AOL had a highly competent mail administration outfit, at least compared to other big shops at the time. It could be annoying to deal with them at times, but they had fair, mostly sane processes and I could always get in touch with a technical person with authority there. (They may still be this good, I just haven't had reason to deal with them for quite a while.)
Google - well, I haven't had to, but can get in touch with a competent person there, but not officially. Which is not the case with ATT, with whom I have had a mail issue for over a decade. At this point I'm thinking either their postmaster died in his closet office back in about 2006 and nobody noticed, or they simply don't give a damn.
Didn’t AT&T outsource all their email to Yahoo! a decade or so ago?
Not sure I agree about being able to reach a tech person at Google, even informally. Bitching on Twitter can get some results, but that’s hardly the way to operate a business...
Didn't mean to imply that Google's stance is a good thing.
It absolutely should not be the case that you need a pal in the right department to get something done, but that seems to be where we are - our Politburos are just privatized.
Edit - My mail issue specifically is with WorldNet. I believe that's run by an ATT spinoff call "Maillennium", but maybe that changed. I don't especially care from a practical perspective; there is exactly one person whom this affects and we worked around it forever ago. I just see it as a barometer of ATT's interest in being a competent network operator.
Google - well, I haven't had to, but can get in touch with a competent person there, but not officially. Which is not the case with ATT, with whom I have had a mail issue for over a decade. At this point I'm thinking either their postmaster died in his closet office back in about 2006 and nobody noticed, or they simply don't give a damn.