I put "Steve in Texas" in quotes because I have no illusions that he was actually in Texas. However, unusually in my phone-support experience, he did not have an Indian accent.

Wow, your email has been broken for weeks? Who is your service non-provider? That's ridiculous! You can receive and send to some addresses but not others? And the ones that fail fail for all addresses at the sites in question (e.g. you can't send to anybody at gmail.com)?