Email Fail, Part 2

(The customer is the CEO of a graphics design company that has hosted email with us. He calls in late one night to report that he is unable to get any email, and that he has important business to attend to and must have his email. I’ve almost exhausted all troubleshooting with this customer. I verified settings on his email client, verified settings on our server and mail flow to his inbox. In a last resort, I have the customer attempt to set up the email account again as a new account.)

Customer: “It says it can’t connect to the server. Are you having server issues?”

Me: “No, sir. If we were, we’d have a lot more callers about this issue. Try [alternative incoming server address and port] and see if you get a different response.”

(Typing and a pause…)

Customer: “Nope, still says can’t connect to server.”

Me: “Hmm…” *thinking there’s no way this can be possible* “Are you having any Internet issues? Are you able to load any web pages?”

Customer: “No, our ISP is having an outage right now.”

Me: “… Well, there’s your problem. Unfortunately without Internet you won’t be able to get email.”

Customer: “Why? What does Internet have to do with email?”