The IT Nerd

I apologize in advance if this comes across as a bit of a rant. But honestly, I am not only in disbelief that this is still an ongoing issue a year later, but I share the frustrations of my clients who are caught up in this. More on them in a bit. But the main point of this post that it was pointed out to me by a reader that it’s been over a year since the following chain of events started:

• I first reported on issues with Rogers email, and the inability to generate app specific passwords to allow users of Rogers email to use email clients like Outlook and Thunderbird on March 7th of 2023.  
• While this issue dragged on, there was a workaround involving using webmail. But that workaround is sub optimal to say the least. And as this issue dragged on into April of 2023, I was left with no other option than to recommend to my many clients who are affected by this to dump Rogers as their email provider.
• By mid April 2023, Rogers has sort of admitted that there is an issue.
• Fast forward to August 2023. It then seemed that Rogers or more accurately Yahoo who is the company behind Rogers email was rolling out OAuth to replace the need to generate app specific passwords. But the catch was that not all email clients support OAuth. To date, only the Outlook 365 email client supports this (if you have that client, this will help you to set up your Rogers email account). Which means that Rogers users using many other email clients, or those who weren’t willing to pay Microsoft every month for Office 365 were still stuck.
• In October 2023, Rogers started to shift the blame for their email issues to Microsoft. But in January of this year, Rogers then started to blame Yahoo.

Needless to say that this is a train wreck next to a dumpster fire. And over a year later I still have a list of nine clients who can’t use the email client of their choice with Rogers email. Nine clients who have the following in common. They are all seniors who don’t feel that they are capable of being comfortable with a switch to another ISP (Bell or Teksavvy for example) or being comfortable with a switch to a Gmail or an Outlook.com. Nor are they comfortable with making the switch to Office365 as an email client because that’s going to cost them money on a monthly basis, which matters to them as they are on a fixed incomes and every dollar matters. Webmail while tolerable to get their email is not a long term solution for them as they developed processes like creating folders to file email locally before this happened. And not having that leaves them all a bit lost and confused. Thus they’re all frustrated that Rogers seemingly can’t or won’t fix this for them.

Honestly, at this point Rogers needs to do better. A company the size of Rogers simply can’t have something like this go on this long and not do its level best to make people whole again. And it doesn’t matter if it is one person, nine in my case, or a thousand. One person who can’t get their email in the manner that they want is one too many. That makes me wonder if Rogers along with Yahoo will ever fix this, or have they simply checked out and don’t care. I really hope it’s not the latter as that would reflect poorly on Rogers and Yahoo.

I’ll continue to watch this for developments and I will still be trying stuff on my end in order to make my clients whole. But frankly, given the inaction of Rogers and Yahoo, I am not holding my breath that either will come to the rescue of these people.

This entry was posted on March 26, 2024 at 4:58 pm 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.