Help Me Convince Earthlink this is THEIR problem

Post date: 2021-04-17 03:12:38

I have been having a frustrating issue with my own Outlook account connecting to my ISP's incoming mail server. I am going to attempt to get on the phone with someone tonight and resolve it. Please help me prepare for battle and convince them to take me seriously.

So - here's the details.

I have Outlook as part of the Office 365 package, and I have it connected to the server Earthlink has set aside for my email domain group (my original ISP was bought out by another company, which was itself bought out by Earthlink). This set up has been working ABSOLUTELY fine for a couple years now. This problem only started happening within the past week.

The problem is this: intermittently, when I go to retrieve email, Outlook first brings up the dialog box in which I would input my password. The correct password is already there, because I have it automatically set to remember my password. I click "okay" or whatever similar thing it says, an then I get the error which says it cannot connect to my ISP's incoming mail server. So I cannot receive email. I can SEND email just fine, since that is a different server at my ISP. Even more frustratingly, I could come back a half hour later and try again and it would work fine. But then fifteen minutes later, I could try again and it would stop working again.

Here are all of the things I have tried to do.

1. "Changed" the password on my Outlook email account (i.e., erasing the saved correct password and re-entering it). This doesn't seem to affect the issue either way.
2. Confirmed that I have the proper email settings for my ISP, for both the incoming and outgoing account. I do.
3. Re-entered these same settings, just in case. This DOES seem to temporarily help - I am able to get the "Microsoft Test Email" and retrieve my mail about half the time when I do this. The other half the time, I get an error message from Outlook that they are not able to connect to the server over at my ISP, so they can't fix things. Or, if I am successful, within an hour I'm back with the same problem.
4. Re-entered these same settings, with the assistance of someone on my ISP's live chat. This worked, but then an hour later I was back with the same problem again.
5. Used Outlook's "Repair" tool on my email account, which walks me through exactly the same steps in terms of confirming the proper email settings with exactly the same 50/50 rate of sucess.

Everything seems to indicate something is going screwy with the server on my ISP's end. I can access my incoming email via the ISP's webmail absolutely fine; for whatever reason, this is only affecting the Outlook interface, and it is only affecting incoming mail. (I was having that problem this morning, and sent a message to my roommate to confirm whether outgoing mail worked - and that went through just fine.)

So. What are the magic words I need to say to convince Earthlink that "Dude, I think the problem is on your end"?

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