It’s been 15 minutes now. Nothing unusual. Getting to this point was really, really hard. I went through seven (7) different phone routing trees before I finally just started hitting 0 and finally got put on hold.

I’m not even calling Earthlink technical support because I have a problem with my service (Earthlink provides me an e-mail account with my Sprint DSL service here at home). I’m calling because I keep getting the following message from an Earthlink customer everytime that an announcement goes out to the Stitchery Mall’s announcement list:

Hi. I wanted to let you know that I just switched to EarthLink for my
Internet access, and so I have a NEW EarthLink email address:

{MAIL_ADDRESS}

Please take a moment today to write down my new address and add it to your
email address book.
I don’t want to miss any of your messages!

Sincerely,
{USER_FIRSTNAME}
{NOTIFY_OLDADDRESS}

Please note that I am not redacting personal information out of what I get. This is the cause of my frustration. I keep getting these messages, verbaitm, and they are completely USELESS! I seriously doubt that Earthlink has any customers really named “{USER_FIRSTNAME}” or that they let people really use “{MAIL_ADDRESS}” for their email address.

[UPDATE: We're to 30 minutes now. I did speak with a "Joseph" with Earthlink technical support. His solution was to send the email to Earthlink so that they could block all mail from that user. Which would not even be useful if I knew exactly which Earthlink user I should be reporting. The message appears to come from Earthlink on their behalf and I stopped trusting the "From:" field in email a long time ago. I don't think this user should have their email blocked because Earthlink has provided her (probably) with a bad script to make me aware of her new email address.]

[UPDATE, Part Two: Well, the call lasted a total of 48 minutes and a few seconds. In the end, I was told that I needed to send the mail to Earthlink abuse. I'm not sure why they want me to do that, as this user appears to have done nothing at all wrong. And I would have scratched my head back in the days when I was working an abuse desk full-time to see my message come in as nothing abusive appears to have happened at all. But, that's what Earthlink wants, that's what Earthlink gets.]