Update is Web of woes

CenturyTel Internet upgrade causes e-mail access problems for clients

CenturyTel Internet customers in the Flathead Valley and across the country have been stewing in recent days because of a sudden loss of e-mail access.

On Friday, April 27, the telecommunications company began moving e-mail customers to a new system platform, capable of providing more mail storage space, enhanced virus and spam protection, and other improvements.

"The problems started happening Saturday morning," said Annmarie Sartor, external communications director for the company, based in Monroe, La.

Sartor explained the main problem: On the previous e-mail platform, customers were not required to "authenticate," a security process that requires a user name and password. On the new platform, authentication was required.

For many customers who set up their e-mail years ago, passwords were long forgotten.

The companies technical assistance phone lines were swamped with so many calls that customers went without help for days.

"We operate in 26 states," Sartor said. "We started running into the e-mail issues pretty much right away."

In Montana, CenturyTel operates in the greater Flathead Valley, from Olney to Polson and Marion to Hungry Horse. Within that area, the company serves 60,880 access lines, 94 percent of which are enabled with high-speed DSL service.

Internet technician Jay McCadden said he has been scrambling to restore e-mail service for many of his clients who subscribe to CenturyTel.

"I'm usually pretty busy, but this has kept me really busy," said McCadden, who operates Virtual Circuit Designs.

McCadden said CenturyTel's system enhancements are worthwhile, "they just did it in a really poor way, by not notifying anybody that they were doing it."

Actually, he said, the company did provide some notification to customers who use "centurytel.net" in their e-mail domain addresses. Those customers tended not to have authentication problems. But many customers, particularly businesses, use customized domain names, such as "dailyinterlake.com."

Those customers were not notified, McCadden said, and were faced with a sudden loss of e-mail service.

"There's definitely been a lot of people who are pretty irate," he said. "Had they informed people ahead of time that this was happening, we could have prepared for it."

Late on Monday night, McCadden said he finally able to get through to CenturyTel's technical assistance, only to be told that he would have to provide Social Security numbers to acquire passwords and user names for his clients. He did so, and acquired the user names and passwords by Tuesday night.

"As of now, most of my clients are squared away," he said Wednesday afternoon. "Once you have the information, it's fairly easy to resolve it."

Sartor said the company made some technical changes late Tuesday that expedited troubleshooting for many customers.

By Wednesday night, she said, the company was making more technical changes that would eliminate any remaining e-mail access problems for customers.

Sartor could not elaborate on the technical changes being made, but she said that by this morning, "most customers will have their problem solved, and they won't have to do anything."

Reporter Jim Mann may be reached at 758-4407 or by e-mail at jmann@dailyinterlake.com