Rui CarmoYes, this is another update on my mail woes with .Mac.
Tonight I got yet another message from .Mac support that started like this:
Although we will be unable to give you absolute reassurance that you will never encounter email issues with your .Mac account ever again, I can offer a work-around which will not only save your sent messages but verify that they left the .Mac servers.
They then go on to describe how to enable saving sent messages (in webmail, of all things), which was well-worded but not applicable to any of my issues.
And then they come up with this absolutely precious gem of utter, indescribable, horrific wrongness that has pretty much settled, once and for all, whether I renew .Mac next October or not:
To ensure that your sent emails leave the .Mac servers, you can add your own email address to the CC field. If you receive a copy of your sent message, this guarantees that the message successfully left the .Mac servers.
Emphasis mine.
Now, anyone who has ever managed an e-mail server can easily understand how utterly wrong this is1.
And many people who never did so immediately get that this is utterly useless when I was trying to e-mail myself for testing.
And no, support never even tried addressing whether or not authenticated SMTP on .Mac actually does anything.
But, to me, their attempt at trying to reassure me with a “fix” that is completely and utterly wrong (and technically baseless, as one can easily verify on one’s own) takes the biscuit.
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1 Those of you who don’t are welcome to check out “RFC 2821”:RFC:2821 from page 71 onwards. Or just ask the nearest mail geek – I can hit a dozen with a bread roll from where I’m sitting at the office…