Email archived?

Hi. On december 12th I received this email from PlusNet:

"This email is to inform you that your mailbox has been archived.

We have taken this action as you have not accessed your default mailbox since
21:01:42 31/08/2007.
To keep your mailbox active, you need to access it and collect E-Mail at least
once in a 180 day period."

Now, why was this done? It's been nowhere near 180days !!

How do I get them back?

I remember a note from PN to the effect that they may do this after 90 days. (This was about 2 yrs ago after a load of 'backscatter' started turning up in peoples default catchall)

Then there was forum comment that they wouldn't actually do this until 180 days....

But you have neither.

I don't know of any advice or direction on the PN help pages. Effective communication of what service is offered is an area that PN still isn't good at. This is a great pity since their product actually stacks up well against the options. Their communication failings cause most of the grief IMHO.

Hi there,

If you PM me a username or ticket number I'll be able to take a look at this for you if you like. I've got an idea what it might be but won't be sure till I take a look.

Hope that helps, please let me know,

Hi, thanks for the PM.

Well as I suspected it is an error on our part - the script has been altered now and archives mailboxes not accessed in 90 days rather than 180 but unfortunately the email template wasn't changed at the same time. I've raised a task to get this changed and also passed a ticket through to get the mail unarchived for you.

Sorry for the hassle,

Hi - any idea when my archived email will come back?

Have you the ticket ID? Matt's not in over the next couple of days unfortunately but I can try and pick this up for you if you'd like?

Rgds,

ticket 23885318

I've just had a look into this and can see that the earliest email you have is from the date of the archive. I've passed the ticket to our networks guys to restore this for you.

thanks. fingers crossed this time...

Well the network guy just passed it straight back again - the earliest email is STILL the archive message. I had loads before December!

I've had this double checked this morning and anything on your account has been released to your mailbox.

So what happened to all my emails prior to december?

Archived must be the new word for lost

I bleeding hope not! PN have lost enough of my (and everyone elses) emails in the past as it is!!

I don't know, any email that we had archived has been released. I've asked for this to be done 3 times and there isn't anything else on there.

so you've lost (deleted!) my email?!?!

Previously on Archived.........

Hi again,


We have investigated the issue here and unfortunately the email has been deleted. This can't now be recovered. We archived your mail on the 12th December as you hadn't logged in to it since the 31st August, and emailed you informing you of this on the same day. Once we archive email there is a period of 30 days were we keep this on our servers, after this date the archive is removed and the mail not retrievable. You posted in here on the 11th Jan asking what had happened, this wasn't picked up until the 14th Jan and no other method had been used to ask us to restore this.

We ran the unarchive process on the 14th Jan(and twice since), and because the script ran without errors it was believed this had worked correctly.

We realised today that the 14th Jan was more than 30 days from the archive and therefore it would not be able to restore this.
Sorry if it's not the answer you wanted, however this is what has occurred.

Par for the course! (no pun intended)

Why the frown? From what Chris has said there were no mistakes made by Plusnet.

If a ticket had been raised rather than posting on here (this is NOT an official support channel) it is possible that the emails could have been saved. I think it significant that the OP hadn't accessed the mailbox between 31st August and around 11th January when they discovered it was somewhat empty.

I don't know any other ISP that routinely archives customer mailboxes. I've got mailboxes that I log into once a year that have my e-mail from years ago on various bog-standard ISPs. Is this another anti-scalability tactic (e.g. it won't scale, so removing the number of messages gives it a chance?)

ISP's are businesses, not charities! Why should they spend money on storage space to keep emails going back eons for people who are paying them no money?

Isn't this guy a current customer? If not then fair point. If he is then it's not so fair and I'd expect PN to have far more obvious and poignant warnings (is there any point warning someone it'll be archived by e-mail when the whole reason for archiving is non-access of e-mail?!? Would not letters, portal login warnings and the like not be more appropriate?

I'm pretty sure that the email archiving is only applied to non-subscription accounts.

Hi there,

These warnings go to the email address specified by the customer on signup, not necessarily the archived box. If it is that box then the email goes in after the archiving has taken place.

Hi Matt,

Thanks for the confirmation on the former - the latter still makes no sense - if they're not checking, they're also not likely (still possible as we've seen) to notice the archive notice until it's too late.

True, but we do ask that customers keep their contact email address up to date... even if we created a ticket on the account the notification for that would be by email as well.

It's acceptable of course to expect the customer to keep details up to date of course, but it's entirely possible for someone to still have the PN e-mail as the only one - it's valid, up to date, they just don't check it often for whatever reason.

As for notification, sure, I understand that too, but if it popped up on the Portal, and so on there is greater chance of them noticing and less chance for anyone to say Plusnet failed to notify them (so you've better covered your corporate behind).

"Why the frown? From what Chris has said there were no mistakes made by Plusnet. "

Correct me if I am wrong but was the OP not within the allowed time?

Therefore there had to be a mistake made.

"To keep your mailbox active, you need to access it and collect E-Mail at least
once in a 180 day period." "

Edited by soundsystem (Sat 26-Jan-08 16:40:23)

In reply to:

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Why the frown? From what Chris has said there were no mistakes made by Plusnet.

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Really?

In reply to:

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Well as I suspected it is an error on our part - the script has been altered now and archives mailboxes not accessed in 90 days rather than 180 but unfortunately the email template wasn't changed at the same time.

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http://bbs.adslguide.org.uk/showthreaded.php?Cat=&Board=plusnet&Number=3235569

I am really not happy with this. The archive process stated that I had 180 days before things were archived! Not only that, but it said nothing about them being subsequently deleted!!!

You received the email after the archive had already happened and this is the only place the 180 days is stated. The website states that free dial-up accounts will be deactivated after 90 days as happened in this case.

In reply to:

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To prevent the loss of your email service you should connect to your email, FTP space or use the account dialup number at least once every 90 days.

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Sorry you aren't happy with this but I've explained how and why things happened in this and my previous reply.

This link:

http://comms.plus.net/blog/index.php/category/general-plusnet-news/

states: "We

We can't store archived mail indefinitely as this would start to take up storage. Therefore we remove this after it's been archived for 30 days. This is no help to you but this info has now been added to the email sent when a mailbox is archived.

No, this doesn't help me now because you've deleted my emails with no prior warning!

180 days before things are black holed. That's what I read from your site to be true. The fact that you specify 90 days before archiving and 180 days for black-holing, you would assume that archived material is retained for 90 days. Not 30 days. You've never told me 30 days. How would I know this?

I think you should demand a refund of the subscriptions you've paid for the last 6 months.

In reply to:

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I think you should demand a refund of the subscriptions you've paid for the last 6 months.

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Why?, according to you PN haven't done anything wrong?

I think you may find it was sarcastic.......

And he twines about others being unhelpfull

I am sorry that you've been so inconvenienced by this. The general policy around this does need a proper review and that's something I'm actively working on at the moment.

Our problem until recently was the sheer volume of untouched spam sitting around in hundreds of thousands of unused mailboxes. This was something that was taking a lot of time and resources to maintain, not to mention shed loads of power, air-con etc. Looking at this objectively I don't personally believe the policy is too unfair for free accounts, provided we do set the proper expectation. In this case we obviously failed to do so, but the policy is no different to Hotmail etc do either.

Also it's worth mentioning that now we have Spam much more under control, this policy is something we should be able to get a good process for. We are storing something like 80% less mail now, so we are generally in a much better place.

I do realise none of that helps you out much though. If there is anything more you think we can do, please feel free to drop me a PM and I will offer any further assistance I can.

Ian

Not being a hotmail user I'm not aware of how their system works. Do they have advertising inserted in to the emails or on their website to enable the costs of the "free" service to be covered?

On the website yes, but not in the emails, at least on my account.

Really!?! I often have a line at the bottom hotmail emails I receive followed by a line of advertising text, then a link on the following line.

Phil

None of mine seem to have any text added to them. Since I use Windows LIve Hotmail and not the old Hotmail, I wonder if it could of been changed.

To be honest, it is irrelevant whether I use a free service or not. If a shop gave away free toasters that burst into flames, they are still culpable.

"Archiving doesn't mean deleting. ... You have deleted my emails after 4 months."

From another post it seems you've previously lost e-mail, so how come you haven't copied it elsewhere (eg using IMAP to access it).

FWIW, I have mail pulled off my PN account at regular intervals, using the runbox.com mail service, status report follows: "Last retrieval: 06.02.2008 15:56 Failed: 0"

If you don't check it for months, one has to wonder how important it was to have the account in the first place.