by Judy Reed

Mired in Internet hell

If there is such a thing as an Internet hell, we’ve experienced it here at the Post this last week.
Some of you may have noticed that you had trouble contacting us by email. There is a reason for that—our Internet provider whacked our email addresses without giving us any time to migrate them over to a new one or even tell us they were going to do it. And they’ve been double billing us to boot.
A few months ago we switched from a Charter residential plan to a business plan, including the phone. Shortly afterward our publisher, Lois Allen, received two bills and called to find out what was up, and was assured by the company we were up to date.
Then, last week, we had a problem getting online. And although we’d been making payments, Charter said we owed over $1,000. Lois wondered why when she had been paying her bill. The answer? They were still billing us for both services.
I don’t know about you, but if we did that to a customer we would have to forgive the charge because it was our mistake. Evidently not so with Charter. Lois spent hours on the phone trying to sort out the mistake, and being bounced from the residential to the business side. Neither side could help her. So she went to the Greenville office to see if she could get it straightened out. And then suddenly we couldn’t get into our charter.net emails.
After calling them yet again, they finally told her that when switching to a business plan, you need to set up a new domain name and change your email addresses because Charter.net is for residential email addresses. Customer service helped her set up the new domain name and told her it would take 24 hours to sync. He said after that she would be able to migrate all the old email messages, contacts, etc into the new email addresses we would set up. He told her where to print out the inch-thick instructions on how to do it. Twenty-four hours came and went and our old emails still had not been restored. So she called Charter yet again. This time she was told the emails and all the info contained therein—ads, contacts, news and information, was gone forever. They had deleted them and there was no getting them back.
She asked to speak to a supervisor, and was told he was the supervisor for that area. So we were stuck. And ready to drop kick Charter out of our lives.
Rather than creating new addresses, we went back to using some older ones that came with our website. The email boxes are now bigger and can hold the photos and ads you send us. If you have tried to make contact with us over the last week through our Charter addresses and it bounced, please email us at these addresses:
news@cedarspringspost.com for general news
design@cedarspringspost.com for sending ads
sales@cedarspringspost.com for contacting one of our sales people.
See a complete list of email addresses in the “about us” section on our website.
And, if you know of any good high speed Internet providers, let us know.