Problems with Sky emails

I am posting this in case anyone else is having trouble with Sky emails. In our house we have 5 Apple devices, 2 IPhones, 2 IPads, and an IMac, last Wednesday we stopped receiving any Sky.com emails , also we were unable to send any Sky.com emails on any of the devices, strangely we were able to receive and send emails that we have with other providers, outlook.com etc. I contacted Sky our internet provider to sort the problem, having already uninstalled and reinstalled the relevant software to no avail. On our Sky.com browser our Sky.com emails were present but not able to be downloaded. The Sky operative walked me through uninstalling and then reinstalling the relevant software again to no avail, we still received the same error messages relating to Sky emails.

The Sky operative was really unhelpful claiming that it was third party problem, down to Apple, and therefore Sky wasn’t going to help solve the problem. I was getting rather frustrated at this point and asked for the email address of Sky Customer Services to be told they don’t accept emails any complaint has to be in the form of a written letter and delivered to their postal address, blood pressure was rising by this point. During the course of the dialogue with the Sky operative he mentioned in passing that Yahoo, who handle the email side of things for a Sky, had recently changed their security protocols, this convinced me that the problem lay within the Sky network.

I have written a suitably worded letter of complaint to Sky hoping to get some sense out of them. Meanwhile I went on Apple’s website and using the chat facility and corresponded with a very helpful operative who went through many processes to try and sort the issue. The operative was convinced that the problem originated with Sky, after spending a long time with me she seemed to think that it was relevant that Sky mentioned the security issues with Yahoo, she thought that it was worth trying to set up my Sky.com email using Yahoo as the service provider, bingo problem sorted.

If Sky knew that Yahoo had created problems by changing their security protocols then why did they absolve themselves of any responsibility for resolution of the problem, it was not a problem that required Apple to make any input but they stepped up to the challenge and gave excellent service, my opinion of Sky has now sunk even lower. So if you are getting problems with Sky emails, the answer strange as it may seem, is to change your settings to Yahoo, it certainly worked for me.
Dave W

Cheap support comes from poor sods in front of a screen with a set of scripts. For support that is knowledgeable about all parts of the system you have to pay a lot of money. The best support, generally, is to have the knowledge yourself to diagnose and correct problems.

Sorry, that's the way it is.

Edited By Mark Rand on 02/02/2020 21:25:39

My problem was knowing where the particular problem was, Apple were very helpful even though it wasn’t their problem, without their help I would never have sorted it.
Dave W

"change your settings to yahoo" probably means nothing to most people. The call centre person probably wouldn't know what it meant either unless they had exactly the same device and email etc.

Unfortunately all the companies involved with devices and software like to play the secrecy and obfuscation game. When Apple, Android, Samsung etc make a software change they like to spring it on everyone so the first people get to know anything is going on is when their device says it is busy doing some update. Then it might be some time before the user realises some website, service, email, app doesn't work. The internet provider certainly won't have been told but because they provide a free support line they are often the first who get calls. It takes quite a long time to get a clear picture of what or who is being affected especially if it is intermittent or only some affected and during this the manufacturer is not cooperating and won't admit any responsibility.

Not really, Sky email and Yahoo email merged recently. They are becoming one and the same.

Under the bonnet, not all is what it seems. There's no particular reason why an ISP should provide email themselves, and it happens Sky has subcontracted it to Yahoo. I have a very old email account, the original ISP is long since defunct, and the account is now serviced by it's fourth different provider.

Dozens of reasons email might break, some of them requiring specialist attention. Call centre staff usually work from simple scripts covering the basic problems likely to occur at the user end. Likely the staff won't know as much about computers as a customer with an interest in them. The real test of service support is how well a provider handles something outside the script. In theory there should be an escalation process, in practice staff are often set targets that discourage escalation because full-throttle IT expertise is so expensive. No escalation until a certain threshold has passed - two or three compalints isn't enough, it may require hundreds of reports before an off-script problem is escalated.

If it's any consolation, I'm using two other brand-name email services. Both are a little erratic, and one is going through a distinctly bad patch at the moment because their system is being upgraded. I'm fairly sure the name of the responsible executive is an alibi because there's no way of contacting him. I suspect he's not a real person. Life, eh!

Dave