How Does Earthlink Support Suck?

Let Me Count The Ways.

February 27, 2005

1. The link in the "your email has been blocked by Earthlink spamblocker" is broken. It does not take you to a place where you can acknowledge that you are a a real person, but instead takes you to a page with information about 128 bit encryption - after giving a warning that you are being redirected from a secure page that was requested to an insecure page.
2. Earthlink does not accept support requests by email, making it more difficult to notify them about broken pages such as this.
3. The email message that Earthlink sends out saying that they do not accept support requests by email has a link when a user could 'conveniently' enter their request. Unfortunately, this link is a link to a blank page, not a location where a support incident could be submitted.
4. The Earthlink support site at support.earthlink.com has a link to a form where it is implied that an email could be sent to Earthlink support. However, this form is broken. It neither has any place to put any information about the issue nor does it have a submit button, so this form is useless.
5. Earthlink's telephone system sends users through a frustrating and annoying maze of menus before eventually dumping the user on a person who just wants to end the call and has no interest in being helpful.
6. It appears that when you fight your way through to Earthlink email support, that the recipients cannot be bothered to read the support request, and just send an email asking the user to be more clear. If the email messages coming from Earthlink are so unclear that Earthlink support cannot follow them, then you should probably give consideration to clarifying them so that they are clear when a user sends an email back regarding the links in them being broken.

From my experiences so far today with Earthlink support, I believe that they may actually be worse than HotMail support, which, until today, I did not think was possible.