Call History Not Working

Good questions & suggestions.  Way above my pay grade.  My sister's cable company discontinued their email service and it was a nightmare for her to move everything to Gmail. 

OP has no credentials for Cox email.  OP only logs into Cox account to check Call History.  I hate to say this but I just checked, and my Call History works flawlessly.  Does yours?

The credentials he uses to sign into his Cox account in order to view call history are the ones to which I was referring.  He has never had a Cox email account.  My Call History failed a couple of times a few years back, but has worked fine during the recent issues people have reported

As you correctly stated in a previous post, call history is retained.  But, for some reason, it's just not currently available for the OP to view.  One possible reason could be an authentication issue with Call History.  Clearing his cox.com cookies to force re-authenticating with his Cox credentials might cause a reset.  But, even if it doesn't fix his issue, he would be no worse off than he is now.

Oh, okay.  Everyday for the past 10+ years, OP has logged into Cox account to check Call History and has experienced the occasional glitches as us.  This time, however, it had lasted 3 days so OP reported the outage on the Forum.  Blah, blah, blah, "send us an email."  Now, here we are troubleshooting email.

Troubleshooting email started because the OP complained he hadn't received a response from Cox Social Media.  They received his email, but he didn't receive emails they sent to him.  Failure of Call History and not receiving their emails are two separate issues.  I'm not troubleshooting his email issue any more.  He can get a gmail account... to communicate with Cox.

I think the emails are queued on a server somewhere because SBCGlobal.net has been a defunct domain since, well, I don't know how long.  However, the SMTP addresses are still valid because AT&T and Yahoo inherited the addresses and provide web portals to check SBCGlobal accounts.  It's weird because these are vintage accounts..

There was a post yesterday about a possible fake address from Cox but it appears Cox "partners" with merchants using this structure of sub-domains:  mc.cox.com or em.cox.com.

It's one thing to be suspicious of fake addresses, but Cox is issuing them to merchant like candy.

forums.cox.com/.../cox-residential-em-cox-com-is-valid

@Becky said "we do partner with a marketing team that occasionally sends emails from Cox" which would indicate the email could be legitimate.  The OP's post of the email said:   

"Your Cox bill for your Home Services is due in 7 days"

This sounds like the email OP received wasn't actually from Cox, but was from a merchant for some type of one time "Home Services" external to Cox.   

No, the bill was due Sept 6 and the notice was 7 days prior.  "Home Services" is TV, Internet, & Phone.  Cox may use a third party to send out these notices but they weren't selling anything, except maybe more Cox services - - I didn't read the entire email since I had already scheduled payment via my online bank.

Okay, so that's a legitmate email that you routinely receive?  Have you ever received an email from a @cox.com address?

The bill from Cox has www.cox.com at top, but below that is the "Your bill is available" subject and below it From: Cox Communications (mynotifications@cox.com).  When you print the email, the top part with www.cox.com in it doesn't print.

The reminder that your bill is due in 7 days is from Cox (no-reply@mc.cox.com)

After Cox finished a scheduled shutdown the email they sent was from Cox (residential@em.cox.com)

Wildfires and connectivity: How to Prepare was from Cox (residential@service.cox.com)

All of them were sent to my email address that is failing to receive emails sent by Cox tech support (or whoever it is that replies to my email to cox.help@cox.com.

Okay, you know more about SBCGlobal and AT&T than I do.  But I think you're limiting the number of views you'll get because there are a lot more AT&T customers than there are people with an SBCGlobal email address.

Cox.com and mc.cox.com are two separate domains.  Everthing to the right of the "@" is a domain.

I checked out your post in the AT&T Forum and it was edited to remove all references to cox.help@cox.com.  I see 10 views and at least one of those was me.  There's been 1 response and it was from the moderator who moved your post to the Email forum.  There are 2 followers.  Maybe you have a couple of fans.

I figured that since it's an AT&T forum, all AT&T users would see it and respond if they are having a similar problem with their ATT.com email.  This would broaden the scope from just being an SBCGlobal.net issue to possibly all AT&T related accounts.  Just in case you're not familiar with the history, when AT&T was broken up in the last millenium, the pieces became regional phone companies, one of which was Southwestern Bell.  I live on the west coast and was surprised when I signed up for an email account with Pacific Bell they assigned me to SBCGlobal.  Perhaps PacBell didn't have their own capability at the time, probably waiting for a permit from the California Coastal Commission.

Should it ever be determined that AT&T is actually blocking incoming email for cox.com email addresses, I suspect it will be found to be unintentional.

But isn't the cox.com domain assigned exclusively to Cox corporate accounts?  Except for a few annoying legal and logistical issues, AT&T could prevent Cox from sending promotional email to AT&T customers by simply blocking email from the cox.com domain.  They could say they're just dealing with spam.

Does that conspiracy theory work?  Probably not.  Malware, a software glitch or some unknown email filter are the more likely scenarios for your missing emails.

The "SBC" in SBCGlobal stands for Southwestern Bell Corp.

AT&T split into smaller divisions in 1984.

Various entities of Southwestern Bell Corp (SBC) owned these smaller divisions (aka Baby Bells).

One of these SBC Baby Bells, SBCGlobal, bought AT&T.

Yahoo connects to all this because AT&T (owned by SBCGlobal) and Yahoo created a partnership in 2008 to provide AT&T customers Internet services, such as email, news, forums, and these AT&T customers could access these services via a special Yahoo portal.

You have to remember at the millennium, AT&T was just a stodgy telephone company.  AT&T didn't have the branding or recognition from these new, hipster Internet users.  AT&T tried to attract these new customers with Google via my.att.net but then switched to Yahoo.

So, let's say in the early 2000s, you had Internet service with AT&T.  Did AT&T have the infrastructure to provide email, news, forums, etc to its customers?  No.  How do we attract Internet customers?  Partner with either Google, Yahoo, AOL, etc.

Pacific Bell was a Baby Bell.  SBCGlobal owned Pacific Bell.  Pacific Bell was on its Mommy's network:  SBCGlobal.net.

Clear as mud?

I wasn't thinking that blocking by AT&T would be intentional.  Perhaps a phishing spammer that  uses a Cox address as bait was blocked by AT&T which accidentally blocked valid Cox emails too.  It seems unlikely because a lot more Cox customers would be affected, but we're not ruling anything out in trying to solve the problem.. 

Email has not been received during last 30 minutes...12:25 pm PDT. Can you call me and tell me what it says.  My phone number is in the emal.

Or post the text of what your email says here on the forum.  I don't have any privacy issues, I just want my call history to work.

Here's a thought.  Call History stopped working right after a few days when users could not get into phone tools because of buffering.  This was after Aug 15 or so.  Starting with the buffering issue I could not add new addresses because I needed call history to do that.  I do this for every new number that appears on the call history.  The reason this may be a clue is that sometimes I accidentally type an illegal special character in the contact's name (I don't remember which ones do not work, possibly # or $).  But the error message is always "We are having technical difficulties" rather than "Illegal Character".  This used to cause me to wait a day or two before trying again.  Then it dawned on me it might be a special character of some sort, and sure enough, when I left it out the new address would be accepted in the normal way.  Perhaps during the buffering problem and the days following it when call history was a national problem, some machine language got thrown into the Caller ID that is initially posted by the software into the name fields of the call history record.  Tech support should be able to do a search of all calls posted to my call history after Aug. 15 to see if any of them contain machine characters or illegal special characters in the first and last name of the Caller ID.  Strip them out and see if call history then works.  These calls would not yet be in my address book because they have to be manually added to it.

Hope this helps.

It's jut call history.  I was able to edit an entry in my Address Book and look at Settings.  I'll be gone most of today.

If you had a corrupted contact, it could cause Call History to fail.  The view you see (when it works) is the result of joining a calls table of your incoming and outgoing calls to a contacts table that you maintain.  Since you're able to expand Address Book, I don't think you have a corrupted contact.  But you could still test contacts individually by selecting each one and clicking "Edit Contact".  At least check the last contact you added before Call History stopped working, if you know which one it was.

If you don't have a corrupted contact, you probably have corrupted calls data.  You should get another email account, even if you only use it to communicate with cox.help@cox.com.  Contact them and ask for your ticket number.  Ask them to verify with the "Phone Tools Team" that they've checked your call history for corrupted data.  When Social Media Support updates your ticket, it should trigger a fresh look at your issue and a status update.

In a response to Becky 19 days ago I pointed out the possibility that corrupted data in a contact record or the call record could be causing the problem.  Especially because the Call History problem started immediately after they fixed the buffering problem that prevented us from getting into voice tools.  In a phone call from them I provided my Login ID and Password.  Why haven't they written a utility program to validate all my data records?  Why haven't they made a copy of their call history program to run offline using my data?  They could put in some checkpoints that say "So far so good at line xxxx of the code?"  They could change their error messages to say "Invalid Special Character in Last Name"  instead of "We are experiencing technical difficulties."  I wrote and modified database programs 30 years ago.  I wasn't good at it but fixing problems like this wasn't that difficult.  Thanks for not giving up on this.

There could be a connection between the wide-spread buffering and your issue.

An application programmer could probably identify the code where the error is occuring, without ever running the program.  However, they wouldn't be able to identify the corrupted database record that's causing the program to fail.  They don't have direct database access.  They use methods and functions, controlled by the DBA, to access database records.  A DBA might run a database query to identify a corrupted record, but not a line of code.  I get your point though.  Cox should do something to identify the cause of the issue and then fix it.

Does Cox still have your current password?  (You're far more trusting than I am).

What I was trying to get across is that you might be able to identify/eliminate a corrupted contact as the cause of your issue.  Then, do the ELSE part of my post.  Contact cox.help@cox.com using an email account from which you can receive a reply.  (Too much time and effort has been wasted because you can't receive a reply with your existing email account).  Ask them for your ticket number.  That will show a ticket was created and you can reference it in future communication with Cox.  Ask if the "Phone Tools Team" has identified the cause of the issue.  It's been a month.  It's time to escalate.

Cox Help previously said they replied to my 5 emails, but I never received them.  So I sent a 6th email today 10/10/2022 to Cox.Help@Cox.com using a different email address with a cc to my regular email address asking them to reply to both addresses. 

I did a live chat and was told there was an open ticket so I asked for it and received it.

I also sent a 6th email to Cox.Help@Cox.com from a different email address than the previous 5 emails, and requested they reply to both addresses which they did and the reply was received at both addresses. 

I tried a 90 day call history which failed but that opened the Dowload box.  So I tried Download PDF and it downloaded a 6 KB file that contained only the column headings, but no data.  But what caught my eye was a list that popped up of recent downloads and the next one down was titled "Oct 1 2022 to Oct 14 2022 File Moved or MIssing."  Just prior to the PDF download I tried Download CSV and that may be what generated the message.  However, Oct 14 was the day after TiffanyR's most recent response which makes me wonder if tech support moved the file to try to figure out what is wrong with it.

I repeated the experiment from 3 hours ago (afternoon of 10/19/2022) and the PDF download yielded the same result, a 5.1 KB one page PDF with only the column headings bur no data.  But there wasn't a repetition of the "Oct 1 to Oct 14 File Moved or Deleted" message, just the one that was there earlier.  So I assume my attempted download of a CSV file did not create it and something else on Oct 14 or later created it.

If a corrupted call entry is causing the error, "Call history" might start working again when the corrupted entry is dropped after 120 days of availability expires.  That would require the back-end process that deletes expired entries to function properly.  But, an error would affect Cox's processing, so error resolution would be a priority.  You would lose some data, but your Call history should work going forward for calls that occurred after the corrupted entry.  If this is the case, Cox wouldn't tell you to wait 3-4 months, but they would probably have reason to believe the error will correct itself... eventually.

The web page displaying call history fails because it uses a collection that includes the corrupted data even if your days criteria is limited to calls after the date of the error.

Thanks

CurtB mentioned that if a corrupted call entry is causing the error, "Call history" may start working again when the corrupted entry is dropped after 120 days of availability expires.

If it doesn’t then my calls will be lost forever. Can’t Cox just send me a waiver of privacy rights to sign so that someone can look at the data in my file, even print it out if necessary. There is nothing in my call history that I want to hide from anyone. It’s mostly incoming robocalls.

Or send me a copy of the file and let me know what program it is written in and I will find a way to print out the data and manually find the corruption. There are usually about 100 calls a month so manually looking at 300 calls might take 15 minutes, including a coffee break.

Twelve days ago CurtB commented that call history might start working again if a  corrupted entry is dropped after 120 days of availability expires.  I inferred that perhaps Cox is just waiting to see if that happens.  If it does then I will lose the calls from 8/2/2022 through the date of the corruption (my last download of the call history was on 8/1/2022).  This is not a trivial problem.  I have a long running dispute with a former tenant and may need proof of phone contacts between us if it goes to court.  There are only 15 days left until the 120 day cutoff happens,  I am perturbed (a more polite term than my first choice) that call history still hasn't been fixed despite many assurances that it is being worked on for almost 4 months now.  

Hi, TiffanyR.  I have no doubt that you've had a number of email exchanges with your provider about this issue.  I'm just a little suspicious that the timing of the "update" will be whenever the corrupted data that caused the issue is deleted (because it exceeded the 120 days limit).  If it starts working, they may tell you they fixed it when it possibly fixed itself, without your provider doing anything.

I doubt they are putting that much effort into it.  And if hoping doesn't work what's next, keeping me in their thoughts?

Tiffany, is the situation outsourced to a vendor like my lost posts? If so, what is wrong with your vendors? Are they outsourced over seas or something? Do we need to get a shocky monkey?

I hope the fix includes increasing the 120 day cutoff to 180 days so that I don't lose any data.