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August 6, 2022 9:54 am  #1


Bell: It can't happen here. Oh yeah?

A few days ago, Bell CEO (S)Mirko Bibic told an investor conference call that Bell had separate networks for wireless and internet, and they wouldn't have the same kind of failure as Rogers did.  
Early this morning, I was getting messages on my cell phone that my periodic automatic email login required a correct password.  So I attempted to sign in to both of my accounts (sympatico.ca and bell.net) using the appropriate passwords.  No luck. I then tried using the web mail interface at bell.net, and got error messages there.
Next I logged into My Bell and tried to use the "manage my email" link, which in the past has allowed me to reenter the old passwords as new ones, and restore functionality. Now I am told that I don't have ANY email addresses.
As a test, I emailed my Bell mail accounts from my Gmail account, and a few minutes later got an error message:
"The response from the remote server was:
554 Invalid DNS PTR resource record for 209.85.xxx.xxx"
Googling this error gives this response:
"The sending server has recently migrated to a new datacenter that doesn't have RDNS set."
I then called the 310-BELL service line, and got a recording message that they are experiencing email problems and are trying to resolve them as quickly as possible".
While this isn't the same sort of outage as Rogers had, it still underlines the fact that none of these companies are taking a "belt and suspenders" approach to making major system changes. 
Fortunately I have Gmail as a fallback, but all of my notifications for everyday user accounts (billing, banking, Amazon, Paypal, etc) use my Bell accounts.
The least Bell could do is put up a message on the home page of My Bell, so that when you access your billing account, you will know there is a problem.
Of all the times I've had problems with Bell email access (and there have been several), they have been associated with their quest for making things better.  Better email user interface, blah blah. But never before have I been told that I don't have any existing email addresses!
At the moment, I'm not expecting any urgent emails, although in the last few days I have had urgent correspondence regarding flight changes, car rental modifications, and hotel changes.  Pity anyone expecting a notification from Arrivecan.

They Big Three all live in glass houses.

 

August 6, 2022 10:29 am  #2


Re: Bell: It can't happen here. Oh yeah?

thanks for posting... i am having bell email issues exactly as you describe.

 

August 6, 2022 10:44 am  #3


Re: Bell: It can't happen here. Oh yeah?

Same problems with my email as well.

 

August 6, 2022 11:32 am  #4


Re: Bell: It can't happen here. Oh yeah?

I have to say, I don't quite understand why anyone would want their main email address to be tied to businesses such as Bell (xxxxx@sympatico.ca) or Rogers (xxxxx@rogers.ca). If one decides to switch service providers for any number of reasons, all access to their "tied-to" email account(s) is lost.

I use google.ca, as opposed to, and never having a hotmail.ca account. Friends of mine found out that their hotmail accounts were often blocked from their access at their places of work and made the switch google (or others) many years ago. Not long after I brought these  points up to the attention of one of my friends, who had a sympatico.ca address, he created a google.ca address for himself. Not long after doing so and unknowingly to him, his wife switched their phone service over to rogers, lost her sympatico.ca access and blamed him for not telling her what would happen.
 

 

August 6, 2022 12:59 pm  #5


Re: Bell: It can't happen here. Oh yeah?

Gmail has its own issues with respect to the profiling and storage of your personal data. Also, it has a 15 Gb storage limit which won't be enough in the long term.  My sympatico inbox exceeds 30 Gb. 
I use a wonderful (free for home use) email archive software called Mailstore Home.  It is excellent, has a fantastic indexer and search engine, and doesn't have a storage limitation.  I synchronize my archive every few weeks, and do a complete system image backup of my computer after that.

Now a status update for Bell email.  A few minutes after my first posting, the My Bell account showed that the list of email accounts had been restored.  I was able to send a test email from Gmail to my sympatico.ca and bell.net accounts without a bounceback, so at least the inboxes  appeared to be functional.  But I could not log in, nor could I reset the passwords from My Bell.  Around 12:40, I was able to log back in to my accounts, and retrieve my latest Gmail test message (but not the earlier ones).  There is no sign of incoming emails since around 4:30 this morning, so the approximate outage duration was 8 hours. Emails sent to me during the outage may be lost if the sending server doesn't persist in trying to re-send.

     Thread Starter
 

August 6, 2022 1:15 pm  #6


Re: Bell: It can't happen here. Oh yeah?

as of 1pm it seems to be back up.  this is actually the second weekend in a row that i have had login issues.  called bell last week and of course... they blamed it on my thunderbird email client which they are not trained to diagnose.  in other words its my fault so go away.

 

August 6, 2022 1:46 pm  #7


Re: Bell: It can't happen here. Oh yeah?

The email client on Windows 10 was working okay, but it took a while for the generic web portal access to allow me to log in. Kept getting a wrong password message, but it's finally all working now. I suspect it may have gone into lockout mode after several unsuccessful previous attempts, and the lockout had to reset after 15+ minutes.
All this irritation in aid of the new look, features and functionality.
 

     Thread Starter
 

August 6, 2022 3:42 pm  #8


Re: Bell: It can't happen here. Oh yeah?

DeepTracks wrote:

I use google.ca, as opposed to, and never having a hotmail.ca account. Friends of mine found out that their hotmail accounts were often blocked from their access at their places of work and made the switch google (or others) many years ago.

Some websites, online services etc. won't even allow you to use a known free/ad-supported email service such as Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo to sign up - you more or less need to use an email account from your employer, ISP or university/college, or your hosting provider if you have your own domain name and website, and at least one email address on that domain name.

 

August 7, 2022 12:14 pm  #9


Re: Bell: It can't happen here. Oh yeah?

My father, which has had the same sympatico.ca email address for 20 years, had the same problem yesterday.

I think that ISP-issued email addresses were more common in the early days of the World Wide Web. I worked in sales for a cable ISP (not Rogers) over a decade ago, back when a lot of Bell customers in small towns were still on dial-up and cable had recently started offering 30 Mbps download in those towns. Although a lot of people already had us for our TV services, one of the barriers we had to getting people to switch from Bell internet to my company was the number of customers who were tied to their Bell email address and didn’t want to give that up.

On a side note, back then I got a new customer sign-up who wanted Internet only - no phone, no cable, and he didn’t have an OTA setup. Back then it was very unusual to see that, but it was right after Netflix had expanded into Canada. It was the beginning signs of cable-never consumers.

Last edited by MJ Vancouver (August 7, 2022 12:20 pm)