was worse, and knew less about what she was doing. And said I needed to wait 24 hours and the email again. Two conflicting statements.

Out of frustration I asked for a supervisor. After another long wait she came on, we went through all the previous steps for a third time. Without any change in a thing. She then admitted their was a problem at Wildblue. And that I needed to wait 48 hours too.

Still not working today.

Is it legal for Wildblue to do this to their customers? I mean anyone can use gmail for free, yet Wildblue