I spent six hours on the phone with T-Mobile and BlackBerry customer care yesterday.

Six hours.

See, I got me a new BlackBerry Curve 8320. Ordinarily I would never blog about this sort of thing, except I had a problem with it that three T-Mobile techs and two BlackBerry specialists couldn’t solve.

Setting up the device was a breeze. Logging on to my T-Mobile account and setting up email for the BlackBerry was a breeze.

Except: I was able to send email but I couldn’t receive email.

I won’t detail every minute of my six hours on the phone. Or even every hour. Suffice to say that the people I spoke with at both T-Mobile and BlackBerry tech help were both courteous and as helpful as they could be.

But I was able to send email, I couldn’t receive email, and they were stumped.

While on hold, I searched the Web for evidence of my problem, both on the BlackBerry and T-Mobile sites and on wireless forums that post help for this sort of thing. I did all the usual fixes for this sort of thing, but this sort of thing persisted: I was able to send email but I couldn’t receive email, and they were stumped.

Then my call got elevated to a network engineer who figured it out. The issue: The email accounts on my computer (I happen to be using Windows Mail on this particular computer) were configured to delete email from the server after being downloaded. As a result, the email wasn’t there anymore and so couldn’t be forwarded to the BlackBerry.

The solution: Change the setting on the email account to leave a copy of my email messages on the server for a day. (It’s over in the advanced properties tab.) Voila: Problem solved.

I knew it was solved, because the first piece of mail that came through successfully was spam.

Six hours. Half a Sunday wasted away so I can receive spam.

Modern technology is wonderful, innit?

This entry was posted on Monday, March 17th, 2008 at 8:52 am and is filed under This 'n' That.