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

The Mail Nazi!

[Anonymous Coward]

No mail for you!!

Outrageous

[Intron]

I would demand a full refund for this free service.

Re:Outrageous

[arth1]

I would demand a full refund for this free service.

Somehow, I doubt they will pay you back the amount the advertisers paid them on behalf of you.

Re:Outrageous

[mrcdeckard]

i agree the parent is +5 funny, however, it seems that some people actually believe that she hasn't a right to complain because the service was free. let's follow that logic for a moment:

i have a computer shop that offers a back up service for free (as an incentive to get people in the store to buy computers, eg). a customer uses it, say 6 months in the past. every 2 months i archive stuff off to a cheap medium, say dvd-r. customer comes back, says, hey, my hdd crashed, could you restore my old info to a new hdd. i tell him, "sure, oh by the way, you'll need to upgrade to a premium service for $19.99."

the customer gets irate, and no one can figure out why. even after i show him the original fine print, he feels cheated. why?

because he was under the impression it was a FREE service with no "catches". he entered the agreement with a trust -- a trust that i will venture to say was exploited. if i saw that he didn't read the agreement when he signed, did i point out to him that it would cost him $20 if he were to ever *use* the service?

of course not. he probably would've just bought a backup drive or something instead. by the same token, i bet the 30day provision was buried in the eula, which lycos bets no one reads (and they figure they don't both people that do as customers).

i think, as a business owner, i should be able to stand my ground, however underhanded it is. he did sign afterall. it's not my fault he had a general trust in people.

however, to respond how lycos did in this case is plain unethical -- i doubt there was language in the EULA that stated, "if user complains about any portion of agreement, lycos reserves the right to delete any and all of user's data."

mr c

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...

What?

[Colin Smith]

You mean this isn't how customer support is supposed to act?

p.s. The customer isn't always right, all too often the customer is wrong, stupid and loud with it.

What surprised me most

[snitmo]

Lycos still existed?

Backups not really required; logical delete.

[Kadin2048]

I think it's entirely possible that free accounts, of which there could be millions, offer no form of protection. Think logically the amount of storage that that would require for a small company like Lycos, and the likely small staff they have. I just can't imagine them having a massive backup system.

Except that, if I'm understanding what happened correctly, at one point after her email got deleted, they offered to restore it ... but only if she upgraded to the $20 premium service.

That was the beginning of the whole argument. She got mad because she felt that this was extortionate, and Lycos' Customer Service Manager basically revoked the offer and said "haha -- now you can't get it back even if you pay!"

So there was clearly a backup there at some point. Or not even a backup; they could have just logically deleted the data, but not physically deleted it yet. It wouldn't have appeared in her account, but it would have still be there on the servers somewhere. (A lot of web hosting companies do similar stuff; if you don't pay your bill, your site will disappear, but if you cough up it will reappear instantly. It wasn't actually deleted, just deactivated.) So it wouldn't be necessary for them to have much additional storage; they wouldn't need to keep a totally redundant backup system (though they probably would), just some feature in their email system that would let them render messages invisible to the user, but allow an admin or DBA to put them back later if the customer upgraded.

Someone failed their Charisma check.

[Canthros]

Having clicked through the Consumerist write-up to the aggrieved customer's blog, it looks like the customer in question is being almost deliberately obtuse and the write-up at Consumerist is misleading.

Whitney is complaining because she doesn't want to pay for an upgraded account to get her emails back (apparently, there's a policy on that: inactive accounts can recover mail lost that way by upgrading to a paid account--not that unusual, IIRC, a half-dozen years back, and undoubtedly a valuable revenue stream for Lycos). Reading between the lines a bit, she's probably made herself a PitA by demanding that the CSRs do something they have no ability to do. (Remember that the key to a business isn't keeping every customer: it's keeping the customers that are making you money. Free email accounts probably aren't making Lycos much money, especially ones that nobody is using.)

Yeah, Lycos looks like a bunch of jerks here. I'm not saying otherwise. But I find myself in disagreement with the Consumerist's claim that they owe her a paid service for nothing just because they're jerks. Sorry about your luck, Whitney: in the future, don't store your email with Lycos.

Re:corporatespeak

[mandelbr0t]

Yeah, not the best possible response, even if she was being exceptionally difficult. Let me give it a try:

"I am responsible for all decisions regarding Customer Service. At this time, we have followed our normal policy for free accounts. We offered you the opportunity to upgrade your account, which would have paid for one of our staff to restore your e-mails for you. However, since we didn't hear from you in 48 hours, the automated process has run normally and completely deleted your e-mail. It is absolutely unrecoverable. I'm sorry for your inconvenience, but we've provided the service that you signed up for. Please provide comments that will help us improve our service in the future if you wish. However, as the Manager of Customer Service for all of Lycos, I have decided that this particular case is closed and will provide no further reply to your questions and concerns."

Hmmm. Same thing, but not quite as confrontational. It still states the important bits: it was policy, we warned you, you ignored us, I'm the manager and I've decided to close this issue without further correspondence. "10/10 for effort, but minus a few points for style, ya?"

I just can't understand

[Jester@TheHouse]

What the hell has happened to personal responsiblity? Now the Customer service agent may have been gruff,(I haven't been able to read the blog due to it being dotted) but why can't people learn to understand the rules of the field here. They have their rules of deletion. She didn't follow them. They deleted them. They offer a service to retrieve them for a cost. She doesn't want to pay. What is the problem really here.

I think it is time that people in the IT field need to practice more tough love, this doesn't give us the right to be assholes, but computers are everywhere, in every part of life. The average joe needs to do this stuff for himself now. No more hand holding. What is it with the mindset that "oh I can just be clueless about everything, someone will sort it out for me"?

They offered to sort it out for her, for a cost. How were they to know she didn't abandoned the account?

And on the flip side again to my fellow IT grunts. Don't be asses, don't use unneeded technobabble (some is really needed sadly to properly communicate with others about computers though), and f'ing document things. Offer your info and insight to others, let them learn the rules of the field.

We all need to learn to be helpful not hapless.

Ok, Captain Angry Pants is going to rest now.

Re:Customer Service

[gurps_npc]

They are a customer. They pay with their attention, which Lycos sells to advertisers.

The fact that someone is not paying you cash does not change the fact that they are a customer.

It is NOT a free service, anymore than TV is free. Just as I have the right to call up and complain about NBC having stupid shows on, she has the right to call up Lycos and complain.

She may or may not have been a pain in the butt.

But a GOOD customer service rep handles pains in the butt all the time. A good customer service rep could probably find a way to fix this situation without having it get blasted all over the internet, which I assure you his boss is NOT HAPPY about. They are in the business of selling PR (ads) and that damn fool of a Customer Service Rep just gave his own business a whole bunch of negative PR.

How high is he?

[curtlewis]

There is no one higher than me that you will speak with. No one higher, eh? I guess he must be referring to drug usage because I'm sure he reports to someone.

I'm not aware of any company where the Manager of Customer Support is equivalent to CEO/Chairman...

Re:The real Mail Nazi!

[Harmonious Botch]

I run a business which deals with customers. In my 20+ years experience, 99% of customers are decent people. The other 1% are assholes. Unfortunately the good customers will do their business and leave, whereas the assholes seem to hang around. So at least 10% of your time is spent dealing with the assholes.

These assholes will make your employee's life a living hell if you don't allow your employee to protect himself. ( look at customerssuck.com for examples ) No employee will work for your company very long if you tell him that he must take shit from anybody 8 hours a day.

But a good customer service manager - and I mean the real boss, not the arrogant guy who claims to be the head of customer service - will train his people how to tell a customer to go away without getting embroiled in a pissing contest. ( Saying "I'm sorry that this happened..." is a good start. It's possible to empathize with a customer without admitting that the company is at fault. )

Yes, the customer was naive and foolish. Yes, the customer service rep was an asshole. But the real person to blame here is an unnamed manager who put this guy in customer service without proper training.

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

Re:tupiche

[squiggleslash]

Seeing as some mods appear to believe this is flamebait, I'd just like to back you up on this.

"Mike" first of all offered to restore the mail, but for a $20 fee, which as the original writer pointed out, came across as extortion:

Should you want to restore the previous contents of your account, you will need to upgrade to the Lycos Mail Plus service...Restoration is not available to members who do not upgrade, and our policy will be strictly enforced. To have your account restored, you must upgrade, and pay the $19.95 upgrade fee. This is non-negotiable.

Customer complained, pointing out how this felt and also making it clear that the "30 day login requirement" was not that clear, so it was an easy mistake to make. After a few exchanges on this subject, none of which amounted to an outright rejection of the above, this comes from Lycos:

I am the manager at Lycos. Your e-mail will not be restored, as it's been more than 48 hours since you were notified as to what you had to do. Our policy is clear, and clearly stated on the homepage, whether or not you choose to look at it. Nothing will be done for you.

So in the middle of discussions, Lycos decided to delete the mail anyway. Just in case there was any doubt, Mike took this one step further and wrote the following snide response:

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.

So, yes, Lycos deleted the mail for no apparent reason beyond being cruel for personal amusement. Clearly the account holder did want to hold on to them. Clearly there was no necessity to delete the mail. Mike felt that he should punish the account holder for daring to question the legitimacy of his $20 "offer". Did he need to? Nope.

Did Lycos have a legal right to? DOES IT FUCKING MATTER? The issue here is are Lycos being assholes (answer: YES!) and does Mike deserve some criticism for his personal, rude, unhelpful and unsympathetic response? Answer: Hell yes. The fact someone has a legal right to be an asshole is not reason to believe the person is beyond criticism, that the organization is not behaving attrociously, that complaining about it is somehow "wrong", or even that the victim has not been poorly treated.

Re:The real Mail Nazi!

[gsn]

Yes actually... as part of their premium $19.95 service. So aparently the ability to backup her mail isn't worth 20 bucks a year. They also have a 6 buck account preservation thing where your account wont get deleted. Also they've had POP access since 2002 http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is _2002_May_14/ai_85911533 i.e. before she got her account. And if her ISP gave her an email address she could have forwarded all incoming mail. Not easy but you'd have a backup.

so...
1) 2002, Company offers free service with additional features like account protection/backup capability at a price.
2) 2005, New customer signs up for free service without additional features that she sees no value to.
3) Two years on she loses all her mail because of the ToS of her free service.
4) She now sees value of additional features.
5) Emails customer support asks for help.
6) Is told please pay 20 bucks to get your mail back.
7) Despite apparent value of offer, she accuses company of extortion and refuses to pay.
8) She loses all her mail.
9) and gets told to FOAD by customer service rep.

Am I missing something?