In misc.industry.utilities.electric Roger Carlson wrote:

| Hi. Every month, I have my electric bill (I live in Michigan; my
| electricity provider is DTE) emailed to me. I usually pay the bill
| online when I get email that it's ready to be paid. Unfortunately my
| emailed bills got tagged as spam for 3 months, and I didn't realize it.
| As a result, I didn't pay my electric bill for 3 months. I got a "last
| resort" paper bill from DTE (and a disconnection notice!!) last week,
| and I promptly paid the bill.

You really should have noticed something missing withn a couple weeks
of when you should normally get your bill.

Most big corporation network administrators or their managers are just
plain stupid, or the company farms it out to the lowest bidder which
means a level of incompetence that would insult the Three Stooges.
That's how it probably got tagged as spam. It was probably coming from
a server that was also being used by spammers to relay their junk.


| But that isn't the problem. The problem is this: Because of the unpaid
| bills, I'm almost sure that DTE has put some bad information on my
| credit report. This is really upsetting to me, because until now, my
| credit report was perfect, and was my bargaining chip for lots of
| things. I have a 13-year credit history with a score in the high 700's.

In this case it's really your mistake that it went that far. I can
see maybe as much as a month late being their fault. But you really
should have been wondering where the bill was. These things generally
do come every month so you should have noticed it missing eventually.

Don't ever use email for such a thing. It just isn't that dependable.
If your provider can't provide you an account status page with printable
online statements any time you want to visit via a secure (encrypted)
web access, then just get paper bill.

FYI, I tried this many years ago with my phone company. The web site
was crap and most of the Javascript was broken and didn't work. When
I called to try to get it changed back to paper billing, turns out they
had no procedure to do that. Several phone calls and several managers
later, it finally got taken care of.


| What can I do to reverse this? Who do I talk to in order to explain
| that it was a total mishap? To whom do I explain that my email is
| fixed, and that it'll never happen again? Do I talk to the credit
| bureau? (Which one?) Do I talk to DTE? Do I talk to the 3rd party
| company that handles the ebilling, MyCheckFree?

You have all three credit reports?

The items should say paid late by now. If they show still due, then
dispute with the CRA. But paid late is valid: it's your fault. I do
know how to get that off, but I don't give that out to public.

--
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| Phil Howard KA9WGN | http://linuxhomepage.com/ http://ham.org/ |
| (first name) at ipal.net | http://phil.ipal.org/ http://ka9wgn.ham.org/ |
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