Richard's Tech Reviews

Rogers announces iPhone 3G plans, unlimited data dreams crushed

Rogers has announced its price plans for the iPhone 3G

http://www.rogers.com/web/content/wireless-products/iphone_voice_data_packages

Snapshot as of 2008-06-27

The "all the data you'll need" part is particularly amusing.

Assuming that, per Rogers usual policy, this doesn't cover roaming (outside of Canada / outside of Rogers network) data, you can expect two stories within a month of launch:
* The "my Rogers iPhone bill is $x thousands of dollars, and all I did was visit my regular websites" story and
* The "I went to the States/Europe and my Rogers iPhone bill is $x thousands of dollars"

via Digg

Now, Rogers did introduce an SMS data alerts service ("your web surfing is about to cost you a kajillion dollars") but it's not clear if they will apply to the iPhone

these notifications are free of charge and automatically provided to customers with an Unlimited On-Device Mobile Browsing Plan. You may receive multiple notifications as you incur data charges throughout your bill cycle at pre-defined data usage rates.

Rogers has also made their pay-per-use data plans into some incredibly complicated world of tiers that I don't think I can even manage to describe.

$25,000 cellphone data bill

Two Ottawa customers have been left reeling, and fuming, after receiving cellphone bills from Bell Canada for tens of thousands of dollars even though they believed they had "unlimited" Internet access on the devices.

Khalil Haddad, owner of an Ottawa salon, was charged $10,342 last month after his son used his phone to surf the web. Jennifer Rundle, an Ottawa hair stylist and student, was sent a $24,791 bill for similar reasons.

Both thought they were paying an extra fee for unlimited Internet access in their cellular plans and figured they would be protected from huge bills.

Ottawa Citizen - How to ring up a $25,000 cellphone bill - June 7, 2008

The Canadian cellphone providers, as I detailed in Rogers Vision has you uncovered, provide confusing and incomplete information about data services, information which even an IT specialist can't understand, let alone an average user.  They don't seem to have a level of support that can clearly answer direct technical questions.  They also provide zero tools in-phone to help you monitor and manage your data use.  There is no technical reason they couldn't provide real-time data and dollar counters, as well as alert, cap and disable.  There are reports they may deliberately limit the amount of info you can get on your phone so that you can't manage your data use effectively, which is even more scandalous.

If Rogers doesn't fix this for The Coming of the iPhone, there will be blood.

debugging Rogers verified email sending issues - problem solved?

So I have a secondary account, lets call it sendexample@rogers.com, that I use as the login credentials for the SMTP server when sending from my own domain.

This is the way I have always had sending set up for my domain in Entourage.
I never touch the sendexample account, I don't think it can even receive email.
I never log in to it.

When I verified my own domain email, I verified it under a different secondary account, let's say I verified foo@example.com under secondaryexample@rogers.com

It appears this approach may be what is breaking Rogers verified email sending.
It appears that Rogers will only accept sending if

1. You have verified the email from within one of your accounts, using the steps they provide.
2. When you send the email, you use THE SAME ROGERS ACCOUNT under which you verified, for your SMTP authentication.

If I use any account other than the one under which the address was verified, including sending using my primary account credentials, the message is rejected with a 553 error.  I assumed that sending using ANY of my accounts would work, and as well I assumed it was a hierarchy, with the primary account being a master for all others, but this does not appear to be the case.  While you may appear to have a "global" set of Rogers accounts in some views online, not in this one.

I suspect many people may be in this situation, whether they verified under their primary account but send using secondary account credentials, or vice-versa.

So in summary:
If you have logged in as secondaryexample@rogers.com, and verified foo@example.com,
you must use user: secondaryexample, pass: (secondaryexample password) for SMTP verification or it won't send.

I'm guessing that earlier this month they were only partially set up, so people were round-robining to a server that wasn't checking for verified emails and that was what was enabling them to send after multiple tries.

Previously:
May 28, 2008  Dear Rogers: Go 553 yourselves

Dear Rogers: Go 553 yourselves

Dear Rogers.

It's really super-clever how, when I try to fill in your support form

https://secure.rogershelp.com/yahoo/contact/support/php/

to tell you that my COMPLETELY CORRECTLY CONFIGURED email verification is TOTALLY BROKEN, you prevent me from filling in the form and instead point me to

http://www.rogershelp.com/yahoo/article.php?id=10H-F

Which tells me how to configure verified email.
Which I already did.
Over a month ago.
And which was first flaky (requiring multiple retries to send from a verified address) and is now COMPLETELY TOTALLY BROKEN.

So how about you stop sending me to do stuff I ALREADY DID

http://www.rogershelp.com/verify-email

and say, fix your f-ing systems yourselves instead.

Thanks.

In case by some miracle you read this and want to help, I'm sending email from Mac Office, Entourage 10.1.6

Which, incidentally means that your offer of "live support", featuring a technician who knows much less than I do following some troubleshooting script and poking around my desktop files, this offer of an .exe file for me to run your remote desktop troubleshooting is not so useful as .EXE files don't run on the Mac.

PS You know that email addresses are not case-sensitive, right?  So why did you make your system case-senstitive?

Previously:
May 2, 2008  Rogers-Yahoo's broken email sending support

Rogers-Yahoo's broken email sending support

I have my own domain.  I never had problems sending from it.  Then Rogers-Yahoo introduced sender address verification.  No problem.  I verified my outgoing email addresses in my domain.  There's only one minor problem:

IT DOESN'T WORK

Or more specifically, it randomly doesn't work.  So I'll send a message from foo@example.com no problem, and then the very next message, with the exact same outgoing email address...

Re-send it... maybe it goes.  Maybe not.  Maybe I have to resend it OVER AND OVER AGAIN before it is accepted.  (In case you're wondering, it took seven tries before Rogers finally accepted a valid outgoing email this morning.)  Fortunately Entourage makes this quite easy to manage, but it's ridiculous.  I know my addresses are verified.  So what's the deal?  Am I round-robining through outgoing email servers, half of which haven't been updated properly?  Or is the DB query to find verified email addresses failing half the time?  Or is it some other combination of maliciously limiting anything other than @rogers.com addresses, or incompetence?

It is making my previously trouble-free Rogers Internet experience very, very annoying.
Please fix it.

Previously:
March 17, 2008  Limit of 10 alternate email addresses per Rogers Internet ID