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ISP Sued Over Suspended Email Account
Saint Aardvark writes "A Canadian woman is suing her former ISP over their suspension of her email account. Their accounting system screwed up, and they suspended her account while they sought payment from her. What she didn't realize was that email sent to that address continued to pile up, without any notification to the sender that she had no access to it. She lost a chance at a $65,000 contract job at the Discovery channel because of this. Read the article at CNet, the complaint she brought to the Canadian Privacy Commisioner, and further details from the woman herself on Cryptome.org."
i woudl flip out on my ISP, possibly parade outside thier office wearing a sandwich board filled with a few choice words, but i wouldn't go as far as suing :p
History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it - Sir Winston Churchill
A telco cuts someone's telephone line because she didn't pay, then she sued the telco, claiming that she missed an important phone call costing her tons of money. Is this reasonable?
¦ ©® ±
she should have been notifying people that might send her e-mail to send it to an alternate address. if all the e-mail had bounced back instead of going on to her inbox, i imagine the end result would have been the same.
my pet machine
This ISP better get ready to fork up 65k + damages.
surely the isp reserved the right to suspend an account that wasn't paid up. if so, there's no case ...
i wish i was but oh well
... she also lost the chance to get a low interest mortgage, purchase cheap airline tickets, and enlarge her penis!
Hmm, from their terms and conditions:
4.1 Inter.net makes no guarantees as to the continuous availability of the Service or any specific feature of the Service. Inter.net reserves the right to change the Service at any time with or without notice. Features of the Service that are subject to change include, but are not limited to: access procedures, commands, documentation, hours of operation, menu structures, and vendors. Inter.net cannot and will not guarantee that the Service will provide Internet access that is sufficient to meet your needs.
4.2 THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED ON AN "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE" BASIS. NEITHER INTER.NET NOR ITS AFFILIATES WARRANTS THAT THE SERVICE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED OR ERROR-FREE OR THAT ANY INFORMATION, SOFTWARE, OR OTHER MATERIAL ACCESSIBLE ON THE SERVICE IS FREE OF VIRUSES, OR OTHER HARMFUL COMPONENTS.
As usual, they don't guarantee to offer any service at all. Surely that puts them in the clear here?
So, she gets one email message and no phone call and decides that she's out 60 grand, so sue?!
If it was really all that important to her, she would have paid the $100 she owed the company,
or find a company that hosts email properly.
The free email that comes with the isp package is usually not very good.
Most people figure that out without losing $60,000.
But really, if you are using email for work you should pay and get a good service, or better yet,
set up your own email host, so if something goes wrong, you have someone to fix it.
She was already in telephonic contact with the person. So if ther email had bounced back, there would have been chance that the person CALLED her. It did not so neither the Sender , nor the receiver were aware an email was sent/not read.
And as such , the telco is responsible to either completly block the service or completly allow it. Not an half way.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Try reading the article dumbass - their accounting system screwed up
it was the ISPs fault, she was still paying, their accounting department screwed up, it even said that in the post
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
i can sue tobacco because i have no willpower. i can sue mcdonalds because i'm a lazy slob. i might as well be able to sue my isp because i dont know how to write a check for my isp bill!
so, even though the email was sent to her old address (in which case you gotta ask -- did she use an old resume? did she even give out her new address?), she's mad that the old ISP didn't bounce the email?
in other words, she's suing because she would've wanted the potential employer to notice the bounced email, and try to contact her to find out her new address???
Sorry... that just doesn't cut it...
mmm... yeah... You see, we're putting the cover sheets on all TPS reports now before they go out...
Lets put this in terms that anyone should be able to understand..
1. You live in a apartment.
2. They evict you for what ever reason.
3. You never had time to forward/tell people new address.
4. Mail goes to old address.
5. You ask for mail.
6. They tell you "No not until you pay us what you owe".
This is a FEDERAL OFFENSE, punishable by jail time..
This is EXACTLY what they did to her, but only in the "virtual" world..
Email is becoming so important to our everyday lives that maybe laws should be passed to protect email, just like they where passed to protect normal mail.
Personal Website
I can't believe, what, three-quarters? of the posts on here are people going "OH WELL SHE SHOULD HAVE PAID THEN DUH".
The accounting system screwed up, ok? She was already paid up and they wanted more money.
Now, the ISP terms said they wouldn't guarantee error-or-interruption-free service. BUT...this isn't covered under that. It was an accounting error, and they suspended her account. This is not the same as if, say, their DNS servers borked.
I'd say she deserves compensation. Definitely. I have had my share of burns from ISP's with OUTRIGHT SHODDY accounting and business practices. Fortunately, nothing so serious...yet. About the only problem was paying THREE TIMES at their suggestion because they said the transaction didn't go through....and then receiving a bill for all three charges. That was an immediate cancel, and lucky for them they credited back the amount.
I hope she wins the case, I'd like to see some of these ISP's get a little more professional. It is a business after all, not a geek club.
...
Without even so much as asking, they just deleted my account with no backup of my inbox. Because of MSN/Hotmail, I've now lost these amazing oppurtunities to:
.BIZ or .INFO domain while it's still available.
Enlarge my penis
Enlarge my breasts
Meet Singles in my area
Meet Sexy singles in my area
Meet my former classmates all over again
Refinance my house at a low, low interest rate
Consolodate my debt
Copy DVDs
Lose weight while I sleep
Work from Home
Accept written guarantees of hundreds, if not thousands of dollars
Get my
Watch out Bill Gates... I've got about 100 million dollars in lost oppurtunity because of you, and I'm going to come and get it!
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
I wasn't paying for the account, though.
I swapped ISPs for a couple of years, and when I went back to the first one, they had never disabled mail and I got 2 years of mail in one download.
Email is a primary method of contact, and I had people that thought I was ignoring them, and they got pissed off. I also had initial contract offers (big ticket items, too) from 2 consulting companies. Since I had moved twice, the old email was the only contact info they had. Oh well...
For some reason, they mistranscribed a digit unbenownst to me. I get back Sunday night, cable and internet are down, call the office, they tell me my card is bad, and it is their policy not to inform you if your credit card transaction didn't go through.
They then attempted to charge me a $25 "reconnect fee". I went postal on them, and they changed their minds. If this company wasn't a monopoly for high speed internet in the area, they would have lost a customer.
I know that many people are probably going "WTF?!" at this, but I can see how she's justified. Anyone providing a service, especially a paid-in-advance service, should be required to actually maintain their services properly. If this doesn't happen, and it causes damages, I belive that the problem should be sorted out legally.
The woman might not be entitled to $65,000, but if she is working right now, she may be easily entitled to the differences between her current job's pay and the new one, for a court-determined period of time (like, a year, or maybe even two or three if it is determined that this amount of time will be required to get back 'on track'.
just my two cents...
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
This is simple, folks. ISP's should not accept email and then refuse to deliver it. They can either deliver it, or bounce it. Anything else is extortion.
She lost a chance at a $65,000 contract job at the Discovery channel because of this.
I don't know about you guys, but that seems a little bit odd to me. Normally an employer would call you if they were offering a 65k contract job. Maybe if she left them her phone number it would have worked out.
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
1)cancel email account
2)???
3)Lawsuit!!
A hot girl tries to pass you a note in class. I seem to be in a position to relay the note to you. But rather than pass the note to you, I eat it [burp].
There are special laws regarding delivering mail...but not email as far as I know. Does a relay even have to send an error message to the sender, if the ISP decides it's not their problem?
-Russ
Just 2 days ago, My ISP's accounting messed up and they cut off my internet =P Luckily, they didn't delete the actual account (just denied access to it) So once I called them, everything got straightened out. One reason you shouldn't use ISP e-mail service is because if you change ISPs, people who you don't know (but got a hold of your email address) can't contact you (for job offers, etc). Even Hotmail and Yahoo! Offer pay services (and since your paying them, you know its secure/reliable)
I see that she's suing for 2x that ... sounds like a great deal -- sue for double what you might have gotten, 1/3rd goes to your lawyer, netting you more money ($87k) than you would have gotten in the first place (assuming that you even got the job!), and you don't have to even work for it!
Nice to know that the US isn't the only place that's sue-happy.
From the C/Net article --
If my mail is having a temporary problem, and it can be queued up for me until I can access it again, that's what I want -- I don't want it bouncing. Bouncing email is bad bad bad!Are these people aware of what they're asking for?
The ISP's contract appears to be pretty clear -- they don't guarantee that everything will work all the time. Pretty standard, I think. It'll be interesting how this turns out (personally, I hope that this goes to court, and the woman loses.)
I wonder what the next step is -- suing your ISP because their spam filter blocked/flagged an email offering you a $65k job? Or even worse -- suing them because they didn't filter your spam for you, and so you accidently deleted the $65k job offer yourself, think it's spam.
People, email is unreliable (and so is postal mail, for that matter.) If you don't get an email (or postal mail receipt) back that acknowledges receipt of that mail (Return-Recept-To: doesn't quite cut it), or your friend doesn't call you and say `thanks!', you cannot be certain that it's been received. Period.
(Return-Receipt-To: isn't good enough because it's sent by the receiving mail daemon when the mail is received, not when the mail is actually read. After receipt, it could be lost to a disk failure, system problem, spam filter, or just accidently deleted.)
I have had problems with most of the IPS I have tried, and I have never been late on a payment for anything! Other businesses love me (except credit cards, which want you to be late).
This case may be a little frivalous, but it will be a kick in the ass to ISPs to be more professional with their service.
"We shall party like the Greeks of old! You know the ones I mean." - HedonismBot
11th attempt.
I use both a mail redirection service (Pobox) and a seperate mail service (Runbox), so I don't have to rely on my ISP for ANYTHING. If runbox has a problem I can direct the Pobox mail elsewhere. If my ISP has a problem at least I can go somewhere else to read my email over the web.
Email is important enough to justify $40 a year to make sure it's going to work when you need it!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Static IP address, email server software, domain name, free DNS hosting and a PC running all the time. Now, either the DNS is screwed up (rare) or my DSL is down (even more rare). I can do whatever I want, which includes relay with authentication.
Reviews with a twist! http://www.sardonicbastard.com
This whole thing is pretty sad. I hear from people on a daily basis that don't pay their bill and wonder why their service is disconnected. I hear complaints to the effect of: "I'M LOSING $10,000.00 AN HOUR BECAUSE YOU &^%$@*&%^ DISCONNECTED ME!!!", "I HAVE IMPORTANT EMAIL THAT I NEED...I'M WAITING FOR AN IMPORTANT CLIENT!!!!", "I AM MISSING A CLASS THAT I HAD TO TAKE ONLINE FOR THE LATEST UNSKILLED STOOGE TRADE PSEUDO COLLEGE I AM ATTENDING!!. Well, the bottom line is simply pay your damned bill. If you refuse to pay your bill and decide to go to another ISP just email your contacts and inform them of the email address change.
The reason why the email accounts still accept mail and are not deleted immediately is due to the fact that some people may at times simply forget to pay the bill or have an outside entity (main corporate office) that pays the bill for them and may be a wee bit slow paying some months. This gives them the time to pay without having to lose their email accounts or any email that may have been delivered to them in the up to 2 months+ that they were in non-pay status. I can only imagine the hell there would be to pay if all accounts were deleted instantly at the time of nonpayment. As far as her storefront analogy goes....it doesn't even make sense. She is comparing apples to oranges here. The ISP is NOT operating her business and acting as her agent in obtaining contracts. Lets say at her store that customers were mailing payments to her using the good old fashioned US Postal Service. It would NOT be her landlords responsibility to notify all her clients that her store was now closed....It would be HER responsibility to do this via a change of address notification to all of her clients. Also, how are we sure that the ISP was in error?? Most people seem to have a hard time grasping the concept of their bill being payed for services in advance and not in arrears. Also, when people get late charges...they tend to think that they can simply pay the bill and not pay the late charges which can and DO accumulate over the months. I for one am waiting to see proof that the ISP was in error and it was simply not her own ignorance that caused the account to become delinquent in the first place. She should be happy that the ISP keeps her email for her for long enough to pay her damned bill or notify her contacts of her new address!!
"The strong will do what they want, the weak will do what they must."
-Thucydides
She lost a chance at a $65,000 contract job at the Discovery channel because of this.
I'm sure that they would have been glad to welcome her to the team when they read a "This email address has been suspended" auto-message.
Y2K Compliant since the late 1890s
Check out his film while you're at it...
Was it just me or was half that article about AOL and their policies on email. Unless I am mistaken somehow they are not named in the suit. So what exactly are they doing in the article.
Either way, why didn't she just call that contact if she hadn't heard from them in a while? Kinda sounds like she is the one that screwed up.
1) Register a domain. If you change ISPs, you will not lose your e-mail address.
2) Notify ALL of your clients if you change your e-mail address.
3) If you are changing, expect to receive e-mail at your old address. You may want to hold onto that old address for a short while (6 months?) and ensure the bills are paid (pre-pay if you have to)
If you accept the stated risks of taking a reply in a given medium, then if you get screwed because of those risks, it's your own fault.
What the contract for the ISP does is set out the risks in black and white for its customers: "don't rely on us." Their contract is harsh but reflects the economic realities of providing a simple, cheap service to a large number of people.
She relied on them despite the stated risks and she couldn't access mail during the period in question. She didn't pursue alternative means of communication (ie calling prospective employers to provide phone numbers etc) which is a failure to mitigate a risk once she became aware of it.
If nothing else, this case is an alert to future prospective employers that this woman should be avoided at all costs. If she can't handle this situation, how would she handle a job in tv?
- I live in Toronto and that ISP is often the
topic of conversations. (They bought the
customers from interlog.com) Their accounting
system is terrible.
- Was the mail to the woman a job offer or
an call for an interview? Don't you usually
get a call for a job offer? Why didn't
the employer try to contact her again
after a week or so!
The user did absolutely everything right. She paid her bills on time, called when there was a problem. The ISP did absolutely everything wrong. Due to an error on their part, they cut her off, and it did not specify in their agreement what their policy is on non-payment.
Surely, you can write down your policies when you run an ISP? And when a new situation arises, or someone points out the deficiency, you can give the person the benefit of the doubt, can't you? Is it that hard?
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
About 15 years ago I ordered Cable TV when it just became available. For the first three months I didn't receive a bill, which was also supposed to include my HBO guide. The office was 4 miles away, and each month I stopped by and picked up the guide, and notified them that I wasn't being billed.
Then I just subscribed to TV Guide, and never bothered with this fly-by-night outfit. I continued getting premium cable TV for about 7 years.
During this time the company changed hands about three times, during which I never received a bill. A physical audit finally caused the current company to catch up with me.
So I ordered basic cable from them, which really sucked. Had they demanded payment for all those years, I would have laughed them off.
The next month I cancelled the basic service, and got DirectTV :)
db
Cig:
ôô
is that 65K in American money, or Canadian????
To : Nancy.Carter@*********, nancar@********* :
/purged/ account rather than a
Cc
Attchmnt:
Subject : Your E-mail Case? You WILL Lose!
----- Message Text -----
Nancy,
If the courts haven't seen your case yet, I assure you, your case is a
very weak one. The court of public opinion in ISP practice weighs heavily
against you. Just about every Canadian service provider carries the
e-mail handling policy you consider unjust.
Your argument asserts that despite being delinquent with the fees
responsible for your account's upkeep, that you are still entitled to what
most Internet providers would consider chargeable services, whether that
service is access to your messages or to have them forwarded to another
e-mail hosted at another service provider.
Understand that the e-mail an Internet provider accumulates for you while
your account remains suspended and you are sorting your billing issues is
a good faith practice an ISP is not obligated to do. In other words, they
are extending a favour to you. This favour is the lesser of two evils.
The other evil is undelivered mail due to a
suspended one. In other words, your mail does not accumulate whatsoever
and the sender is returned a mailer notification explaining your account
no longer exists. Which evil is the more appealing to you?
I am qualified to be offering you my opinion you ask? Well, I am not a
praciting attorney but I am a Internet service professional that has seen
and dealt with variations of your problem. In a case like yours, the
facts are so overwhelmingly against you that I imagine a judge would
dismiss your claim entirely citing negligence on your part for not paying
your bills.
I only suggest you tread carefully. You're dealing with professionals
who's practices are often reviewed with lawyers before they are put into
play. Nonetheless, I wish you the best of luck in your fight.
(Name Witheld)
An Anonymous Spectator
I once subscribed to an ISP and used myid@theiraddress.com as my email.
.bomb company (Global Crossing)didn't even get an acknowledgement.
I eventually got my own domain and cancelled the ISP account.
They refused to forward email to my new address. They refused me access to it. They didn't bounce the email. They simply collected it and didn't tell anybody that the address was no longer valid. This was still in the days when most ISP's operated by old timer internet courtesy rules.
When I complained, they told me it was *policy* to do this, and they refused to either let me access my mail or to stop bouncing it. A polite letter to the president of this big
They did offer to let me sign back up, after paying a penalty fee, and then I could get at my email. But of course, if I ever unsubscribed, tthey would hold my email address hostage for 6 months from that time!
I finally got a tech who, against the rules, sent it all to me. This tech had been with the local company before it was purchased Global Crossing.
As a result, I ONLY use a domain that I control for my email!
Of course, even that isn't enough! My daughter had a commercial site. The company providing services was acquired. Then the acquirer went bankrupt.
Requests to NSI to transfer the site always disappeared into the bit bucket (fill out the form on their site and you get a confirming email. Respond to that and after that... nothing.)
Calls to them produced the same result.
Eventually, after many months (of not very frequent effort, I must admit) and lost ad revenue, I was able to get hold of somebody who persisted long enough to get technical folks there to fix or circumvent some sort of bug that was causing the problem.
The internet still has a ways to go before it comes up to the standards most of us expect from services.
Oh, and it has demonstrated that it can acquire the characteristics of big, unfeeling bureaucracies in less than 10 years (see ) NASA held the previous record for constructing a huge unfeeling bureaucracy in the shortest time. I guess must be internet time...
Now, as for the ISP...
Some say that email is free, which makes it different from smail. This isn't entirely true; while smail requires "stamps," email works on a subscription service. Pay your ISP, the ISP provides you with an address which you can send to and from. Because they have costs too -- supporting the lines and hubs you dial in on, connecting to other hubs, etc.
If you change addresses, and start getting mail sent to a different address, what happens?
In the case of the smail, you get the stuff forwarded from your old address to the new address -- and that's perfectly fair because the sender paid to get the letter or package to you. This is helped considerably by the fact that all the post offices are owned by the same company. BTW, this is probably the only case I can think of in which a monopoly helps the consumer.
In the case of email, what happens? One person pays a fee to send the email, which goes out onto the network. (This is a recipe for disaster in some peoples' minds -- we promisenot to read it. Really!) All other systems agree to pass it along, until it gets to the other end.
The receiver pays as well, to send and receive messages. This would seem to last as long as the user pays. But some of that time is wasted at the start because people have to publish or otherwise get that new email address out, same as if you changed your smail address.
And when the user changes services, what happens to the email still inbound to the box? Some people will say that the email should be shut off, any new messages bounced. Anyone with any sense of fair play would also say that since there was a lag time before the address could be used that anything new that comes into the address should be bounced to the new address, with a message back to the sender that a new address is being used. These are ethical solutions that may be overlooked because we are talking about "business" here, which seems to work by different rules.
The article on C|Net is clear enough on the point: ISPs' handling of email under special circumstances is not merely twisted but actually sprained.
And I consider it a very good point.
Much of the Internet is still frontier-grade in its rules, with its share of rail barons and robber barons and common horse thieves and a government that lives very very far away and has little hope of understanding this wild frontier for the next several generations.
What's missing here is not legislation but common sense.
I think that when a user stops service, old and new mail should be forwarded if possible for two to four weeks, and then simply handled like any other bounce. I consider this ethical and sensible. Other peoples' common senses and ethics may say other things.
Which leads to the questions: a) How do we decide on an optimal solution, and b) how do we make the non-ethical, non-sensible people follow suit?
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
Although I see this issue from her point of vue, I really think that she shouldn't sue because someone sent her an invitiation to potentially see if she was interesting in maybe getting this contract that might be given to her.... Basically, she's just dumb...
Networking, only one letter from NOT working...
Actually, I'm waiting for the next phase:
Spam from the ISP.
Instead of receiving the actual e-mail when connecting, the customer receives the actual subject line, and the text is...
"Your account is temporarily disabled due to ****. Please contact the ISP at this number () during these hours (). Your business is important to us."
And apparently to others. Ha ha.
The individual now knows their information is in jeopardy. Closing the account is an option, or so is leaving it hanging while the suspension details are worked out.
Something that isn't being discussed is work e-mail. More specifically, a work e-mail address assigned for you specifically. Yes, using it for personal e-mail is bad. But consider what happens when you leave the company - what prohibits them from answering (any type of) e-mails from your account? You probably won't know about the responses given from your place of work. Maybe wrong answers, but it isn't clear on who the information is coming from. I tend to stay in the same field of work, I'll be running into these customers and business contacts again. It would be difficult to prove damage to your reputation and/or the monetary damage of such a thing.
The google cache of the cryptome page.
"I don't trust goats," --To Catch a Spy
I got the perfect bounce message! "We're sorry, we at dipshit ISP couldn't send your message to the degenerate recipient looser because she is too stupid to use a computer or pay her bill. Yes we fucked up but its not our fault cuze our computer did it."
Yes the ISP was at fault for the accounting error and they should have simply dismissed the payment crap because they screwed up and didn't notify her(its called customer service), BUT the bitch is stupid for conversing over email for important matters such as a new job. Ignorance maybe bliss but it doesn't give her the right to sue. If that were the case, I'd sue every damn fast food restaurant everytime they hand me a drink and it spills on my $15 crap khaki's from Walmart just because they got my nuts wet. If the job was that important to her then she should have made it a point to tell the dumb fuck who was going to hire her that she had a new email address.
I don't want the government to step in and start passing laws that ruin the internet(like they do with everything else)....but I'm just an anarchist sum'bitch.
Inter.net represent everything that could have - and did - go wrong with ISP mergers. It's a hodge-podge collection of former "mom & pop" ISPs that were bought out or merged into this new entity Inter.net to attempt to keep up with the competition. But they did so too fast and too haphazardly. A classic case of the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, ensued. I used to be a customer of Interlog which was a great Toronto-area ISP that became part of Inter.net. All the people I know who were with Interlog and are now with Inter.net have had nothing but problems with accounting and such. Either Inter.net doesn't even know they're a customer and they're getting free Internet, or Inter.net doesn't believe they're a customer and refuses service. Moreover, I handle a web site that was provided by Inter.net until this summer. I had to jump through hoops of fire to get them to even realize who the heck we were and that we wanted to cancel our account. To this day I'm not even sure if they think we're a customer but one of the directors of the company's website offered to handle the situation. The last I heard was that he just didn't care what they thought; that he'd given proper notice of our account termination numerous times and that he expected them to send an invoice anyways. To sum it up, I'm more surprised that this woman is the first person trying to sue them rather than the fact she wants to sue them.
I got the perfect bounce message! "We're sorry, we at dipshit ISP couldn't send your message to the degenerate recipient looser because she is too stupid to use a computer or pay her bill. Yes we fucked up but its not our fault cuze our computer did it."
Yes the ISP was at fault for the accounting error and they should have simply dismissed the payment crap because they screwed up and didn't notify her(its called customer service), BUT the bitch is stupid for conversing over email for important matters such as a new job. Ignorance maybe bliss but it doesn't give her the right to sue. If that were the case, I'd sue every damn fast food restaurant everytime they hand me a drink and it spills on my $15 crap khaki's from Walmart just because they got my nuts wet. If the job was that important to her then she should have made it a point to tell the dumb fuck who was going to hire her that she had a new email address.
I don't want the government to step in and start passing laws that ruin the internet(like they do with everything else)....but I'm just an anarchist sum'bitch.
...takes more than a few hours to research something like this, and certainly once something funky is noticed, reenable the account?
The ISP (and accountant) should be ashamed.
If there is one thing about the internet I have learned, that is to have more than ONE email account, and to make my "Buisness" one different from my ISP. Specially since ISP's change thier plans like MCI or AT&T.
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
More people need to use common sense these days. Our laws are based on ethics and morality but when I hear about companies like this ISP basically putting in the TOS clauses that indemnify against every conceivable act (acts of God not withstanding) then I gotta wonder. If their accounting software is at fault, and I mean truly at fault, and she genuinely lost a $65,000 contract from it, then they have an obligation (not legally, but morally) to repair what happened. They messed up and they gotta pay.
The problem here is that this company, like other companies with a contract try and use legal clauses to excuse them out of moral responsibilities because of "their own fault" and "shit happens" attitudes. We need Terms of Service that say basically "if we screw up, we claim responsibility and make repairs". People don't want to take the wrap for anything, they just want to pass the blame on to someone else.
Another problem that arises is that customers don't shop around for the best term of service agreement that ISP's that service their area have. They don't have printouts and organize the agreements saying "ah ha, this one has expressed oral consent whereas this one has implied written consent". All they do is become influences by commercials, colleages and friends as to "what's the cheapest and best (as in least busy calls if by analog modem, or however you define best) ISP out there.
Let me know what you think about this.
The ISP is attempting to collect a debt here, and is limited in the tools it can use. Sueing is OK, turning off services may be OK, "self-help" to the customer's property is not. Generally, you can't put a clause in a contract that allows "self-help", either; that's illegal.
I don't think it's reasonable for a small ISP to accept this kind of liability for what is supposed to be a recreational-use account. People like her, who use e-mail for critical business, should sign up for specialized business accounts that, for example, can offer loss ensurance, backup delivery of every message to another, independent ISP and will not block/disconnect service without 6-month prior notification. She will have to pay up of course, but it should be worth it if you are dealing with clients who will drop you because of one failed e-mail. Regular ISPs should only be liable for refund of service fee, perhaps with interest and compensation for the effort it took you to get the refund. Not for other, unpredictable, things that happened because you were locked out.
Her email address was ______@inter.net. That means the email address is the property of inter.net, not her. It's the reason when you change ISPs you loose your previous email account with the previous ISP.
Bouncing someone's email is the equivalent of the telephonic error: "The number you have dialed has been disconnected or is no longer in service." If you called someone who was negotiating a contact with you and got that message, would you still award the contract? I think not.
I ran an ISP with the same suspension policy. Email was allowed to pile up because to bounce it might damage the credibility of the account holder more than their not responding.
If a suspended customer wanted mail bounced or forwarded, we would honor that request; but the default was to simply lock the account. Nearly all suspended customers resolved their situation within hours (poor, addicted L-users), and many of the unresolved suspensions were the result of clients moving or dying (really.)
I feel for her, but the only alternative for ISPs is to pursue collections of overdue accounts. This is simply way too expensive. Bill in advance and suspend non-payers is the only efficient model. Anything else spikes your costs.
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
...YAHOO!!!!!
Now, with no notice, they can still send email to the account, but the only ones able to read it are the employees of the ISP (who may or may not have done so; that's irrelevant). By insisting upon a fee (whether truly owed or not), they assert ownership over the messages as if they were the legitimate recipient.
Thus -- is the ISP in effect impersonating the account holder by not providing notice that they, not the intended/expected recipient, are the only ones receiving the email?
As i read this artcle and then the threads here it seems slashdot readers have completely missed the point.
She was not a delinquient customer who didnt pay her bills. They just never charged her and then expected a lump sum payment. Im sorry but this is totally AGAINST her contract with them. She agreed to pay the x dollars a month. Whether they collect that money or not is their problem not hers.
Secondly they didnt terminate her service they held it in limbo. In canada if you mail a letter without postage the post office still has to mail it back to the sender. If you send it to an address thats someone has moved from then the law states that that person must put that peice of mail back in the mailbox with Return to sender on it. It is not legal for them to sit there and hold onto it ESPECIALLY as a tactic to make her pay their fucked up lumpsum bill.
This violates so many canadian laws that her case is extremely strong. When an isp account is disabled. It will go back to replying there is no mailbox name at this address and send it back where it came from. Thats an internet standard protocol. In this case they just happily collected all the email. Thats bogus.
I for one hope she wins this lawsuit because inter.net is a really shady company that uses every dirty trick available to them.
What they should have done is accepted her offer to pay have (i wouldnt have made that offer personally) and they should have dropped the whole charge minus the last month. As the letter of the contract goes this is all they're entitled to and suspension of her account alludes to a breach of contract.
good luck
Inter.net was created by PSINet (read: Pissy-Net) after buying a number of smaller ISP's. I used Interlog which was an amazing ISP until it was bought by PSI. After that point, service declined until it was completely useless - the dialup lines didn't work properly, the web/mail servers started having problems, the news server was replaced with a useless machine. The final straw was the elimination of shell access, at which point I switched providers.
Although I don't know the complete story, I would tend to blame Inter.net unless they have made some drastic changes to their organization.
I use Macs to up my productivity, so up yours Microsoft!
Yes, and if this woman's account had been 'killed' as she suggests, she'd be complaining that important emails got bounced, and if they'd just accepted them until she could call up with a new credit card number, she'd have gotten them, so it's all their fault, and they didn't have the right to deny service, and blah blah blah.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
This woman requested to close her account, and then wanted access to E-mail at that address?
..."
"... At that point, she terminated the account and signed up with an alternate provider, Carter said.
The old account, however, was kept open under suspension without her knowledge, she said, and e-mail continued to pile up. Carter eventually was able to retrieve 24 e-mail messages some three and a half weeks after the cancellation
She does not have some sovereign right to that E-mail address - when she closed her account, the ISP was free to do whatever they wanted with their resources.
If I close "bob@example.com" at Bob's request, and then Robert comes in my ISP and wants "bob@example.com", I'll give it to him.
If I close "bob@example.com" at Bob's request, and then TAKE IT FOR MYSELF, I haven't done anything wrong.
> When your account with an isp is cancelled, they should not be collecting email on your behalf.
When you close your account with an ISP, you lose all claim over your address. The ISP is free to give it to another customer, throw mail to that address in the trash, or read it.
Are you suggesting that even though you've closed your account, the ISP should have some responsibility to you?
How long does an address have to wait before it is "free" again?
This is nonsense.
E-mail is not "personal"; It is not the same as a postal address, which includes *your name*. It is not possible to tell who an E-mail is intended for *without reading part of it*.
If I were the ISP, I would argue:
When she continued to have E-mail sent to her address, we assumed she wanted to re-open our contractual relationship.
AT&T@home, whenever their service was down in some region (California and Texas almost daily), people who used the Internet for business would constantly lose money. AT&T would always point out that it is a residential service, or for notfor-business, whatever. Most ISPs have the same blanket excuse in their TOC's also. Usually they want to bump you up to a business account before they pretend to be reliable, but I'm pretty sure they have a way out of responsibility for that too.
Fnord.
I haven't read all the facts in this case, but it sounds as though what you say here is indeed common practice in the industry. The question is, should it be allowed?
E-mail has rapidly become a very important part of many people's daily lives. Everything from bills to job offers is sent by e-mail, and it is assumed (rightly or wrongly) by many organisations that mails they send are received by the addressee, even though there is no equivalent of registered mail.
Under those circumstances, it seems reasonable to mandate that service providers must either perform the service they offer, or inform someone trying to use it (by sending mail) that the service has not been performed. Leaving everyone in the dark, as appears to have happened in this case, clearly can be misleading and cause significant damage to parties involved, as also appears to have happened in this case.
If the service provider is allowed to operate on this basis, and this woman can't get compensation from them having been harmed by their policy, then the law governing the validity of the service provider's Ts&Cs should be reviewed, IMHO. Allowing this behaviour to continue is potentially very harmful to the small person/business, and does no good to anyone, except possibly a service provider holding their customer to ransom (and over their own mistake, at that, in this particular case).
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
The only part of this story that really bothers/concerns me is the idea that an ISP may suspend one's account, yet leave their mailbox active.
I had this happen once with a local ISP I tried out for a couple months, and then decided not to use. (Luckily for me, I didn't keep them long enough for it to create BIG hassles for me.)
They actually left my email account fully functional, but they simply deleted my password allowing me to establish a PPP connection with them. I had no idea they did this (assuming, of course, they'd delete my mailbox to save disk space and all), until months later. A few people were asking me why I never replied to their email.
I finally realized they'd been sending mail to my old account all this time, and it wasn't bouncing back because it *was* delivered successfully, onto the server I no longer connected to.
By this time, I'd almost forgotten my password, but managed to remember it - and connected to their mail server via my current ISP's connection, and pulled down well over 1500 emails that were piled up in there.
I think everyone important knows my current address now, so I haven't worried about it again -- but for all I know, that account is *still* active on their system today!
The ISP was holding her personal private data and not granting her access to it--that was the issue.
They would have been OK if they had destroyed it.
They would have been OK if they had bounced it.
What they did was silently accept more email after the suspension but refuse to let her access it.
The court is saying the email is her private personal data and she has an "access to information" right to see it.
The ISP had every right to cancel her account. But why not bounce her email at that point?
They kept her email because they believed that holding her personal private data hostage was a way to force her to settle the dispute.
That's wrong.
Most of the large ones do already, and some smaller ones do these, but it'd be nice if these became common practice:
Your message has not been delivered because...
We do not have such a user. Maybe you made a typo? Have the wrong domain?
The user's mailbox is full. Please use alternative means to contact them -- and do everyone a favor and tell them to empty their inbox? Thanks.
The user's account is suspended temporarily -- please use other contact means.
User is having technical difficulties. They have provided forwarding information. Contact them at $(OTHER EMAIL/PHONE NUMBER/POSTAL ADDRESS).
Too bad most people are totally oblivious to it, and most ISPs no longer bother to provide the service due to oblivion.
Of course I'm talking about finger! Five years ago most people I dealt with had accounts at ISPs that provided finger services. Among other things, it'll tell you the last time they logged in and checked their email. Plus it is a nifty medium for figuring out what someone has been up to -- .plan, the original blog!
If all accounts provided (opt-outable) finger information and people were used to checking it, maybe this woman wouldn't be out $65,000? And people could stop sending obnoxious messages to their whole address books telling them they're going on vacation?
We seriously need to start a conspiracy to protect and revive UNIXisms.
If more people would take responsibility for their own lives, instead of blaming someone else when things go wrong, those people would probably enjoy much happier lives with less silly lawsuits like this one.
There are so many ways this woman could have taken more responsibility for the situation.
According to the article, the company "presented her with a $214 charge for 14 months of service that had gone unbilled because of an accounting error. Carter said she agreed to pay half..."
There's problem number one. She should have paid the whole bill. She got the service (with deferred payments even), she should pay for it. There is no reason why she should only pay half. Failure to receive a bill doesn't relieve you of your obligation to pay. Now, if they were tacking on late charges that would be a different story, but that doesn't seem to be the case here. She claims they intially accepted the offer of paying half but later rejected it. I suspect the truth is more that they agreed she could pay half now and half later, and when time came for her to pay the other half, she balked. But, I'm speculating.
According to the article "she terminated the account". They didn't cancel her service, she did. So why didn't she notify her contacts of her new email address? According to the article "Carter and her potential employer had exchanged telephone messages about the position". There's the next problem -- obviously she had been in phone contact with them, she should have notified them of her new email address, or at least notified them that her old email address was no longer valid. BTW, the email was "from a potential employer encouraging her to apply" -- it was NOT a job offer, nor does it even sound like it was a personalized email. It sounds to me like it was a job-posting spammail.
When you are trying to get a job, it is YOUR responsibility to keep in contact with the potential employer. For her to fail to get an email but not bother to follow up until "some three and a half weeks" later, well it sounds to me like she wasn't that interested in the job.
If *she* had taken responsibility and paid her bill in full when it was presented, this wouldn't have happened.
If *she* had taken responsibility and notified her potential employer contact of her new email address when it changed, this wouldn't have happened.
If *she* had taken responsibility and followed up with her potential employer when she didn't hear from them, this wouldn't have happened.
Whether or not her "potential employer" got notified that her mail was undeliverable is the least of her problems.
Does she think that if her former ISP had merely sent a bounce message back to her potential employer, they would have immediately offered her the $65,000? If I were the potential employer and I sent an email to a job candidate and it bounced, I would not even bother to try to contact the person anymore. If they follow-up with me, fine. There's lots of qualified people out there looking for jobs, I'll just go on to the next person.
If an ISP freezes a customer account, it could be due to either party being at fault. Therefore a solution should ease clearing that fault, without harming either party.
I suggest that when an ISP freezes an account, they must continue to store messages for a reasonable time (a month may work), as well as auto-replying that the account is frozen and cannot be read by the recipient at that time. This way, everyone is alerted to the problem. After the reasonable time, the stored messages must be kept by ISP for a further, say, 3 months before destruction, and all further messages are bounced.
Bad news for ISP - has to absorb the cost of storage.
Bad news for customer - has to absorb embarassment of the auto-reply deal if fault wasn't theirs.
No, as far as I can tell what she wants is either a) the ISP to start bouncing e-mail to closed accounts as soon as they're closed/suspended/whatever, or b) the ISP to allow access to the e-mail for as long as they choose to accept and not bounce it. What she objects to is the policy of accepting the mail as if everything's OK (thus not giving the sender any clue there's any problem) while simultaneously not allowing the recipient access to it (thus not giving the recipient any way of knowing who/what to respond to). To me her position seems emminently reasonable.
It seems to me that the situation would have been much better if Inter.net had disclosed the terms of the suspension to her, explaining that they had suspended her account but were not terminating it or bouncing her email. And that disclosure is pretty reasonable - if my ISP suspended my account, I would probably expect them to tell me what was happening with it.
Because of their lack of disclosure, and other strange behavior, like accepting an offer of a reduced payment at first and then rejecting it later, it seems like they're substantially responsible for the problem and the delay of its resolution.
Disclosure might have reduced the problem for her, because she would have been able to contact people who she thought might contact her by email and let them know the issue.
However, she had no way of knowing what specific email was being held, so she wouldn't necessaily have been able to guess that the specific email that's at issue would arrive. Having some kind of notices sent to people who sent email to the account, which is technically quite feasible (programs like the "vacation" program do it), might have helped with that, and that seems like a pretty reasonable thing for an ISP to set up.
It clearly would behoove ISPs to have accounting errors default to customer-friendly behaviors and not lock people automatically. I was locked automatically from my DSL account after an accounting error, and before I even bothered to fix the problem I had moved to a new provider. Doesn't competition teach these businesses anything?
I don't need large brains to have a good time.
A good way to avoid these kinds of problems is to use a separate DNS host, such as EasyDNS. It provides an extra layer of indirection in front of your web and email providers, making it easy to switch if there are any problems.
Most people have their current web/mail ISP hosting their DNS records too. If the ISP goes out of service, not only do you lose web or mail access, but you can't immediately switch to a competitor - you have to wait at least a few days for the DNS transfer to take place.
With EasyDNS, I can cut over to a backup web or email provider in just an hour or two. If you use their email forwarding service, you can switch to a backup email account *instantly*. I keep at least 3 POP accounts at different ISPs as backups. This has saved my butt several times...
If someone provides me a service with no contract stating terms of payment, they're free to try and bill me, and I'm free to try and not pay it.
She isn't entitled to free email, but nor is it clear the company is entitled to extort payment from her. If they chose not to bill her for 14 months, that's their loss. See: estoppel, laches.
Sounds like she was playing with fire and got burned. I imagine, though that she'll have her way since she's willing to assert her case in court. She never would if she just sucked it up and paid.
I don't need large brains to have a good time.
That's like what, a hundred bucks??
Just think of all the files people sent her asking for her advice! There might be a class action suit in the making....
A lot has been mentioned about 'The ISP's terms and conditions' or User agreements but this is not the core of the case. Once the user terminates an account the User Agreement does not apply. This person, to her knowledge, terminated the account. The complaint is:' The ISP had improperly used her personal information without her knowledge and consent for a purpose other than that for which it had been collected '
The ISP used her personal information, the content her e-mail, for the purpose of collecting an alleged over-due balance. The e-mail was collected without her knowledge and it was collected to reclaim the over-due balance.
Is that like those "beans" thing that Whoopy Goldberg was trying to sell a couple of years ago?,
or would it be more like evercrack plat?
just curioud
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
Since when was missing an opportunity a reason to sue for $65K? I thought that you had to prove in a court of law that you had to have real and NOT PERCIEVED grievances that accounted to damages to collect in a court of law.
What? She didn't have a phone? Can't phone someone? I know of precious few producers in any form that wait around for E-mail when they can call someone and get to the bottom of the work at that moment. Producers might spec on E-mail, but I don't ever remember hearing about them finalizing any details on anything other than the phone.
A missed opportunity is not the fault of an ISP. If she had played her cards right, she should have used the telephone. And by the way, I am a journalist, and know a TON of freelance journalists. SO she might have been up for some Dixcovery Channel work. SO WHAT. If they want you for a gig, they will call you directly... that is the way it has always worked.
Funny the article says...
"- a potential contract worth $60,000"
Where's the other 5k??
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Why is she even bothering suing? I mean if that is $65,000 Canadian money then that is only like $5 american.
You can't hold an ISP liable for the cost of the loss of a contract because of a time constraint on email response. That would be like being offered a job at $65k if you can be there in 30 minutes and then suing the cab company you rode with because they took 45 minutes to get you there and you lost out.
Mistakes and outtages occur. If your email is THAT mission critical, take action to acheive that level of service somewhere. Don't just expect your ISP to provide you with a level of service that you aren't contracted for. They provide email...email is not 100% guaranteed, period. It doesn't matter if it was an accounting error, or an outtage or a configuration error...email is not guaranteed, period.
Can this even be done?
I have an active account on my *nix box. If I disable logins ("suspend the account") the user can't login to shell, ftp, e-mal, whatever. The only other tactic is to delete the account. Now, the mail is bounced, but all current messages are gone, as well as any other files they may have on the server.
How would someone implement a suspended account and bounce e-mail, AND leave their current files there in case they wanted to reactivate their account?
I'm not crazy,I'm actively irresponsible.
Rather than suspending the account, an account in a billing dispute should return the temporary condition of "disk full", for which a standard MTA will back off and retry.
Since the condition of being out of space, or some other transient condition, isn't un-common, it won't be viewed as a problem, like this case was.
And semi-intelligent MTA's can notify the sender, that their email is being delayed, so that they can check via alternative means like voice. An ISP that notified the intended receipient would be great, and best done once when the account is flipped to "temporarily unavailable".
A problem that is resolved in a few hours would be transparent to the end users, other than the delay.
When the receiving mailserver says (as is recorded in the sending mailservers log), that is has accepted the message for delivery or somthing similar (Example: "stat=Sent (gA2LC60L027839 Message accepted for delivery)"), then I'd guess they are under some obligation. They certainly cannot send it to /dev/null. You can decide to put a letter in the bin without reading it, the mailman cannot. I am sure some RFC does forbid giving a false statement as to what is done with accepted mail.
I think the only acceptable policy is refusing to accept messages, either with 'user unknown' or something else, e.g. telling the sender of the refused message to look at a webpage, where it says something like: this account is suspended for now. This is very easy to do, in any case in sendmail.
-- Marc Schneiders The Only FreeRoot on Earth (and in Hell)!
Just think, how many times have many opportunities to aid rich Nigerians in distress (for a 20% cut) because of your isp's spam filters? I demand reperations be paid for the money I might have earned on these unique opportunities!
Needs to do a little research when it comes to civil court.
There is a big difference between consequential damages (aka liability) and potential damages. In your analogy, you give a great example of product liability...car company is neglegent in constructing their vehicle -- faulty car leads to accident -- accident leads to deaths -- deaths lead to liability lawsuit -- lawyers get rich. Ford and Firestone have already experienced it first hand.
But, the case here is completely different. The "job offer" presented to this independent worker is not set in stone! It is merely an "offer" which she could "apply" for. The fact that she lost the opportunity to apply for the job does not AT ALL equate to $65,000 worth of damages. The difference between this case and a liability case:
She has not lost anything but an opportunity.
Money was not taken away from her. Her significant other / child's / family member's life was not taken from her. Nothing was taken away from her but an opportunity to earn money. I can't sue my roommate for keeping the phone busy when a radio show randomly picked my phone number to award me $1,000. All I did was lose an opportunity to earn money. Civil courts can not and do not put a price value on lost opportunity. It's outrageous that she even thinks that she's entitled to a full $65,000 when, if she was awarded the contract, she would have had to work to earn the money.
Bottom line: she should be awarded three months of ISP fees for the ISP neglecting her the services they were holding hostage, plus a possible $1,000 in punitive damages. Nothing more.
I've done outsource support for 3 different broadband ISPs and every one of them had screwed up email systems. I'm sure it's the same with most ISPs. I'd have to question the judgment of anyone that would rely on just one email address for important email. Don't use two pop accounts either because your email program could screw up to and might not give an error. These things happen.
Was the ISP in the wrong on this issue? Yes but users should expect problems with their email and make alternate plans for important email. Have any important emails CC:ed to a web account also. I hope she wins the case against them, maybe some ISPs will wake up. Just remember Murphy's law applies to email also.
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
So what if they did bounce it? She'd still not get the job, only this way they'd think she was a cheapskate who wouldn't pay her ISP bill, or didn't care because she changed ISP without telling them (the people who might have hired her).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
What normally happens when an email addressed to a bogus account attempts delivery? Traditionally, the mail is bounced back to sender with a "Message undeliverable, User Unknown". Try a vrfy: bogus-username@FQDN at sendmail sometime. Well, at least with older sendmail versions. OK, so these days to deal with spammers and crackers vrfy is disabled normally, and often times sendmail is configured to accept all inbound mail and forward that which is undeliverable to root. But it used to be common that any mail addressed to a bogus username would be bounced to sender and left undelivered.
My point? Once her account was disabled it the mail daemon should have stopped accepting inbound mail for her account. This could have been done by any number of means, from changing the username, removing the account, to setting up a special alias for disabled accounts. As a former 'NIX administrator for a small ISP I can tell you that is exactly what we did. And in all other organizations for which I've worked we did similar things, usually amounting to disabling and bouncing. I'm not suggesting that the ISP should be responsible for forwarding to a new active email address.
IMO: The ISP, and all ISPs who follow this standard, should be held liable for interfering with reasonable communication, particularly if it's business communication with the potential for financial damages. While the ISP had no responsibility for forwarding the mail to another active account, they certainly should not have accepted inbound mail for a canceled account. This is akin to a landlord(*) keeping postal mail for a previous tenant, and if opened would constitute mail fraud and invasion of privacy (a felony). The only legal recourse is to send the mail back "Return to Sender" and let the post office sort the mess out. Which is exactly how most people expect email to work.
Cheers,
--Maynard
(*) As a current landlord I'm well aware of these things.
Why wouldn't the ISP just have the mail daemon send an automated reply message back to the user, in addition to storing the e-mail, stating that the user's account was currently suspended and that they should use some other means to contact them. This way, the e-mails are kept, and the person(s) sending e-mail know something is wrong. And of course include a little disclaimer at the end saying that the suspension may be in error and that the sender should not assume that the receiver did anything wrong.
if a user doesn't exist. No reply confirms that the account exists.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Haven't you guys ever heard of autoresponders. Geeze, a lot of companies I know are smart enough that as part of the default action on a suspended account, an autoresponder is tagged on.
All it takes is a simple response email such as:
Re: Message header
Sorry, this person's account is temporarily disable and he/she will not be able to read this email until the matter is resolved
This would have notified the sender, while still retaining the emails for the customer until the account is re-enabled.
As for bouncing the email, if I'd just talked to somebody, probably already gotten emails from them, and then got a subsequent bounce... yeah, I'd probably call them.
I've dealt with ISP's who screwed up the billing for months on end (hello Shaw cable, are you reading this). After several phone calls each month, I finally got a bill that didn't have double-charges coupled with back-charges.
I think the main point of this is, the problem is not just due to the disabling of the account, but a flaw in the ISP's billing system. If that flaw hadn't happened, no disabling, no problem. Therefore, it is their screw-up, regardless of what happened later with billing resolution
To throw in another (on top of many others) analogy:
If the power company screwed up in their billing system and cut a business' power, and the business lost money or business... I would guess that it would be much the same scenario.
You said it yourself - the service is crap. I like being able to at least use POP3 to easily transfer messages locally.
And I also like to be able to have the option of redirecting mail elsewhere for whatever reason, if I'm at a conference for example I can have all my normal mail going to a throwaway yahoo account.
Basically, $40 is nothing - and I can be pretty sure it will be around. Free email might be around forever, and if your email isn't that important it's a good option. But I think if you are angling for $65k deals you might want something little more reliable that yahoo, not to mention what it looks like to the people you are dealing with!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
..for the missed opportunities at millions from those Nigerians have been offering me while my account was suspended.
We want email to act like the postal service, but we shun at the idea of paying e-postage. We are silly confused people. :)
Carter said she agreed to pay half, an arrangement the company initially accepted but later rejected. At that point, she terminated the account and signed up with an alternate provider, Carter said.
Carter says this, Carter says that... I work in a cell phone service provider, and if I got a penny for every people that *think* their account is closed only because it has been suspended by non payment... Did she REALLY call to deactivate or just assumed that the compagny she was pissed about would do it?
There is no comment from the ISP. I cant form an opinion on that lady, who goes 14 months using a service that she didnt pay. And then starting an holy crusade cause her ISP is not ethical...
I worked at Nortel before, and I know co-workerS who don't pay their Inet service for the last 2 years (after the huh... crash?). They SURELY won't complaint if they get caught will they? The girl is PISSED about being caught and now CNET give her a tribune to be pissed on. Sure she will be objective and tell it how it happened.
"You can't interfere with the mail. The post office has to return a letter even when it doesn't have enough postage." (Carter says)
Hrmm Well as the employer paid SO much to send her that email, I dont see how its comparable. Post Office *DO* lose mail anyway, hey they "lost" my Stuff magazine 3 times in the last year now... Will we push the analogy if an ISP lose an e-mail? If a byte of downloaded file get lost between you and the server?
It may be bad faith from the ISP but dont tell me its not bad faith from her part. She had 14 months to change her e-mail address, instead she act all surprised when her account get suspended... DUH LADY! Accounting departements DO catch up, its their damn job!
Seems simple enough. I mean, if you're not going to pay the bill, then you're quite right in that they have no real way to make you pay except to resort to a collection agency, and even then you could get by without paying, most likely.
But once they discover their error and you laugh at their demand for payment, where's the rule that says they must then continue providing you service?
As I see it, this woman was quite free to not pay. But the ISP was quite free to cancel her account and decline to provide her further service as well. They could tell her to get stuffed, delete all her piled up email, and remove her name from their system entirely.
A company is under no obligation to provide service against its will. As it probably says in their TOS: "We reserve the right to cancel your account for any damn reason we please." (paraphrased, of course).
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Here's the gist of the letter sent on Feb. 6/02 to this customer by Karl Delwaide at Fasken Martineau Dumoulin, the second largest law firm in Canada:
..."Since the summer 2001, our client has been gradually informed that ou have taken many steps to bring your personal commercial dispute to the attention of various associations or governmental bodies such as the Canadian Association of Internet Providers, Industrie [sic] Canada, the federal Privacy Commissioner and the federal Department of Justice. Our client has now been informed that, as a journalist and TV producer, you are actively seeking media coverage of your personal commercial dispute with Inter.net Canada..." ..."These attempts to "publicise" [sic] your personal situation are clearly abusive and constitute harassment of our client in the present circumstances."... ..."Therefore, our client puts you formally on notice that it will take action against you to recover any and all damages that it will suffer as a result of your actions and attempts to publicise [sic] your personal commercial dispute with Inter.net Canada. Our client reserves its rights in this regard.
..."the use of email is considered by the firm as an adequate means of communication, equivalent to regular mail."
"Re: Defamation against Inter.net Canada"...
Do govern yourself accordingly."
This was sent by the lawyer to Ms. Carter via email.
The lawfirm's disclaimer attached to this email read:
When your email account is "suspended", start sending yourself messages until the account overflows its quota. Further email will bounce.
Most MTA's allow for "non-fatal" error messages. These could be due to DNS problems, connection problems, etc. It would be trivial to extend this to include access problems for the user and would essentially amount to a warning being sent in response to an e-mail message saying the e-mail may not actually be delivered immediately.
I would even take this a step further and insist that proper SMTP "fatal" bounces be generated for all unread e-mail left in a user's mailbox if that user's account is finally cancelled.
Simple solution: never rely on an ISP for your email. There are some totally hopeless ISPs out there; this woman's problems aren't a drop in the ocean. Instead, get a web-based mail account including IMAP access so you can use a non-web-based mailer. The best one on Earth is Fastmail, but you can even settle for Hotsnail or Yapoo if you must. Then, whenever your ISP dies, or you decide to dump them in favour of one that understands the concept of service and reliability, then you don't need to change your address.
The grownup version of this solution is to get your own domain name through a reliable provider of such services, and then when you change email systems you can just change a couple of MX entries or whatever and it's all done.
I have discovered a truly remarkable
If a company billed for a service that they may or may not provide, I'd certainly think twice about giving them my business...
Company: We've got this great service, but understand that we're not obligated to provide it to you, regardless of the reasons, even if you are a paying customer.
Me: Umm... next?
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
Here's the gist of the letter sent on Feb. 6/02 to this customer by Karl Delwaide at Fasken Martineau Dumoulin, the second largest law firm in Canada:
..."Since the summer 2001, our client has been gradually informed that you have taken many steps to bring your personal commercial dispute to the attention of various associations or governmental bodies such as the Canadian Association of Internet Providers, Industrie [sic] Canada, the federal Privacy Commissioner and the federal Department of Justice. Our client has now been informed that, as a journalist and TV producer, you are actively seeking media coverage of your personal commercial dispute with Inter.net Canada..." ..."These attempts to "publicise" [sic] your personal situation are clearly abusive and constitute harassment of our client in the present circumstances."... ..."Therefore, our client puts you formally on notice that it will take action against you to recover any and all damages that it will suffer as a result of your actions and attempts to publicise [sic] your personal commercial dispute with Inter.net Canada. Our client reserves its rights in this regard.
..."the use of email is considered by the firm as an adequate means of communication, equivalent to regular mail."
"Re: Defamation against Inter.net Canada"...
Do govern yourself accordingly."
This was sent by the lawyer to Ms. Carter via email.
The lawfirm's disclaimer attached to this email read:
...she continued to use the service without paying, regardless of the fact she was never actually billed.
That's something I like to call "willful ignorance". She knew she was obligated to pay for the service she signed up for, and continued to use, yet she remained silent when she realized (and for that long, she had to have realized) that something wasn't right.
Yeah, the ISP goofed, but she lacked the moral responsibility to resolve the issue before it became an issue.
In short, she tried to capitalize on the ISP's mistake by continuing to use the service without speaking up, and when she finally got called on it, she sued.
This borders on fraud, in my opinion.
The part where the ISP kept the account locked, but still existant, even after she cancelled it... well, that was just plain bad practice on their part.
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
I'd like to know where you pulled that out of. On second thought, maybe not.
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
1) Email addresses are, for all intents and purposes, anonymous. You don't know who "owns" a particular address.
2) The "I've moved!" bounce would require that your former provider use their resources to support this service, essentially forwarding part of their business to a competitor. Can you think of anyone willing to spend thier money to do that?
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
I have several clients who I am trying to "wean" off of Inter.net.
The problem largely has to do with the succession of mergers that has taken place leading to Inter.net's ownership of companies like Interlog (Vancouver BC).
Last fall one of my clients was experiencing issues with invoices never showing up for their ISP service and web hosting. They work all over teh world so internet service is critical for them and they spend a lot per month. The office manager/treasurer of the client called to ask Inter.net for an invoice so they could pay them. Inter.net obliged and fixed their records, but the next day or so their collectiosn department callde up demanding payment within two days or their service would be cut. They paid of course, but it was insulting for them to constantly remind them of the problems, only to be called back by the collections people.
I moved them to Bell Nexxia within two months - internet connection, phone, IP services and web hosting in one fell swoop. Not a single problem since.
I imagine that they are so far gone on their client's records that they are desperate to get paid when a problem DOES surface with unpaid services...except that it's often been the client reminding them of this problem!
Anyone else know of these kinds of problems in detail? I'd like to know more if you do.
JB
I know a LOT about this. My email address is nancar@sympatico.ca
Well, it took about three minutes for polardomains to load - not exactly confidence inspiring. And why should I believe that a "fly"-by-night organization is going to be around longer than pobox, even if (or perhaps especially because) they are so cheap?
POBox is nice because they are charging a price where I imagine the business is worth sustaining. Registerfly looks liek a good deal, and could replace my Runbox account I think, but I'm not sure I'd trust them with an address I wanted to be around ten years from now.
I really don't think of "pobox" as unprofessional at all. Not like Yahoo, or especially Hotmail!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Actually, no, I'm a very liberal Democrat (probably a little bit left of Martin Sheen)
;-)
Then I owe you an apology for accusing you of being a "right-winger." Next time, I'll try to be more careful before calling someone such an offensive name.
I'm in the same boat; got my own DNS/mail servers behind a static DSL link, but I'm moving within the year. You DO know how long it takes to get DSL hooked up, right? Well, then you're borked.
Only alternative I can see is getting hooked up with a good managed hoster like rackspace or rackshack or something.
Please contact me at nancar@sympatico.ca. Thanks.
...and you don't have to worry about your service being suspended. I like it how these people have the $$$ to fight legal battles, but they don't have the $$$ to pay their bills. :) People like this make me sick.
UA or not... an ISP operating under the law as an ISP should not have the right to deny a user access to their account without at least providing a bounce back to people who are emailing the account. Now... FREE email services are a different story... after all, you get what you pay for. But if you're shelling out $15-20/mo for a typical dial-up ISP they need to have something better then "oh well, guess you're screwed until you wait on hold for 40 mins to talk to our customer reps" as an answer.
I'm VERY skeptical that she lost a $65k job from not being able to see her email, but email IS important. At work we basically become paralized when email goes down, because you don't realize how easy it is to talk to customers, other locations, etc via email... you type a note for 20-30 seconds, and boom, 10 seconds later it's where it needs to be. Calling that person to explain my 20 second note would take several minutes... plus 90% of the people out there want to shoot the shit for 10 minutes even if you just called them an hour ago!
I agree that, within reason, technological solutions are better than regulation. OTOH, you never need the legal system unless things go wrong, and it is there to protect damaged parties if and when that does happen. There is always the possibility that a technological solution will have loopholes, and that someone unscrupulous will then attempt to exploit others using those loopholes.
The Internet really shouldn't be anything special as far as the law is concerned, IMHO. There is no whole new virtual world where normal sensible behaviour is radically different to what's gone before, contrary to what certain evangelists might argue. However, clearly the immediate and widely distributed nature of the Internet, and the amount that people have come to rely on it, raises new issues about how things like IP, privacy, harrassment and finance are handled. I think it's important for the legal framework to be there to protect people's rights in these areas robustly, even if the primary means of doing so is a technological solution.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Email may not be personal; it is the same as a postal address... okay. I will grant that.
When I move out of my apartment, and the new occupant moves in, I don't "OWN" the mailbox.
HOWEVER... any mail addressed to ME at his address is still mine, and it's a crime for him to open it, or hijack it, or what have you.
It may not be possible to tell who email is for without reading part of it.. but this is where common sense comes in.
I've had postal mail misdelivered that I've opened to find out who it rightfully belonged to, because there was no other way; call me a criminal if you want, but those who received their misdelivered packages in time for Christmas were nothing but grateful.
Besides, the situation you describe is not what happened; they didn't hand out her email address to someone else; they simply didn't turn it off and other people thought she was receiving their email.
Look at phone numbers.. you don't own your phone number either, but the telephone company generally tries to give some time between recycling numbers. If you cancel your phone tomorrow, and I get your number the next day, and get calls for you, if I pretend to be you, that's fraud.
Get the picture?
Also, Canada has stronger privacy laws than the US.... communications that can be reasonably expected to be private are generally protected.
Interestingly enough, the courts established (rightly so) years ago that radio communications have no expectation of privacy because they are broadcast; specifically, analog cellular phones.
That's why you can still buy subversive things like cellular scanners in Canada.
Yeah, like nobody knows that.
The point is that you CAN tell, after a fashion, that something was destined for you or not.
If it says "Dear Joe Martinez" and your mane is Jay Martin.. obviously it is not for you.
Men are, as a group, physically stronger and more often able to defend themselves.
Which women compensate for with the element of surprise and/or the use of weapons.
Your belief that men and women face the same threats, dangers, etc. just shows how little you know about women.
And your statements show how ignorant, sexist and bigoted you are towards men. If a man tried to kill his wife he'd get more than one day in jail. When a woman rips her boyfriends testicles off she gets three months in jail. And people like you will cheerfully rattle of statistics on how many women are abused while ignoring what happens to men.
A great many people have the (very) mistaken idea that stalking, domestic violence and murder is something that men do to women, like only whites can be racists to blacks or hispanic. Well guess what, a black man can be racist to a white man, and a women can rape, murder or assault a male just as easily as the other way around. The only difference is that when a women is the victim, society is in a rush to send the man to jail, but when the man is the victim he's the butt of jokes on the Tonight Show.
Pay your fsking bill! Crap, is it that hard?
And your statements show how ignorant, sexist and bigoted you are towards men. If a man tried to kill [sacbee.com] his wife he'd get more than one day in jail.
In the case to which you refer, she was sentenced to five years for the use of a gun in a crime plus one day for the assault. The sentence was later overturned by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, who ruled that the judge had sentenced improperly. So you see the actions of a lone, rogue judge in imposing too short a sentence as proof that women and men face equal threats? How the hell did that leap of logic take place?
When a woman rips her boyfriends testicles off [tennessean.com] she gets three months in jail.
And I suppose you are going to tell me that is standard practice and that all judges would have sentenced the same way. Face it: You chose articles that sensationalized extreme rulings, not intelligent studies or statistics.
And people like you will cheerfully rattle of statistics on how many women are abused while ignoring what happens to men [washtimes.com].
Regarding the article from the right-wing, lunatic fringe newspaper (The Washington Times), the only thing cited in there was frequency of violence, not the results. I hardly think that husbands whose wives hit/smack/etc. them show up to work in casts, limping, covered in bruises, or end up beaten to death. I've seen female victims of domestic violence. I know how much stronger men are than women (on average).
I'll ask you this: When was the last time that you heard of a male jogger being overpowered, raped, beaten, and left for dead by a group of women?
Given your writing, it is apparent that you live in fear of being beaten up by women, but I assure you that such fears are uncommon among most men. I also note that you posted anonymously -- possibly out of fear that you wife/girlfriend would see it. Please, if your wife/girlfriend is beating you up, go to the police and talk to an attorney. Don't assume that it's normal.
...that email was considered an unreliable, non-garunteed form of communication that has no legal bounds?
" These stinking isp's need to learn that this common carrier crap is way behind us. They are responsible for everything. Including my fat ass!"
Can I bill you by the pound?
Pull my finger for my public key.
The primary cause of failure in electrical appliances is an expired
warranty. Often, you can get an appliance running again simply by changing
the warranty expiration date with a 15/64-inch felt-tipped marker.
-- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw"
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