“Warning: Your mailbox is full!” was not the message in my
in-box I expected to see this Sunday morning when I returned home
from a night of partying, movie going, and sleeping on a friend’s
couch. In fact, it was the last thing I expected. And it was more
— much more — than a trifling annoyance.
It meant that half a dozen essays that were supposed to come in
had bounced back to the writers, with a note telling them
(erroneously) that my e-mailbox was all full up; try back later,
once I had done my part and taken out the trash. It meant that I
had to reactivate an old back-up e-mail account and try to alert
people to use that one instead. It meant coming in to the office on
Sunday night and calling people all over North America to put the
Monday edition of the website together. And it meant another little
piece of my past had been lost.
I should explain: A few years ago, on a lark, I registered the
domain name deviantreadings.com. It came, as most domains these
days tend to come, with up to 10 free e-mail accounts — remote
access e-mail accounts. Think of it as Hotmail, but with monthly
fees, an odd name, and unlimited storage.
It was great. When one article brought down the wrath of several
thousand angry Muslims, I didn’t have to worry about it
overloading. The address was highly memorable: I often quoted it to
people at social gatherings and received e-mails that night or the
next morning, or sometimes a few days later. Rarely did I resort to
the old pen and a cocktail napkin trick. I could log onto it from
anywhere. It was so convenient that I continued to pay the monthly
fee just for the e-mail, long after I had lost any interest in the
website.
And I would gladly have continued to pay the $15 a month, but as
part of their new ongoing efforts to screw the customer, the good
folks at Yahoo! Website Services announced in the middle of
September that they would limit accounts to 10MBs. They would hack
all the accounts down to this limit by unilaterally deleting enough
old e-mails to bring them under the line. Under massive protest,
they agreed to (a) set the limit at 20 MBS and (b) allow the users
to make room themselves. If the accounts went over 20 MBs, an All
Full sign would be sent to would be correspondents, until we made
room.
That was the theory anyway, and I decided to reluctantly live
with it rather than switch e-mail programs. Out went thousands of
angry e-mails, interviews, letters to and from former lady friends,
pretty much everything that made the account worth keeping. I
figured that I could make it work within the new limitations, but I
obviously didn’t count on the massive incompetence I was about to
run up against.
This Saturday, having gone slightly over the 20MBs, I was told
that the account was full. So I threw out several MBs and went on
my merry way. Then, Sunday, the same message. I contacted Yahoo!
customer support but they were not helpful. I was told that their
“engineers” were looking into my problem. One correspondent even
suggested that if I were to reduce my remaining e-mail cache
even more, well, hey, you never know.
Incredulous, I replied that every minute that my e-mail was
locked up was a minute in which I could not receive correspondence
from editors and readers or articles from writers; the whole reason
for my forking out nearly $200 a year for their service. Yahoo!
should fix this problem yesterday. They responded by sending a
survey to gauge my satisfaction with their service. One guess how
they scored on that one.
In subsequent e-mails, we established that, gosh, I am under the
limit after all, and they don’t know quite what happened or how to
fix it, but they’d look into it and get back to me. Engineers are
no doubt feverishly pouring themselves into it as I type on
Thursday night. Perhaps one day a triumphant tech will emerge from
the twisted depths of my e-mail program with the reason why it got
snarled up, and a solution to make Einstein’s equation look like
kindergarten fare, but by then I’ll have moved onto something
better.
