NOT RECEIVNG ANY E-MAILS

I usually receive A LOT of e-mails daily; many of these are from Yahoo music trading/vining groups. However, I noticed earlier today that that flood had slowed to hardly a trickle.

When I went to one of my groups to post a message, I got the error "you cannot post to this group because your e-mail is bouncing." This happened to be a group where I'm the owner/moderator. WTF? In the e-mail preferences section of Yahoo (found rather easily), the message was that AT&T was hard bouncing my e-mails because of "abuse" and to contact my ISP. I supposed the abuse was that I usually receive a lot of e-mails.

Anyway, I went to my account on the AT&T website. It took me over two hours (!) of searching through their various FAQ's before I finally found a way to ask them about this problem (you would think that the world's largest telecommunication company would provide a "contact us" page that doesn't just link you back to the FAQ's that didn't answer your question in the first place).

The method of contact was to do an online chat with a customer service representative. I have never liked online chats because my fingers tend to slip off the keyboard keys and I hit send when I don't intend to. Anyway, the answer was that it's a "server problem" (after the chat session, I found a service bulletin that said that the AT&T servers weren't accepting any e-mails from AOL, Yahoo, or BellSouth addresses (which, I suppose constitutes a pretty big share of the non-MSN and Hotmail e-mail market).

The funny thing is that the first e-mail I received in many hours was a log of the AT&T chat session. So, I present that now (I find it slightly amusing, slightly irritating since the the CSR seemed so bored):

05/30/2005 05:49:19AM Message Sent "Please type your message now."
05/30/2005 05:49:27AM Message Sent CSR "Hi, how may I help you?"
05/30/2005 05:49:28AM Message Sent CUS "I don"
05/30/2005 05:49:47AM Message Sent CUS "I don't seem to be receiving any e-mails in my account since yesterday"
05/30/2005 05:50:30AM Message Sent CUS "Yahoo is saying that you are hard bouncing my e-mails from their groups because of "abuse""
05/30/2005 05:50:31AM Message Sent CSR "As of now Mark there is a mail server issue regarding the e-mails ."
05/30/2005 05:50:55AM Message Sent CSR "The technicians are aware of the facts ."
05/30/2005 05:51:09AM Message Sent CUS "when will this be fixed? I rely on those e-mails for home business"
05/30/2005 05:51:28AM Message Sent CSR "We can understand your concern and regret the inconvenience caused . But this is under work."
05/30/2005 05:51:39AM Message Sent CUS "thanks"
05/30/2005 05:51:40AM Message Sent CSR "As soon as the technicians are able to do so it will be posted on the Help Bulletin board ."
05/30/2005 05:51:51AM Leave Session CSR (Shirley.S)
05/30/2005 05:51:51AM Leave Session CUS
05/30/2005 05:51:51AM Session Ended