Today I had my email account with Bell suspended. I have had this account since I first started using Bell Internet over 20 years ago and this is the first time for it to be suspended.
It started with a failed logon via Thunderbird. It continued with a failed logon via Bell’s web mail site. Once I got into my Bell Account and went to manage my email addresses is where I found that it was suspended and I had to call 310-SURF to reactivate it.
Calling 310-SURF was an exercise in futility as the person I spoke with was unable to resolve the issue but did make the comment that “it was suspended by an agent”. The issue was escalated to the “back office support” after I had to dig up the password. A few minutes later the web mail says my “account has been locked for 10 minutes and to change my password”. When I got onto my Bell Account again the email address now allows me to change the password (so it has been reactivated).
Through all this Bell has yet to disclose why the account was suspended.
I have my suspicions though!!
Today I was testing to figure out why Bell was not delivering all of my messages and not returning any errors (thus violating the standards). The messages are legitimate business communications.
So using my office account, gmail account, and work account, as destinations I was sending slightly different variations on an undelivered message. After about 25 variations I was unable to send any more. These messages were sent one at a time with a few seconds in between to check the target account.
I think I figured it out though. Any message that contained a link to a private IP address (http://192.168.0.31) was causing the message to be undelivered and no error returned (violating standards).
So I have multiple issues with Bell right now:
- failure to deliver email messages and not reporting said failure to the sender (required by standards)
- suspending my email account without disclosing the reason why
- parsing my email messages and possibly reading them?
So as far as I am concerned we have intentional service failures, non-compliance with standards, a lack of communication, and possible privacy violations.