Yesterday, we pointed readers toward the story of Florida woman Kathleen Cox, whose Comcast e-mail address was given away to a new subscriber with the same name. After more than a month of trying to get Comcast customer service to restore her lost e-mail address, she finally went to the local news station. Only after that did Comcast actually fix the problem.

She wasn't alone. Shortly after our article published, we heard from a man suffering the exact same problem. Michael Taylor of Tennessee spent three weeks of complaining to Comcast customer service without any progress. But once Ars sent an e-mail to our contacts in Comcast's media relations department, his problem was fixed within two hours.

Though losing a Comcast e-mail address to a new customer of the same name is something we hadn't heard of until yesterday, there have been numerous cases over the past year in which customers were unable to get problems fixed until they contacted journalists. Notorious examples involved a customer whose billing account name was changed to "Asshole" and another whose billing account name was changed to "Super Bitch."

Besides the obvious fact that cable companies should be able to fix problems before they get escalated to news organizations, it's strange that Comcast's computer system allows employees to take an e-mail address from an existing customer and assign it to a new one. While Cox and Taylor have gotten their e-mail addresses back, we have not received any explanation from Comcast about why these problems occur in the first place and whether Comcast can prevent them in the future.

Taylor’s three weeks without his primary e-mail address

"I have been without my primary email for three weeks now, with no hope in sight," Taylor wrote to us yesterday, using a secondary e-mail address.

"I have been a Comcast customer for 15 years," Taylor explained. "At the time I started service, Comcast didn’t even have their own mail service; they were still using @home. I got my @comcast.net email address as soon as they put their own mail service online."

That e-mail address stopped working on May 21.

"I spent a couple of days troubleshooting before contacting Comcast on a chat session. They created a case number and promised a fix within 72 hours. It didn’t happen," Taylor wrote.

Taylor made many more attempts to get the problem fixed. He contacted Comcast again on May 26, this time with a phone call. Taylor explained:

At first they didn’t believe me. I was told that the only way someone else could get my address was if I first relinquished it—and it would then have to go in a “holding cell” for 90 days before it could be reassigned. After I finally convinced them, they said they were escalating my case to second level support, created a new case number, and again promised a fix within 72 hours. I got a callback that afternoon around 5:00 P.M. They confirmed that my address had been given to someone else on the 21st. They said it was the same day that person had started service. They put me on hold to call the person they had given my address. When she came back to me she said the person had agreed to let me have the address back and that I should get it back as soon as they could execute a “username transfer request." She said that should take no more than a couple of days. (That didn’t happen.) Yet another case number was generated.

Taylor called again on May 29 and was told it would take another 36 hours to fix. He called Comcast again on June 2, June 4, and June 8.

"I was told that the case is being worked, but they couldn’t give me any idea how long it would take," Taylor wrote. "I gave them my mobile number once again to be sure they had it. [Comcast had previously recorded his phone number incorrectly.] During the conversation, I got the distinct feeling that they did not want me to call them anymore and that they would prefer if I waited for when and if they chose to call me."

That's where things were when Taylor contacted Ars yesterday. We forwarded his e-mail to Comcast's media relations people—those are the ones whose job it is to talk to reporters like us—and they got the right people to work on it.

"I just got a call from Comcast’s Security Assurance Team," Taylor wrote to us last night. "They had my e-mail address back up in minutes... I’m a computer networking guy and used to be an e-mail administrator. I knew if I could just talk to the right person it could be fixed in minutes."

But with Comcast, easy fixes are often not as simple as they should be.

UPDATE: Comcast has told Ars that it's apologized to Taylor, and that while the mistake was due to a human error, the company is trying to determine whether it can use a technical safeguard to prevent it from happening to other customers.