------------ Quote: Kicking What's wrong with using Hotmail with brokers? "Don't leave the Hotmail account as permanent. Itâs not the place to be permanently exchanging finance info" ---------- I'm just overly cautious about financial information like you might pass back and forth with a broker being on a public server like hotmail. Why take chances? Hotmail has been hacked before. Hackers notoriously hate Microsoft and target them. Granted your isp email server could be hacked as could your PC at home but nothing is perfect. Hotmail is just sitting out there in the open. Just my over cautious opinion. With the amount of money some of you work with caution seems a small price to pay. Far as the IB exchange goes I had no clue what broker he was refering to so if we did jump to conclusions it wasn't targeting any broker. Frankly it does sound rather odd and I think my suggestion was a step to helping narrow down the issue. he asked an opinion and got our replies. Like it or lump it.
Quote: BullFighter: "....you will notice that this board is all about people helping other people." That one sentence sums it all up. Its the only reason I surf here daily.
The response from the broker doesn't sound like something that a non-techie c/s person would make up (the talk about tracing and timeouts). It's entirely possible that emails from c/s go out through a different SMTP server than the system that sends statements, depending on how their network is organized. It's also possible for that first server to be configured in a way that retries too often or not often enough, or for not long enough, before returning the message as undeliverable. Now, whether they retried it or not... Was the broker IB? I've got a lot of unanswered email to them, and figured I was just being ignored. Others seem to be saying the same thing recently.
They should be if their server is configured properly. At the very least the errors should be logged in the SMTP server's error log. From your posts, it does sound like they see the error but just can't figure it out. It sounds like a configuration or firewall or routing problem with one of their mail servers. I'm also curious to know if the mail that you are receiving is from the same server that Customer Service uses. I bet that it is not. For mail that you received, you can examine the SMTP message header to see the mail server that sent the message. In Outlook, right click the message and choose options. It should look something like this. Received: from postman.cniweb.net (postman.cniweb.net [12.24.139.121]) Good Luck! Mike
Bullfighter, I think you may have misunderstood the post. I specifically posted because of a thread a few months ago from Baron indicating we should not be doing support for customers on the board. As I said before, it's cool for you guys to talk about it, that's what a discussion board is for, but this is really a forum for the traders, not for IB to do their support on. As for taking my post as a personal attack, I'm sorry if it seemed that way but actually, I was implying "others tried to help" that some people were trying to be helpful. Anyhoo, in the long run, I was trying to steer clear of "IB Speaks" being the theme of the theme of the thread and was going for more of a "It's not really appropriate for us to be engaging in this conversation on this board". Per your post, I can see I did a swimming job of that. At any rate, I hope I've explained my intentions better. If you (or anyone else) want to discuss what happened with IB, feel free to converse with us about it; I was simply trying to not step on ET's toes with respect to IB doing support here. -EWP
Wow, I didn't think my post would initiate such a long discussion. Thanks everybody for your responses and suggestions. I didn't post the name of the broker, because I first wanted to find out where the problem is, and not to accuse them publically when I wasn't sure. Yes, I had my doubts when IB's customer/tech support told me they are responding to my e-mails, but I wasn't receiving any responses. Especially when I was receiving all other correspondence from them, like daily confirmations, communiques, etc. It was also suspicious to me that when I was opening a second account with them recently, I was contacted by IB's representative by e-mail with no problems. That seemed strange... But as it turns out, they were really responding to my e-mails, I just wasn't receiving their responses. I was provided with the responses that were sent to me in the past that I never received. I think they found the problem now. I have to say that I really appreciate EWP's help & effort in this issue, and I am glad that my e-mails and a message on IB's board were responded to.
Can you tell us what the nature of the problem was? I'm just wondering if it affected other customers.
Alan, the problem was a malfunctioning spam filter of my DSL provider. So I don't think it affected other customers. (You mention that you have also unanswered e-mails. Based on this experience, I would suggest the best thing to do is to call the tech support. My e-mails to cust. service complaining that I am not receiving responses were just answered by e-mail again...which I was told, shouldn't have happened) You were right that the e-mails from customer service and tech support are sent from a different server than e.g. the trade confirmations.
Mike, they are a local provider in PA, you probably wouldn't know them... In general, their service is quite good, but sometimes they have strange issues.