Major e-mail hassles (no. 24 in an ongoing series)

[peteryoung]

Macunlimited was once a very good ISP. Everything worked fine, you could speak to people if you needed to, and when there were problems they were usually fixed in a day or three. Since they began to operate under the new management of Breathe a few months ago, things have gone downhill fast, and now in a big way. Three weeks ago I discovered I couldn't download e-mail because of a password recognition problem, so since then I've had to do all my e-mailing from their fancy new website. Their POP3 access has never been fixed, three weeks later. But now things have got as bad as they could possibly get: I have now just logged on to discover that all my e-mail has now been wiped from their site, completely lost.

I know I'm not alone here, the Breathe message boards and forums are now screaming (including a rather vitriolic post from me) for having deleted all their customers' mail. The 60p/minute Support line never answers so you can't talk to anyone, and their website's Support page has a rather pathetic message saying they know of no current problems.

WTF could have happened here? Could an attack have caused all this, or is it just completely crap and negligent service?

It's obviously now time to abandon this rapidly sinking ship so I will be migrating to a new ISP as soon as I return home in a few days. Watch this space for a completely new e-mail address, but in the meantime if you need to contact me you can do so at a mostly unused back-up: peter [underscore] a [underscore] young [at] yahoo [dot] com.

Comments

[nwhyte]

Once they have broken faith with the customers as drastically as that, there is no point in speculating about why; just get the hell out and to a new provider as quickly as possible. I used to to use NetIdentity but had already switched almost everything to gmail before NetIdentity were bought by Tucows and suffered a very similar series of disasters over the last year (mercilessly chronicled here).

They will no doubt appeal for customers to keep faith and no doubt many will do so out of a combination of Stockholm syndrome and lack of information about the alternatives. That's not your problem, though.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

Googlemail!!!

[alexmc.livejournal.com]

Seconded. I dont know how easy it is to download everything to your home computer but frankly I dont see a downside with google mail. I am starting to use it for almost everything nowadays.

[alexmc.livejournal.com]

It might be worth considering an email address based on a domain you control yourself (such as sfpod.net) and have it forward to your ISP email address. That way you shouldnt need to tell people your email address a new every few years.

Having Faith

[godelescherbach.livejournal.com]

I went through a similar experience with my firewall this week. It started giving me trouble. I went to the message boards and it appears that the latest release, the first since the company had been acquired had bugs.

On the other hand, given that all the trouble messages seemed to have started about a week after the release...I wonder if it was something a vindictive former employee did? Two days of workarounds and I got it uninstalled and put in a new program.

Anyway, Pete, you might want to take "The Eternal Golden Braid" out of your blogroll. It's dead, dead, dead and gone.

Re: Having Faith

[peteyoung.livejournal.com]

Why? I admit hadn't looked for a few weeks... but as you can tell I've not been around much on LJ either. So when did you pull the plug? And does this mean we'll be seeing more of you on LJ? :)

Re: Having Faith

[godelescherbach.livejournal.com]

I'll reply as to "why" offlist. I'll still have a LJ account, but The EGB is going away and I'll be mostly a lurker for a couple of months or so.