If You Advertise An 'Unlimited' Email Service, It Had Better Be Actually Unlimited
from the truth-in-advertising dept
A year ago we praised Yahoo! for taking the bold step of offering its email customers unlimited storage space. It was a great concept, but Lee Gomes at the Wall Street Journal recently discovered that we should all start putting scare quotes around "unlimited." It seems that if you leave too many messages in your Yahoo! Mail inbox, you start running into problems. Gomes got a mysterious error message, followed by several years worth of email disappearing. Yahoo! says it can get the messages back in a few hours (presumably restoring them from backup tapes). But this is still pretty embarrassing for Yahoo!, and it's unfortunately all too common in the tech world. Companies love to advertise unlimited service when their systems aren't actually set up for "unlimited" usage. Yahoo! shouldn't advertise an unlimited service unless it's actually unlimited, and somebody should have given some thought to what happens when people store a ton of messages in their inbox. Maybe there's something to be said for Google and Microsoft's approach: instead of claiming that your service is unlimited, pick limits that are high enough (2 GB in Microsoft's case, 6 and constantly growing in Google's) that most users will never have to worry about them, but still give the IT guys a specific number to aim for.
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"unlimited"
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Yahoo mail
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Besides, is it really that hard to sift through your inbox every so often and delete anything you won't need to refer back to?
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And while we're on the subject, using the WSJ's name in connection to an issue with an email he owns as a private individual -which is strongly implied in the column- was grossly unprofessional. 'Mainstream media prerogatives' my good right boot!
Sorry if I'm not being very objective here, but the man's attitude just infuriated me; you'd think someone in his line of work would have figured out by now that shit happens.
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It's not just e-mail
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it's not a new problem
Why no fix? I suspect it would mean rewriting the whole database/index behind the system. Who could imagine that anyone would have anything near 65,536 messages? Who could imagine that a personal computer would need more than 10 meg of storage - on something called a hard drive - and 64K of memory???? Now, WHY I have that many messages in my in box is a totally different question...
- John
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They're not lying though...
However, at least Yahoo are being honest here. They're not placing any limits on the service, it's just that they've had a few technical hiccups while running it. They're not trying to penalise Gomes for using the service in this way and they should be able to restore emails for him so nothing is ultimately lost.
To me, this is a non-issue. There's nobody trying to mislead anyone, it's just a tech issue that Yahoo should be able to resolve at some point. As Gomes says "Turns out Yahoo isn’t really prepared for users doing what we do–namely keeping all their mail in a single inbox–as opposed to moving them into sub-folders.".
If Yahoo are aware of the issue, it can be fixed. In the meantime, he's already noted his own workaround for the problem - make a few subfolders (maybe one for each month of year rather than content), and spend 20 minutes moving messages out of the inbox.
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Re: They're not lying though...
"Like many other cubicle dwellers saddled with slow-poke corporate Microsoft Outlook email, we regularly forward our regular work mail to an outside account"
I don't think I have ever heard of anyone doing that and if they did that's grounds for firing around here and probably a lot of ether places as well. I hope his boss doesn't read the article he wrote.
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I keep a local backup...
But once a week or so, I download all my gmail to my home system with Thunderbird (free, open-source news/mail reader). Once a year, my emails get archived to CD. That way, I will still have my back emails even if Google decided for some reason to terminate gmail, or maybe an earthquake or tornado took out one of their datacenters, etc.
I keep all my non-spam email forever. I occasionally retrieve emails sent to me more than 5 years ago.
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Beyond unlimited
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Google's Limit
Infinite +1
Was going to find a picture and link to it, but don't have enough time to find it. Sorry.
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Re: Google's Limit
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you actually TRUST Yahoo!?!?!?
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Which perfectly illustrates the dangers of relying on some online company to store your data. If you want to use such services as a backup, or to allow access to the data from any computer, that's fine, but for anything important, you should always make sure to save a local copy.
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FRAUDULENT UNLIMITED PROVIDERS
MORE TRAGIC IS PAYING A LARGE SUM OF MONEY TO POBOX.COM FOR "UNLIMITED" EMAIL SERVICE ONLY TO FIND OUT THAT WHEN YOU DO SEND FREQUENT [NO NOT HIGH VOLUME BUT FREQUENT] EMAIL THEY SUDDENLY SHUT DOWN YOUR SMTP SO YOU CAN NOT SEND ANY MESSAGES WITH A VAGUE NOTICE THAT SOMEONE, THEY CANT SAY WHO WHEN AND WHERE..., HAS COMPLAINED YOU ARE "SPAMMING"
NEVER MIND YOU DON'T BUT THAT BULLS...T SURE STOPS YOU FROM USING "BANDWITH" AND LO AND BEHOLD YOUR POP3 IS CUTOFF TOO AS WELL AS YOUR WEB SERVICE.
EXPLANATION: WE WILL GET BACK TO YOU....
STILL WAITING!!!!
BY THE WAY DONT SEND ME ANY EMAIL TO THIS EMAIL ADDRESS, I WONT GET IT.
I AM IN THE PROCESS OF TAKING MY BUSINESS ELSWHERE.
I HAVE TO GIVE IT TO THE SWINDLERS AT POBOX.COM, PROVIDERS NORMALLY BULLS...T YOU WITH A SUPPOSED ERROR MESSAGE AND DISAPPEARING EMAIL BUT AT POBOX.COM THEY TAKE IT TO THE NEXT LEVEL....JUST ACCUSE THE PESKY USING CUSTOMER WITH A BULLSH...T CHARGE OF SPAMMING , CUT HIM OFF, GET RID OF THE EMAIL AND JUST APOLOGIZE LATER AND HOPE THE SUCKER STAYS WITH YOUR COMPANY. INNOVATIVE TO SAY THE LEAST
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CLASS ACTION LAWSUIT for false advertisement and Wiping out our Data!
I reported this problem to both Yahoo and ATT (I have an att.com account but att partners with yahoo to run att email services on yahoo servers) and both ATT and Yahoo STILL claim that we're suppose to have unlimited data storage.
What's worse, when I asked them fix it via their ridiculous help desk, nothing has been done (which is typical of them no matter how big or small the issue is.) ATT and Yahoo have the worst service ever!
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