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Massively Parallel Procrastination

So I got a blackberry.

Yesterday, I spent O(2 hours) on the phone with them to figure out why I couldn't ssh out. Turns out that the default APN isn't set to wap.voicestream.com, so non mail/http connections fail. What T-Mobile told me was "RIM blocked port 22 because end-users were using that port to download third party software that voided the device warranty." RIM set me straight (and claims that they'd never block a port on customers. Especially not SSH, which their customers _use_.)

Tonight, I've spent 4.5 hours on the phone with T-Mobile and RIM because the device...stopped being able to send or receive email. After three first-tier T-Mobile engineers and two second-tier T-Mobile engineers, I finally got bounced to RIM. Their first tier technician seems to be focusing on "oh. it must be your mail server" although it worked until 6:30 this evening just fine. And other IMAP clients work fine. The latest gem:


Hello Jesse,

Thank you for contacting BlackBerry Technical Support. In order to determine
why the integrated account is unable to receive email messages, I will
require additional information:

1) Please provide the login information for the integrated account for us to further investigate the issue.

Account type: (Example: POP, IMAP or Outlook Web Access 2000 account)
Mail Server name: (Example: mail.servername.com)
Username:
Password:

2) How many messages are in the Inbox folder of the account ?

If the message count is greater than 1000 messages, the end user would need to move messages to
a subfolder.

Please reply to this message, including your Service Request number as it appears above..

I am looking forward for your reply.

Sincerely,

Mohamad
BlackBerry Technical Support
Research In Motion Limited
Tel: 1-877-255-2377
Email: help@blackberry.net
Web: www.blackberry.com