If You're Going to Shut Down My Email, Please Tell Me First

The BBQ Pit
1

One of the benefits, the only benefit really, of paying for my annual alumni membership is that I got to keep my university email address. I’ve had the email address for almost twenty years now, and I use it for anything important like billing, some personal correspondance, and an address that didn’t receive a lot of spam. On Monday morning I was able to log in just fine, but that afternoon my account was blocked. I sent them an email on Tuesday but didn’t hear back so I finally called today.

They decided to end the emails for alumni unless they were lifetime members. I didn’t ask why, but if I were to guess it’s because it was a pain in the ass to administrate and just not worth the effort. That’s fine. What isn’t fine is shutting off my account without telling me. To their credit, they’re reactivating my account for two weeks so I can transfer anything I might need, but still. I guess that’s $50 a year they won’t get from me.

I know this is an incredibly lame pitting. But the situation had irked me.

2

That is not a lame pitting at all. I’d be seriously pissed, and for exactly the same reason.

I am grateful that the university where I was once a grad student gave me advance warning before shutting down and mothballing the IBM 3090 mainframe where I (still) had an account, so I could download anything I wanted a permanent copy of.

3

Tell me about it!

About 20 years ago, my alumni organization announced an “alumni-only” e-mail address for members. This was only an e-mail forwarding account. You couldn’t send anything from it, but anything sent to it would automatically be forwarded to whatever e-mail address you wanted and they would change that whenever you wanted. They suggested using it for bank accounts, investment accounts, billing, and other commercial accounts you may have. The utility was that if you changed your e-mail address, you only had to let them know and you wouldn’t have to change any other accounts.

Well, I set-up banks, investments, retirement accounts, even some e-mail groups I had joined, and it worked fine. Until one day I got an e-mail from one of the people in one of those groups who also knew me IRL (so they had another e-mail address for me), saying that what they had sent to my alumni.org address had bounced. I checked and it had been several months since I had received any forwarded messages from that account. I called my alumni organization and they said, “Oh, we shut that down a while back. We sent out an e-mail.” Well, it took me a long time to backtrack all of the accounts I had used it for (and I am not sure I got them all).

I stopped my contributions to their annual giving right after that call. A few months later I got a call from the alumni organization, asking for a contribution. I told them I had stopped because of their telling me to use their forwarding e-mail address, encouraging me to have these accounts set-up to use it, then end it with little or no notice. They told me they would look into it and could they have an e-mail address they could use to get back to me. I gave them my alumni.org address. Funny, I never heard back (other than calling me the next year when they wanted more money).

I always liked my alumni organization. After graduation, they were instrumental in getting some job interviews (none of them materialized), my first professional position came from responding to an ad in a magazine (yep, I’m old), and subsequent jobs arose from contacts from that first job. But, they fill a needed function and I was proud to support them. But, not any more. If they don’t care about me, I won’t care about them.

4

I went through something similar. I had a Mac.com email account set up and it was my main account for years, and then they were suddenly cutting off support for it.

Unlike you, I did have notification, and so I hastily set up a Gmail account (which I still have). It was a real pain though.

But that isn’t what’s irritating. Later, they brought it back. I now have it again, but in the couple of years between I had already set up my Gmail as my primary.

What a pain, and ultimately unnecessary. It still rankles me.

5

A story from the 90’s
Many many years ago, I was one of AOL’s first DSL customers. I got the service and I kept it, and I never upgraded the software because I was lazy about such things and didn’t see a need.
Then one morning my internet stops working. I called AOL customer service.

They were like……oops, we shut down that server, we didn’t think anyone was still using it. So I had to go hunt down an AOL disk (this was in the days when you could grab them from the checkout counter at the bookstore) and upgrade the software.

6

My ISP was earthlink from back in the dialup-modem days, and my account came with a limited amount of free web space, so I joined the throng of 1990’s people who created our own home page and had a presence out there in worldwide-webland. Over the years I switched to DSL, then FiOS, but I retained my email addresses and gradually expanded my personal web space. I had academic papers hosted there, and a modest but ego-nourishing number of other sites linked to them.

Then one day I went to upload a .html file to which I’d made minor modifications and my FTP access to the web space errored out. Contacted earthlink. “Oh yeah… we’re phasing that out, as part of migration to new servers. Later this month you can regain access to it but it will be read-only, that’s so you can download anything, but in April we’re shutting it all down”.

I didn’t need that; I make all modifications on local files then upload them, so I have the hierarchy of folders and files replicated on my hard drive anyway. And I could purchase a web presence in any of a number of places and re-upload my files and be back where I had been, except with all new web addresses of course. “But what about the people who have links and bookmarks to my site?”

I wanted to leave behind forwarding notices, but no, they weren’t gonna do that. Just shutting the lights off after April, nice knowin’ ya, thank you for being a customer since 1996 and all that, but hey we told you the free web space was available but that we don’t support it.

“This isn’t you providing or not providing tech support. This is you taking away one of the things I was paying for each month, and now I’m invested in it”.

:frowning: :frowning: :frowning:

ETA: oh and since Ann_Hedonia mentions AOL, yeah they did it too. AOL had “hometown”, all AOL customers had free web space for each of their AOL usernames, and I was using those too, as spillover. Same shit. “We’re going to stop doing that”. “No, no forwarding, we’re sure nothing useful or important was being hosted there”.

7

CompuServe did a similar site shut-down. I had a site there of over 200 pages of professional information that just vanished one day.

8

I was able to log back into my university account. I went through my emails to make sure I hadn’t missed any notifications and it turns out I didn’t. I’ll write the alumni office and let them know I would have appreciated some notification and I’ll put in a good word for the IT department helping me out.

9

This thread made me panic… but my alumni forwarding address is still doing its thing. Except when it decides something is spam, in which case it won’t forward it. Great.

10

Thank goodness they turned it back on for you!

About 5 - 7 years ago, my old Yahoo mail account locked me out for no reason, and no matter how many ways I tried to get back in, it wouldn’t allow it. I had the correct password, the correct contact info for verifying myself via other backup email addresses, etc. There was no way to contact them. All I could get was to be referred to Yahoo community answers. Luckily I hardly ever used that account anymore, but it had a lot of history I didn’t want to lose.

Then, out of the blue, 2 or 3 years later, it allowed me to log back in again with no explanation. Bastards.

11

My job did that to me. There I was in 2011 working for a state agency. Then were merged with a much larger agency. Right at the same time the governor decided that all state agencies would use the same convention for email addresses. So now my email address is going to be changed but that’s OK , they’re going to migrate my old mail to the new address. Until I happened to talk to someone in IT the day before and mentioned the email thing and she said " we lied". I had move as much as I could on my own that day.

12

It may be too late, or you may already know about it, or maybe you no longer care, but you could check out
http://web.archive.org/ (the Wayback Machine internet archive).

13

Thank you.

14

Oh my gosh, I was on the other side of a shut down like this in about 2020! Not Earthlink, so not yours.

We stopped advertising the free web hosting space years and years and years ago. It fell out of memory through staff turnover and the passage of years and the business changing ownership twice… Over time it was just entirely forgotten.

Fast forward to 2020 when we were about to decommission a server as part of another project, and these web spaces were discovered. We quickly realised:

  • There was no record linking webspace usernames/customer accounts. Even if they were still active subscribers, there were just no records to tell us “Webspace user Cazzle is customer number 123456”.
  • If webspace files gave us context clues to identify a name, there was usually no matching account. The internet services they were attached to had been defunct for so many years that the accounts had been purged, probably around 2007 when we switched to a new billing system.
  • There were like two people who had accessed the FTP in the last two years, according to server logs. We identified one and helped her move to an appropriate alternative. The other seemed to be an ex husband of a former manager from two owners previously… We had no contact details for him (and he had no paid services with us).
  • Some spaces were being used to host content that would be against our TOS if we had a TOS for this forgotten service. Things that were embarrassing/horrifying to have linked to our brand and to be sharing with the world.

Aside from the one identifiable active user, we ended up terminating without notification. We kept backups for a while just in case.

In the nearly three years since, I have received two complaints. None were from the ex manager’s ex husband!

15

It can be convenient to use a forwarding address for important emails, but it’s probably better if your financial and other important accounts go straight to your real email. One reason is security. The emails flow through the forwarding servers and anyone on those servers can intercept them. For something like a college alumni forwarding server, the security on that might not be too robust. The other reason is access to critical emails when the forwarding server is down. If your bank sends you a verification code through email when you log in and forwarding server is down, you won’t get the code. And some email systems will not send emails through known forwarding servers. So if your “alumni.mycollege.edu” address gets put on the blocked forwarding server list, some companies like banks and credit cards won’t send to that address. They’ll may let you register with the address, but the email system will not send to it. The forwarding addresses are probably best used for low-priority emails where it’s no big deal if the emails are intercepted or you don’t receive them in a timely manner.

16

I’ve had a Hotmail acct long enough that it can legally drink. It had a 15gb limit.
On Feb 27th I got a banner notice that new limits are being put in place effective Feb 1st; yes, almost a month earlier. While there’s still a 15gb limit, you can now only have up to 5gb of attachments, which of course, I was well over after 2+ decades of having that acct. What’s worse is %*^& iphones tend to put attachments inline so there’s no paperclip showing you there’s an attachment. How the ::bleep:: am I supposed to go thru & figure out what has attachments if you don’t allow me to filter on attachments, & 2) why are attachments such a small percentage of my total limit; is there really a difference between a photo & just text? Got a couple of days before they locked my acct unless I paid them $. The way I see it, if Russia or China (or even N Korea) launched a nuke towards Redmond, WA the US military would say, “Have at it, guys” & not retaliate.

Any recommendations for a new email provider (I hate the gmail UI, so don’t suggest that)

17

My university account was gmail based and I just opened another gmail account to take its place. You’re right though, the UI sucks.

18

I use AOL. Most spammers don’t even know it still exists,

19

Hm, after my internet access with Xfinity was mistakenly canceled, I got an automated email saying I could still use their email address. It didn’t say if there was any time limit to it, so I assumed there wasn’t, but I was a bit surprised. Guess the bits don’t really cost them too much more.

20

Not quite as bad, but it used to be, EVERY SINGLE TIME my undergrad alumni office called me (you know, to “verify your information” and all that), they’d start by asking “Is your email address still _____?”. The address they gave sounded like it could plausibly be my email address (IIRC, it was some variant of my name @yahoo.com), but I’ve never had a Yahoo email account. At least three times running, I told them “No, that’s not my email account, that’s never been my email account, here’s my actual email, please update your records”. Finally it got to the point where, when I got the call, I’d interrupt the work-study student calling me and ask “Before you go any further, what email address do you have on file for me?”, and when it was still wrong, I ended the call (politely, because it’s not the fault of the poor work-study schlub). Now, I don’t even get called by them any more.

I figure, if you not only care so little about me that you can’t actually keep records on me, but actually care so little that you’ll lie and pretend to keep records on me in the hopes that it’ll make me more likely to donate, then I have no interest in donating.