So I switched my E-mail from macavenger@macosx.com to Apple’s mobile me the other day. While most of you know this already, what you may not know is why.
It all started when I was down in Anchorage, and checking my e-mail using their web interface. I noticed I had a fair number of messages in my trash folder, so I decided to empty it using the convenient “empty” link at the bottom of the page. So after clicking on the Trash folder, I clicked “empty”. Bad move. Now my Trash folder had just as many messages as it had contained before, but my Inbox - where I keep all the messages I intend to follow-up on in some way- was empty.
Thankfully I had just completed a spring cleaning of my Inbox, so I only had about a dozen or so messages in there, but still, not good. Normally, this wouldn’t be all that big an issue- I would just restore from my local backup. Unfortunately, my local backup was offline at this particular moment due to a recent enclosure failure that also managed to hose my backup, so that’s not an option. So I quickly zap off a message to the administrators notifying them of this bug and asking them to see if they can recover the lost messages, since it was a system fault.
Their response? In essence “That’s not possible. There is no ‘empty’ button.” U-huh. Then how did I click it? We went back and forth a couple more times, but the short version of it is they said “What you claim happened could not happen. Therefore, you must have just accidentally deleted your e-mails. Go back through your trash folder and dig them out. And By the way, we don’t keep backups, and you are an idiot for suggesting that we should, because then we would be spending all our time recovering accidentally deleted e-mails, not to mention that it is for your privacy”.
Excuse me??? Let’s go over this point-by-point shall we?
- “The button you say you clicked doesn’t exist.” Great. I obviously know your system better than you do. That makes me feel....unconfident.
- “What you claim happened is impossible, therefore we will assume you are lying”. I’m sorry, but NO ONE calls me a liar. Even if they do phrase it more delicately.
- “Since you did not do what you thought you did, the solution is for you to spend the next couple of hours digging through your trash and trying to find everything that disappeared. Good luck!” Gee, thanks. I guess that would be a solution- if I HAD actually “accidentally deleted” the messages. Of course, considering that the saved messages spanned several months, and I had hundreds of messages in my trash (thus starting the whole debacle) to begin with, it is hardly a good solution, and probably would still have missed several.
- “For your ‘privacy’ we don’t keep backups. Do you know how much we would get done if we spent all our time recovering ‘accidentally deleted’ e-mails?” SAY WHAT? What kind of idiotic Sys admin do you have to be to not keep backups of EVERYTHING? What are you planning to do when (not if) the server crashes? Just turn to all your paying customers and say “oops, my bad, but you just lost all your e-mail?” I mean, really. Oh, and I never once even suggested that you spend any time recovering accidentally deleted e-mail - just that you fix a server glitch that caused data loss.
After about the fourth exchange, I gave up. If they are going to be this much trouble to deal with, and have data policies this obviously bad, I want nothing more to do with them. So I switched to mobileMe. Which also gave me this nice space for a blog :)
For anyone out there that is considering getting a macosx.com e-mail address: DON’T!!!!