Is there an outage or not? AT&T should know which services it provides to its customers

I have had some trouble sending email and as an AT&T customer, I use their smtp server outboud.att.net. It seemed like the server might be down. I reported this to AT&T customer service on Twitter and asked if they have information on whether there is an outage. To my great surprise, they basically refused to tell me whether the server was down or not, instead wanted my phone number so somebody could call me and discuss the situation.

The exact error message from Thunderbird

Of course, AT&T does not have almost any mobile phone coverage in southern Champaign, so I gave them my email address instead, but as AT&T does not have email support yet - only phone, Twitter, store and web chat - they still kept asking for a phone number and my AT&T account number (which I didn't have with me).

Now, I wouldn't want to be telling the people at the largest ISP in the United States - and almost pioneer and inventor of many technologies and - what services they have and how they work. Their basic services are super expensive, but I think it is apparent that they do not even know that they provide SMTP services in their network - and not even just in their network but also from outside if you happen to have an AT&T email account for any reason, and as far as I know, the free Yahoo! email services use the exact same server.

Nevertheless, they wanted to know whether I was a U-Verse or a DSL customer. (Let's forget for a while the fact that DSL is a technology whereas U-Verse is a brand name for a cable model based broadband service.) It should not matter, because the use of outbound.att.net is not restricted to any specific service or product. Actually, I'm using it with my phone - and my phone's network connection is much faster than my AT&T U-Verse broadband. Anyway, even though I told them this is important and urgent, they have not been in contact with me since - this is probably due to the fact that today is a national holiday, and this is also why I wanted to know possible problems right away, instead of entering some lengthy helpdesk process that goes into idle mode over holidays.

Now, AT&T has been restructuring its services and corporate structure lately. The question of whether some services are in operation or not is very relevant to many (consumers and enterprises) who depend on them. I don't use AT&T's email service to receive emails (even though I could), but because I mostly connect to Internet using AT&T's services, the use of outbound.att.net as the SMTP server is a natural and the recommended choice.

I think the AT&T customer service does not know what the difference getween webmail and SMTP is. Or, more importantly, they seem not to be aware they are not the same thing. They are also not aware that even though your email settings are correct, there can still be something wrong on the server side, and knowing if this is the case is a great start for the debugging process.

Now, if you have time and a workstation to work on, you may browse the AT&T website to try to find outage information and similar announcements. But they may not be up to date or assess this specific problem at all - for example, AT&T's website still doesn't acknowledge the reception problems in southern Champaign even though it has been reported to them at least one year ago.

I think an efficient and reasonable exchange (on Twitter, for example) would go something like this:

Customer: Hi, I'm having trouble sending email with outbound.att.net. Can you check if there's an outage or something?

AT&T Support: Hi, we are sorry to hear you are having problems, but we have no information of any outages related to outbound.att.net.

Customer: Ok, thanks! I'll check if there's something I can do about it here.

Then, if there indeed are no problems AT&T is aware of, the customer can check many connection-related parameters and other stuff. On mobile connections, the said problems happen quite often, but in my case it was a problem with a desktop computer at home. After knowing that it is not a general server outage, the next contact  would be through technical channels and be about more advanced settings and other technical matters.

As AT&T ought to know, they serve the whole United States and its very diverse population. They serve students, IT professionals, single moms, nuclear fusion research facilities, NASA, politicians, people whose mother tongue is other than English, the blind and the deaf, pizza parlors, dentist's offices, the government. This is quite a challenge. But for most of these, the recommended (and the only) choice when they send email with some other technology than webmail (even though webmail uses te same server still), is through the SMTP server outbound.att.net, and knowledge of whether this server works is relevant if not crucial to their businesses, hobbies, research activities, benefit applications and so on. It should be treated as such.

The Service You Get - in Finland and in USA

A common quote from a Finn visiting United States is how surprising it is to actually get service in a restaurant or just a typical grocery store, after getting used to the service level in Finland. Is this impression really justified?

I have travelled in several U.S. states and also lived in Michigan for half a year now. Unfortunately, I must say that the level and type of service you can expect in United States is of much higher level than in Finland.

I have been to Las Vegas three times. It is a city known for its services - hotels, restaurants, entertainment and so on, so it is logical to get good service there, isn't it? But I have been elsewhere, too, and encountered friendly employees everywhere, at least on Finnish standards. Sure, waitresses may be a bit annoying when they once in a while come to care about the water level in your glass and ask about how you are doing with your hamburger. This is just unprecedented on Finnish scale. But what is this Finnish scale?

There are many not-so-favorable descriptions of Finns and the Finnish culture. Finns are shy, introverted, even depressed. They do not start conversations and refuse any smalltalk. Some of this is actually true. When a Finn goes to a restaurant, he or she pays for the (amount of) food, not the service. Giving a tip would be insane, especially as in a Finnish restaurant nobody bothers you with the so-called service! Also, hiring people in Finland is insanely expensive, as are rents and infrastructure, so the few employees must care about more important things. Finnish restaurants are much less formal than American ones - you do not have to wait to be seated, you usually just pick your seat. (I am not commenting about fine dining here. That would probably have less differences.)

What about tips, then? Do they really ensure that the service level is good? I think tipping is a very bad practice, for several reasons. It adds ambiguity to the salary. In many states you can pay below minimum wage, if the employee gets tips. (By the way, 40 % of tips do not get reported to the tax officials.) It adds ambiguity to the actual cost of the service. It adds a level of commercialism to the actual service, as if you should pay extra for "good" service, in addition to the "normal" service that you ordered. And, after all, the employers do not want to pay their employees more than the minimum wage (or much less, if permitted) - it should be up to the customers to pay them! This system makes the waiters and waitresses (and other to be tipped) practically private business owners or contractors, not employees.

Do tips ensure or encourage better service? Some have even proposed that tip is actually an acronym for "to insure promptness"! Common sense might say that they do. However, in his New York Times column, Steven A. Shaw provided another view. An attractive waitress gets most tips, not the one who provides the best service.


A tip is always a voluntary payment, a gift (of which you have pay tax, of course, as it is income). However, if it is also salary to the person servicing you, how can it be voluntary? Are these free services that you may pay for if you want? Is that not somewhat degrading, even? To me, it portrays itself as a social game with money involved. A work is serious business, not tricks and games. These people, who happen to work in some service field position, are living their lives, studying, raising a family like others. I think their job should offer the level of reliable income like other jobs.