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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."
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.
... 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?
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?
If your telephone line is disabled, callers receive a message telling them that "this line is out of service" or suchlike. The complaint here is that her account was not disabled, but she was refused access to it -- email continued to pile up, outside of her reach, while people assumed (from the lack of a bounce message) that it had reached her.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
No, it isn't reasonable. But that's not what happened here. She continued to pay her bill. They screwed up. Jesus, jsut read that article.
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.
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They can suspend the account. They CAN'T hold email hostage, they must close access at BOTH ends of the pipe. If they closed her account properly anyone sending her email would have it bounce and would know the message did not get through, and perhaps try another means of contact. Sorry guys, I think she has a case. Just because she isn't smart enough to get better service does not give this isp the right to fuck with her.
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
no -- that's not what I meant. If the contract owner had really wanted to hire this
person, they might likely have called her sometime over the 4 weeks that she didn't
reply to the email they sent.
What I am saying is that this $60,000 contract was nowhere near a final deal which was
lost because of this email message. She simply wasn't prepared to do the job if she
would let this lead be missed so easily, and her
only connection to the business world is a sketchy email isp account.
The $100 she owed comes from the link she wrote. Here's a quote:
I demanded the email back, but was told I had to pay the $106.87 they said I owed them in order to get my messages.
It really doesn't matter if she owed that or not, if she thought there could be job or contract offerers worth thousands in there, she would have
been happy to pay and then switch the email to somewhere else.
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
Usually an ISP doesn't actually close the account when billing issues arise. The logic behind this, would be so that people won't lose any important e-mails. They simply pay their overdue bill, and then have access to all the e-mails they received. I think this is a rinkle they never really expected.
However, having worked for an ISP before, I believe more people would be angry if you suddenly started bouncing all their e-mail if their credit card expired. It is more courteous to just prevent them from accessing it, until they pay up.
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 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!
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Check out his film while you're at it...
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)
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?
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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.
She paid all the bills she was sent, so yeah, it is unreasonable for them to cut off the service.
Then they discovered their mistake and contacted her, saying "We fucked up, you owe us another $214". She complained about what is essentially a surprise balloon payment (and rightfully so), and the ISP agreed to reduce the amount she had to pay them by half. Let me emphasize that this was the arrangement agreed to by both parties! This is the only part of the whole thing that is reasonable.
But then the ISP changed their minds about that, and decided she had to pay the full amount. This is obviously unreasonable, since they had already agreed that she only owed them half the charge for their screw-up! She, rightfully, responds with "Fuck you guys, cancel my account." But they don't, and they subsequently hold her email hostage for payment they have already agreed that they are not owed.
Had they actually canceled her account, as they said they would, the email would have bounced and Discover would likely have tried to contact her another way.
So, yeah, it is totally reasonable that she sue the ISP, who, through it's dishonest and unreasonable behavior, has cost her a large amount of money. In fact, it would be unreasonable for her not to sue.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
And the key difference there, is that you made a diligent effort to fix their mistake.
It's like finding a hundred dollar bill on the ground that someone just dropped in front of you. You go up to them, tell them you saw them drop it, and it's theirs.
They insist it's not yours. You continue to tell them its theirs, and back and forth. Finally you give up after arguing with the guy for 5 minutes, and pocket the bill.
They see you on the street 6 months later, and demand their 100 dollar bill back, or they'll call the police.
In this isp's case, you took the bill, didn't tell the person in front of you, followed them around, and kept picking up the bills they dropped. When they reviewed security camera footage of the area later, realized you were the one that took the 100 dollar bill, you deny it, and then sue them when they tell you to stop following them.
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 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.
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.
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.