"Your not my customer I really don't care" *click* Nice. professional too. I had a similar experience with them - even though we *are* a UUNet customer, we weren't the customer with the problem (in this case, a email address which was a subdomain of the company's main address was being rejected by the UUNet mailservers; a simple misconfiguration during a security lockdown).
after I got a supervisor (phone firewall wasn't even willing to take down details and didn't know what a MX record was), conversation went something like: Me: Hi. I am post admin for $mydomain and I am having trouble sending mail to emailaddress@subdomain.contractorsdomain via server $uunetinboundmail. it is being rejected with error <descriptive text that basically says "this isnt a relay"> Them: you shouldn't be using $inboundmail, you should be using $mydomain_designated_smartmailhost Me: I tried that already - it doesnt' matter if it comes from my mail host or your smarthost, it is still being rejected by $uunetinboundmail Them: if it is being rejected, then it is for a good reason. perhaps it is the wrong server for subdomain.contractorsdomain? Me: that's where the MX record points - and addresses @contractorsdomain are being accepted by that server just fine Them: then the MX record must be wrong - why not contact the DNS provider Me: I am - that is you too. this is one of your customers I am trying to send email to there then followed a short conversation that amounted to that - given that $mydomain was working fine, they would *not* look at the problem for $contractorsdomain unless $contractor contacted them about it. I found postmaster@contractorsdomain worked fine, so managed to get *that* guy to get uunet to fix the problem (and it was literally a thirty second fix). The standard policy for uunet seems to be that following "the system" is more important than actually fixing problems, and problems don't even *exist* unless the customer with the problem notices...... which I find astonishing. someone *must* have the authority to enter new trouble tickets if they notice that a router is spitting sparks without having to get the customer on the far end of that wire to report it for them....