I am told that my canceled AOL account will no longer be active when “the box is filled” (the supervisor I talked to had no idea how many emails that meant) or “when the account is recycled” (the supervisor did not know what that really meant or when it would happen.

I let them know I was contacting the Better Business Bureau if we could not get this cleared up. I have tried several times before.

So you see the issue is that people can send to this old address, GET NO NOTIFICATION or bounced message that indicates the account is closed, and will assume that I am not answering my email. Bad for personal and professional contacts!

Has anyone had experience with this part of the issue? I was told by AOL that it was common practice for email accounts to NOT give a bounced message, and to remain “active” although canceled. is that true???

What do you think?

A funny anecdote: I forwarded your link to a bunch of my fellow techs at work and told them that an online buddy of mine was going through AOL cencellation hell, and had some audio of it. By the time I got the e-mail out, you were already Dugg big time, and everyone thought I just grabbed a Digg story and passed it off as a casual discovery. Hilarious!

Anyway, good work, man. I can’t wait to find out what AOL has to say to you. I think they ought to make a press release to apologize and announce big changes to their cancellation system. But I won’t hold my breath.

One thing: The mp3 file you posted on putfile was wrapped in a tag that specified it as a Windows Media Player file. WMP on the Mac platform doesn’t play mp3’s, only on Windows machines. So the “other 10% of us” had to View Source, find the URL of the actual mp3 file and paste it into our location windows. Gotaa watch those lage corporations who think they are the world!

Also, I personally think that Jon, although he was a dick, was doing what AOHell expected. There have simply been too many cancellation horror stories to believe otherwise.

Good luck and thanks for the great reading over the years.

I cannot agree with the folks who think that the operator you had to deal with was either:

A) Doing his job

or

B) Doing what AOL expected him to do.

Neither of these arguments are all that logical considering the consequences.

If AOL expected this kind of treatment, there would have been no fallout, certainly no severing of ties, after this recording had been made public. There would have more likely been a claim that the tape must have been somehow “doctored” to the extent that only the portions that made the caller look good and the company look bad were used. You’ll note that AOL didn’t say that.

The notion that the “retainer’s” job is really just to piss you off doesn’t really hold water, either. On the contrary, it’s their job to be your ultimate advocate, to go “against” the “big guys,” convince you that they’re the ONLY one there who’s really in YOUR corner, and then promise that they’re going to give you a deal that no one else is ever going to get just because you’re you! And if such an offer still isn’t enough, they’re supposed to still be friendly and cordial enough that if you leave and then decide that you want to come back, you won’t have such a bad taste in your mouth that you’d never consider them again.

To put it another way, there’s no reason why a retainer should hope to make you so angry that the ONLY reasonable option you’re left with is to never do business with the company for the rest of your life!

People switch companies all the time. And many of them try out other companies they’re convinced will be better, find out they’re not, then come back. A smart business would never require its employees to prevent that return from ever happening!

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/17/technology/17online.html