Comment by mrweasel
16 hours ago
To be fair, Outlook.com has always been a bit shitty, if you're trying to deliver email to them. Last time it was reasonably good the service was still called Hotmail.
The problem is that we've allowed email to be centralized around a few massive providers, who do not care about customer service. If you're large enough, you probably have a contact at Microsoft for Outlook. Everyone else has to yell into the void and sometimes that works.
> If you're large enough, you probably have a contact at Microsoft for Outlook.
For certain very large values of "large". I work for a company which has several thousand Office365 accounts with MS, many of which are the expensive one. It's nigh impossible to get support from them, you're always supposed to go through some partner, who has no idea what they're talking about. And when you do get someone through MS, it's actually still some kind of useless 3rd party who'll ask you to turn your VM off and on again when you complain that it won't turn off (this is actually a true story we had happen on azure).
In the end, after about an hour on the phone, the dude gave up and called for help higher up. It took something like a week to have a freaking VM unstuck and destroyed on Azure.
Contrast this with AWS, where we were spending much less at the time, only had the basic free support, and I was with someone on the phone in under five minutes who helped us have our direct connect issue solved in 15 minutes.