The IT Nerd

I’ve been covering a long standing issue with Rogers and their email offering which is powered by Yahoo for weeks now. If you’re new to this, here’s the TL:DR: Users of Rogers email service (in other words they have a @Rogers.com address) can’t get their email on any device or application that they choose. And this has dragged on for weeks. This is in part due to the fact that Rogers requires users to create  App Specific Passwords via Rogers Member Center on each program or device that an email address is used on. The creation of new app specific passwords doesn’t work and existing app specific passwords appear to have been deleted in many cases. That pretty much breaks your applications that rely on them. There is a workaround, but that workaround is sub optimal to say the least. And it’s led me to recommend to my many clients who are affected by this is to dump Rogers as an email provider.

Today, after weeks of official silence on this issue, Rogers has finally admitted that it has a problem. Sort of. As of this morning, if you try to generate a App Specific Password, you will now get this error message:

Why Rogers didn’t add this weeks ago is beyond me. It might have saved them a bunch of tech support calls as well as mitigated the frustration that their user base has at the moment. But even then, this isn’t a substitute for a proper announcement from the Canadian telco that they have an issue and that there’s a timeline to fix it. But I suspect that this is because Rogers has no clue when it will be fixed because they have no clue about how to fix it. So they’ve just pretended that the problem doesn’t exist unless someone calls into tech support. And when that didn’t work, they added this message.

#Fail.

The only thing that is perhaps new is the fact that the message points you to this document which details how to set up Rogers email on an iOS or Android device. I tested this with a client this morning on their Android phone and it does work. And I assume that it will work for iOS devices as well. But this does nothing to help people using Outlook, Thunderbird, or any other email program on their desktop or laptop computer. And as I have said many times before, using a web browser as the primary means to check your email is sub optimal. Thus this response from Rogers is still pretty bad. And doesn’t change the situation for any of their customers in any meaningful way.

This whole situation is going to bite Rogers as I can say that over the last few weeks, I have been working to transition people off of Rogers email using this method, and then when Rogers eventually figures out how to fix this issue I will be archiving that email for the clients in question so that they can dump Rogers as a telco. Though there seems to be a few clients who are so fed up with this that they are willing to sacrifice their email and just switch to another telco because they are so fed up with Rogers handling of this situation. And I have to say that I don’t blame them. Rogers has really mishandled this, and when their churn rates start to increase, they will only have themselves to blame.

This entry was posted on April 12, 2023 at 11:14 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Rogers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.