Lycos Deletes Emails and Says 'Too Bad!'

Billosaur writes "The Consumerist brings us a tale of woe which is apparently generating outrage in some quarters, along with death threats. Lycos email customer Whitney did not access her account for 30 days. This resulted in Lycos deleting over two years worth of email. It isn't so much Lycos' policy that's the problem (though that requires some scrutiny), but the response of the 'manager of all of Customer Service,' Mike Jandreau. Apparently he's not too service oriented, as his exchange with Whitney shows. And since this story was posted to The Consumerist, apparently Mr. Jandreau has become the focus of some unwanted attention. Of course, his final response to her might have something to with it: 'I'm sorry, no one here has any intentions of helping you with anything. I am the manager of all of Customer Service. There is no one higher than me that you will speak with. You violated our policy, which is, despite what you say, completely clear. No one is holding anything hostage. Your e-mails have been completely deleted, and no amount of money can now restore them.'"

Comments

Lycos is right, obviously

[JackHoffman]

If you get an email address from them, you agree to their policy, which is to delete email accounts that haven't been accessed in a while. The grace period is longer at other providers, but it is still a very common type of rule, simply because users never bother to remove old accounts. They would just pile up if there was no rule in place to delete accounts after some inactivity. In fact, I find it comforting that Lycos actually deletes email and doesn't keep it around forever. If I were offered the choice of two types of accounts, one which can not ever be deleted and one which expires after a month, I'd take the latter.

Before it starts...

[Apocalypse111]

Before too many people begin criticizing this woman for using a free email service and not following the terms of the account, let me just say that this is as much about them deleting her email as it is the responses she received from management. Go read the replies she got from the head of Customer Service. That kind of answer is totally unprofessional. There are words used to describe people who exhibit that kind of behavior, words akin to "douche bag" and "asshole". Personally, I was unaware that those were job titles used at Lycos...

Re:It is his fault

[Arathrael]

That wouldn't necessarily have helped. My hotmail account got marked inactive, and all the email in it wiped, despite my checking it at least once every couple of weeks.

According to their support people, their system thought I hadn't logged in for 30 days because opening it via msn doesn't count. Here's the exact quote:

Sign in to your account directly. You need to manually enter your password in the MSN Hotmail sign in page in order for our system to detect that you are still actively using your account. If you access your mailbox through MSN Messenger and others where you do not manually enter your password, our system will not be able to detect you actively using your account.

Oddly, I only ever check my hotmail via msn and this only happened once over a period of many years. Personally, I think they just delete random accounts occasionally for a laugh. Fortunately I never really trusted them to start off with so I didn't use it for anything serious. It was still annoying though.

Of course, the best bit of the response was where they suggested I subscribe to Hotmail Plus and said they looked forward to providing me with a 'consistent and effective service'...

Re:What?

[computational super]

the "no" should have sounded a little more like, "sorry, but no"

I must wonder, though, how many "sorry, but no" responses came before the "not so sorry, but no" response, but weren't represented in her blog. Remember, the customer service rep didn't get a chance to tell his side of the story.

Re:corporatespeak

[giminy]

I'm sorry for your inconvenience, but we've provided the service that you signed up for.

The word 'you' is used too much, as in the above sentence. I would recommend the following edit:

"Dear so-and-so, I am Such-and-such and am responsible for all decisions regarding Customer Service. At this time, we have followed our normal policy for free accounts. I would like to point out that we offered the opportunity to upgrade the account, which would have added the account to our backups and would have permitted a restoration. Unfortunately, we received no response in the 48 hours alloted per terms of the free account service agreement. As such, an automated process made room for other accounts by expuging the data. The process used makes the data unrecoverable. I am sorry for the inconvenience. Please provide comments that will help us improve our service for not only yourself, but also for our other valued customers. Sincerely, Such-and-such"

'You' is a very confrontational word. When in doubt, refer to the item at hand (e.g. 'the data' not 'your data', 'the account' not 'your account'). I especially like the sentence "The process used makes the data unrecoverable." You really have to unravel it to place meaning to it. "The process" oh, that was run by you guys, okay. 'the data'. oh, that was my account. Crap.

This sort of passivation makes eyes glaze over and also tricks our brains into not parsing the whole thing at a time. It's hard to associate bad guy A with doing bad thing B if both A and B are obscured behind intermediaries.

I add the last 'yourself' in there on the off-chance that the customer will come back. It doesn't hurt to leave the door open.

You can trust me, I work for the government (no, really, I do).
Reid