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The following is no longer relevant since EarthLink fixed the problem; but I have preserved the story here because there are instructive points, and besides, they say they have fixed everything, and I believe it, but it never hurts to have a record, and this is as convenient a place to keep a record of this as any.

We have been paying Earthlink a considerable amount to host my wife's web site. The money is taken by them on my American Express card, and they get it every month. So, out of the blue, I get a

PASTDUE@EARTHLINK.NET message that wants 14 bucks, and says

We have previously sent you invoices and a past due notice, but we have

still not received a payment to bring your outstanding balance current.

This is the final notice we will send you. We have scheduled your EarthLink account for inactivation on 03/19/03 unless payment in full is received before that date.

But of course they have not sent me any previous notices, or I have seen none so any that came here would have to be after the last time I paid the bills, and they take their money every month through American Express, and I don't understand what $14.04 would be for in the first place. They don't explain.

Now my wife's mail address is not easy to change, and it's worth fourteen bucks not to have to change it, so I'll pay it; but I am not sure why Earthlink deserves any of my money other than that they can demand it. Earthlink used to be a class act. It seems to have gone a long way downhill. I note that this is now worked out of Atlanta, and isn't local to Los Angeles - Pasadena any more.

And I guess I'll be looking into a new place to host her web site, and while we're at it we will look to see what we can do about minimizing our dependency on EarthLink. A company that can't keep its billings straight usually has other problems.

So I telephone them. They have a telephone tree system that makes it impossible to talk to people. But eventually I get through that.

Well, I got hold of a human being. His name is Kim, and I can barely hear him. He says if he talked louder he would be shouting. Shouting would be preferable to not hearing him, but if I strain I can sort of understand him. He says I pay by check. I have never in my entire life paid an Earthlink account by check, but he knows I pay by check because it's right there on his computer screen. He says I didn't pay in November and January. I point out that $14 is less than any month's account would be, and besides we have a web hosting account, and a satellite connection account, and both those services cost a lot more than any $14.04.

He repeats that we pay by check, and I owe $14.04. Now he has to hang up and call me to "verify the account." We will see how long that takes.

Well he has called me, but he isn't at his computer screen because he is on the telephone, so he can't tell me what the charges are for. This takes a while to explain. His phone cord isn't long enough.

Ah. He managed. Apparently we used an 800 access to Earthlink in November and in January. When I point out that (1) we don't pay by check, and (2) we don't use 800 service, we dial a local number either here or in San Diego, I get a repetition of the charges and the assertion that I must have used the service because I am being billed for it. I ask for a supervisor.

Now I have a supervisor. Her name is Kawanda and she is certain there can't be any mistakes, because it's right there on the computer screen, and they can't bill me for any service I didn't use so therefore on January 20 I, or rather Roberta, used several hours worth of 800 dial-up access. On Martin Luther King Day. Only we didn't. I point out we don't use 800 dialup services. When we do use dialup, it's to a local telephone, not to an 800 number. But Kawanda is absolutely certain we did use that service, and that we pay by check, and she is unwilling to entertain the possibility that there can be any error on their part. I point out that I pay Earthlink quite a lot of money every month, but it's all by credit card, and I have never in the dozen years that Roberta's account has been in use paid by check, and she patiently explains to me that I must pay by check because that's what her computer screen tells her, and I must have used the 800 service because they can't bill me for any services I have not used. I am not making this up.

Well, I will pay Earthlink the $14.04, but it is clearly time to look into alternatives to Earthlink. If they can make this kind of mistake for trivial amounts, and are unwilling to discuss the possibility that anything can go wrong at their end, they can make that kind of mistake for any amount whatever; and since their letter threatens to turn this over to a collection agency, I think I prefer to deal with a company that has a little more control over its activities and billings.

Incidentally, I have found the US Mail invoice they sent me. It was in the bill box, the one I emptied last time I paid the bills, near the top, so it came in recently, in the last day or so. It doesn't say what the charge is for, but it does say that it is due March 15, 2003, so this isn't even overdue yet; but Earthlink is telling me this is past due and threatening me with shutting down my wife's account, and with turning the account over to a collection agency. Sure make it a pleasure to do business with them.

(And see Mail.)

Having read your account of your recent dealings with Earthlink, all I can offer are sincere sympathies. A common practice in the industry, per two coworkers who wrote parts of their billing software, is to spread otherwise unrecoverable bills onto other accounts. This practice is in full swing with the Telco's as well.

My largest client has an huge phone footprint in multiple states. To audit a typical months worth of billing is an expensive and time consuming process. The Telco's know this, so do ISP's Most people don't question a charge below $20.00 they just pay it to avoid the time and expense to fight it.

Recently my client, as part of merger related activities, did perform an extensive audit of our phone charges. I can't disclose the amount they discovered we were over charged but it was significant in both dollars and as a percentage of total bill. Some examples were calls billed to lines that had been disconnected for over a year. A significant portion of these calls were to Nigeria, on that specific line.

ISP's and practically everyone else out there quietly pass delinquent accounts onto other accounts. And sometimes it is just an outright error, but as you discovered as far as they are concerned you have to prove they made the error, and how do you prove a negative?

As to your wife's hard to change email address, I am guessing this has to do with the fact that it is published, probably relating to her Reading Program and her efforts in that field. While I cannot offer any mitigating advice for the current situation I do have a service to share with you that will prevent it from happening again. Use a mail forwarder like POBOX.COM. I have been a happy user for many years now. In essence they give you an email address like mine below. Then you configure where you want that email to actually be delivered, including multiple delivery address's. For instance mine sends a copy of the email to both my private address as well as the address I am using at a particular client site. And I can reconfigure it on the fly.

They also offer filtering, rules, SPAM scoring etc. And their charge per year is very reasonable. I have my own domain as do you, but I still find the mail forwarding concept or more correctly mail redirecting, wonderful. They do not store your mail, but simply redirect it. In all the years of using this service I have never seen a message altered in any fashion via their processing, there are no size limits as they do not store it, and it adds less than an minute to the delivery time. ( I periodically run test messages through to check on this and other issues.)

There are other vendors but POBOX.COM appears to be the granddaddy of em all and has the longest track record that I am aware of. I am fairly certain you are already aware of these services but it might have been awhile since you last looked at them.

Cheers,

Robert Porter robertporter@pobox.com

I probably ought to try a mail PO Box, but I do have lists to worry about and so forth.

I would probably have just paid the $14 if they had not threatened to cut off the account and turn it over to a collection agency as the first move in the game.

Another note on EarthLink:

“I note that this is now worked out of Atlanta, and isn't local to Los Angeles - Pasadena any more.”

Earthlink recently laid off all 500+ remaining Pasadena employees, with the exception of the handful in the NOC.

All remaining Earthlink jobs are currently in Atlanta with Mindspring. Before too long, Earthlink “tech support” will be in India like AOL’s.

And Sky Dayton seemed like such a nice guy the last time I met him.

Robert Grenader

My original EarthLink account was set up by Sky Dayton here at my house when he started the company. It was free for a long time, but I voluntarily converted to paid service in part because I could hardly claim to be "evaluating" it any longer, and in part because I like to see what happens to my readers as well as to me. For a long time it was pretty good.

But lately the Spaminator hasn't been working -- Roberta receives really horrible porno spam now -- and while I can set Outlook rules to filter much of it, one would think that EarthLink could get a lot of that at the source. They used to.

Well, all good things eventually end.

Sky and Arwen are delightful people, and Arwen is a pretty good novelist, although with two young children she's not likely to find much time to write... For the first few years Sky took a personal interest in the gory details of making EarthLink work, and that showed.

Subject: Change an Email Address only once, and Worldcom analogy.

In 96, my ISP was swallowed by "Canada's largest Internet provider". They immediately declined to renew my account, because they wanted to discard retail and concentrate on lucrative e-business. (Why buy every large retail provider if you don't want retail? Within six months, they were losing four million dollars a month - a large amount of money in Canada, and within a year were gone). So I learned early the "joy" of changing an email address.

When I moved to a broadband ISP in 2000, I couldn't decide between cable or ADSL, so I made an interim decision and moved my email to a forwarding address hosted at a friend's hobby domain. My 2000 ISP went messily bankrupt in 01 and my friend changed the forwarding from his PDA while on vacation with us at a beach. (you know enough geeks, right?). Eventually I bought my own domain address because it looked like his employer might be moving him. Both the 2000 address and my own still work.

The lesson here is that your email should not be at your ISP, and once you get large enough, is probably worth owning yourself. Presumably your wife's email address was set up before jerrypournelle.com. Shop for price or reliability on your pipe, and shop for stability for the email address.

Shrug. Perhaps you already did this. Earthlink should be an example of "stability". But ecommerce is a shambles and business plans are collapsing everywhere. Perhaps this sounds like the end of Worldcom. Charge for anything, and when you rebate the charges, it comes out of a different account, and from a different quarter. If Earthlink is doing this, your billing went into Q1, and your rebate, had you fought hard enough, would come out of Q2. It worked for a year for Worldcom. If this hypothesis has any validity, bogus billings are a screaming indicator that it is time to shop around on your own terms.

G Goss

I agree. Completely. I can only say that when we set this up, EarthLink was about the best game in town; that is, it was very good (and knowing the CEO didn't hurt: Sky Dayton was passionately interested in making it work properly and appreciated being told of problems; he had an assistant named Tiara who was wonderful at straightening out problems; I believe her husband was a Vice President).

Over time EarthLink grew, and now we have this, where I am billed for something I am pretty certain I didn't use, and the threat to cut off service and go to a collection agency comes before the bill is actually due according to their own invoice.

I will now be looking for painless ways to change services. It was pretty good while it lasted. All things change. As to the WorldCom situation, yes, that had entered my head also.

More in the column, because this is all a very bad portent.