Chuq,
No matter what others may think of your actions, I'd say you are doing the
right thing. You've attempted to contact the management about the problem and
gotten nowhere. It now time to turn the problem over to those that have
a better chance of getting results from them, their customers. Juno may be
a large system, but if they want to stay that way, they need to keep the
customers happy. The old saying of 1 angry customer having more impact than
10 happy ones is still true.
It was a few years ago that I did the same thing for technical problems with
aol.com. I couldn't seem to get their attention no matter how hard I tried.
Finally, as a matter of last resort I posted a message similiar to yours to
the list giving a warning of 2 weeks time that I was going to terminate all
aol members in my lists. Being a technical list, I wanted to give people a
chance to continue to get the list and not miss things they may find critical.
I gave the list members a few suggested options.
First, contact aol management and send them the included problem
description and demand a fix.
Second, move to a better (and at the time it was easy) provider.
Third, is a combination of the above 2. Tell aol why your leaving. This
should have the most impact.
Fourth, do without the list.
It appears that what I couldn't do as an outsider, their customers were
able to do rather quickly. The next morning I was contacted by a aol tech
manager/vp asking for exact details of the problem. How serious it was,
etc. Imagine the shock that someone there actually cared AND had a clue.
He actually had some ideas as to the solution to the problem and what
needed to be done.
This resulted in another rather formal email response from aol asking me not
to do the cut in 2 weeks. For some reason they actually needed to pass the
message through their legal dept for approval so as to not be promising
anything they couldn't deliver. They were actually working on the problem,
but it was going to take about a month to deploy.
The result is that the actions taken did actually attract attention in
management where it was needed. A fix was installed and things got
dramaticly better. They still had a long way to go, but the were moving
in the right direction. I'm sure that aol would have made the fixes that
were needed to reduce the problems that I was seeing at some point in time,
but I was fed up then. All of a sudden this problem had a priority level
inside the company because their customers knew about it and were about to
leave. Also, a much wider audience knew of the problem and if any were asked
for a recommendation, aol was not going to be in the list.
I think that many people don't realize how much time and effort it takes to
run a list. At that time, by getting rid of the problems being caused by 1
provider, I was able to reduce the time I spent by about 50%.
--Gene
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