Lycos SUCKS: they held my emails for ransom for $19.95, then deleted them
I’ve had a Lycos mail account since 2000. In the last year or two, it became horrifically spammy and was often down, so I phased over to other email providers with better spam filters and more reliability. I also noticed that most of my earlier email was gone - the email only went back to 2004, though I’d had the account much longer, and was nowhere near my storage limit. I kept the account and checked it from time to time, in case some old friend or account came calling over to that address. Apparently I waited too long between logins this last time, because the other day I found that all of my emails were missing. Folders and my address book were still there, but empty. I emailed their tech support, and got one Mike.
Here’s his response:
…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.
I wrote back:
So let me get this straight: you’re holding my emails hostage until you get $19.95 from me? I checked your policies, and didn’t see that listed. This hardly seems like a customer-friendly policy, especially toward someone like me, who has been with Lycos for several years. There were many times when Lycos was not in compliance with its own terms of service, and I didn’t try to extort $19.95 from you.
He wrote:
You can clearly see, right on the homepage: Note: The content of a Lycos Mail Basic account will be deleted if the owner does not login and check the account at least once every 30 days.
I pointed out that there’s nothing about this on their home page, and nothing in the policies REQUIRES them to delete the email of inactive accounts:
8. Account Inactivity. Lycos reserves the right, in its sole discretion, to delete any materials (including emails) stored in connection with an unpaid Lycos Mail account if the user’s account has been inactive for thirty (30) days.
I got nowhere, so I asked to talk to the manager. Here’s Mike’s reply:
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.
I replied:
Your policy is NOT clear. What is clear is that nothing in Lycos policy, or in long-established practices of basic human decency, REQUIRES you to hold my emails hostage. Also, I find it difficult to believe that you are the manager over all of Lycos. Please direct me to YOUR manager.
Mike’s reply:
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.
And that’s it. Hundreds of emails gone. All part of my history, and this person is a complete asshole about it.
Note: I deleted all comments that included this guy’s last name (with apologies to those who took the time to write in support) - I don’t believe anyone should be fired over this. Sure, he should get out of customer service, but I don’t want to get the guy fired. And yes, I should have read the fine print.
Too bad you didn’t get the Uber Manager’s name into this post. You may have found out then if he’s really as unaccountable as he makes himself out to be.
On the bright side, be glad you dont’ work for these guys. If this is how they treat their customers, imagine how they handle the people who depend on them for an actual living, and not just e-mail.
They must have been really short on storage space and desperately needed those several megabytes that your emails were taking up. Maybe they ran out of money to buy more hard drives considering no one has used their search engine since 1997.
Seems you are the asshole
Serves you right, you shoulda logged into your account at least once per 30 days, like it says RIGHT ON THEIR HOMEPAGE. Idiot.
So…given the tone of “customer service”, I’m assuming we should be looking for Lycos soon on F*ckedCompany.com? Or are they there already?
(looks)
Oh, the lasst mention there was about a year ago:
—snip—
Lycos
Rumor has it that Daum, the parent company of Lycos, ordered execs to get the head count to 60, wiping out about 80 positions. Rumor has it parts of the company, such as Quote.com, will be sold prior to the RIF.
When: Sun Jan 22 09:51:00 2006
Company: Lycos
Points: 156
—snip—
so…this isn’t exactly the kind of place you wanna leave data you care about.
That’s harsh. I agree with Lex - working for these clowns must be depressing.
I hope you didn’t lose anything too heavy to deal with and manage to get some of it back from friends etc.
what’s his email address? You should post it if he is such an asshole.
Hotmail has the same 30-day policy. It sucks.
Why did you email them asking where it says they’re REQUIRED (capitalization yours) to delete email? The lack of that one word doesn’t mean that their customer service agreement isn’t clear.
They said they have the right, if they feel like it (and they obviously do), to delete all your email if you don’t log in at least once every 30 days.
You fail at teh life. Suck it up, buttercup.
Submit this article to the fine people at The Consumerist. They like nothing better than to flay !@#$% like this alive for the amusement of the general public.
Seriously. They get results.
http://www.consumerist.com/
Lycos? They’re still in business?
Not for long, I guess.
Lycos have sold themselves to the devil. I’ve had a lycos mail account since 1999. For much of that time, I’ve been paying the $19.95 for pop access and no ads. Worked great. But recently, they “upgraded” their service to some thing that requires installation of Active-X for everything: even replying to a text only email. So, I try to use it at work and, of course, I can’t, because I (perhaps rightly) don’t have privileges to install Active-X controls. I send them a message telling them of the problem and their answer is that I must read the help and install Firefox. Bear in mind that at this point they have already taken my money and won’t give it back. (Though they managed a refund after they took about $30 out of my account by accident earlier in the year WITHOUT A WORD OF NOTIFICATION OR APOLOGY.) OK then, I will go to the system administrators of a very large organisation and tell them that I need special privileges to install software because I want to use lycos mail at work … ok. Also, Active-X or not, the whole thing frequently falls over for hours, even days at a time. Actually, I take back what I said about lycos selling themselves. They are just a bunch of wankers.
Unbelievable. Raise holy hell about this, contact someone else at Lycos.
ah… quite a strong response already!
That guy should not be dealing with the public. He should be shoveling manure, and here’s to making sure he is. I’m fired up! gimme an email and i’ll tell them what for.
I feel for you and I hear you!
Misery loves company. In December I lost all my Yahoo EVERYTHING. I played the silly Yayoo Answers “Game”. I was a Blondeheiress a fashionista, Emily Paris Post, asking silly questions and answering “oh so proper.” In December some TROLL came along and flagged me.
I lost all my yahoo email accounts, including my Interior Design Firms. I used everything Yahoo had to offer. Their calendar, I blogged, I owned a successful Group with hundreds of Members, I even lost my yahoo personals account.
I had 2,839 points. 1018 questions were asked.
Suzy Ormond, Martha Stewart and Donald Trump we were all on there.
YAHOO RESPONSE
Sorry, this account is not recoverable
Your account has been flagged or deactivated by Customer Care.
It has cost me dearly. Yahoo you SUCK!
Man, it’s unbelievable what dinks are out there.
Don’t pay a word of attention to the critics slagging you on your own site. You’re right. They’re wrong. And I’ll bet they work at Lycos (IT does seem to draw buttheads to customer service).
Here, as I see it, is why you’re right and your critics wrong: Lycos makes money off you. Their mail is not free, and you are not “lucky to have [it]“. You trade your screen estate for free mail. There’s no luck about it. It’s a deal you made.
They acted like dinks. Huzzah for the right to diss dinks.
No one forced this guy to be an asshole. I say give him all the wrath you can get. Poor customer service at any level deserves to be pointed out with big spotlights!
Couple things I find interesting… the number of people that feel that this is an APPROPRIATE response from lycos is boggling.
Even IF this is appropriate for them to delete everything (and yes, indeed, in the net world ‘can’ usually means ‘will’ as I’ve found out via my hotmail accounts), the mean spirited attitude displayed by the employees towards their customer is uncalled for at the least, and worthy of firing at companies that value their customers at all.
Attempting to extort money (which is what the early emails amounted to) is just the icing on the cake. A simple apology (I’m sorry, we can’t do that, please don’t let this deter you from enjoying our free service) would have eliminated many of the bad feelings.
Who are these weird trolls who follow links out from boingboing and then take unsupported contrary positions in the comments? (Or is this on digg too? That would explain it.) As i-h says, there is no such notice on the Lycos Mail “homepage.” It’s easy to check for yourself.
Neb, you’re an asshole. This company offered a service long enough to cause somebody to put their trust in the safety, security, and usefulness of that service. Then they withdrew the service, shafting customers. They didn’t offer the service out of the kindness of their hearts, but to generate revenue (both from ads and in increasing brand recognition for their other services, etc). Then they pissed on customers. They suck. You suck too.
Hmm, and it seems that “Dave” and “Star” doth protest too much.
Maybe they (or him?) are part of the lucky 60 that got to keep their jobs?
But who really cares? They’re douchebags.
gmail it’s free
Hey, thanks for the props, all - here’s the email I have for Mike: support@support.lycos.com
I can see both sides of this. On one hand, it does seem that their ToS is pretty clear: they can delete your email if you don’t log in within 30 days. Just because they don’t say “will” delete your email doesn’t mean they aren’t within their right. You didn’t log in, and they deleted your mail. You’ve no right to complain about that.
What you DO have a right to complain about, though, is how terribly you were treated by “customer service.” A company in which the MANAGER of ALL customer service would say “nothing will be done for you” with such palpable glee should not be in business. You’re damn right to be drawing attention to this, and I hope Lycos (And Mike) get exactly what they deserve.
As someone else said, it’s a very small world…
gmail FTW! F lycos!
[...] The man who lost his Emails [...]
I’ve just closed my Lycos account in support and emailed to tell them why. too many jumped up little arseholes treating the public this way.
How awful of them.
As of right now, the Lycos Mail homepage does indeed say:
“Note: The content of a Lycos Mail Basic account will be deleted if the owner does not login and check the account at least once every 30 days. “
Mike deserves to be fired, I hope the uppers at Lycos see this give him the ax.
Â
this must be him. you can see he designed a lycos “help” site. what an ass. he’s apparently a failed musician to boot.
“They didn’t offer the service out of the kindness of their hearts, but to generate revenue”
Right. And if you’re not using it regularly, you’re costing them money. Maybe they could have been nicer about it (although, honestly, they weren’t that mean, and you kinda overreacted) that doesn’t mean they aren’t in the right.
Oh, and they gave your free email for SIX years, so maybe they don’t owe you anything.
I can sum this up in one word:
Brain Damage
Even the auto response to my question sounds dickish:
This is an automated response to inform you that your question has been received, and added to our system. We will respond to your inquiry within 24-72 business hours, Monday - Friday 9AM - 5PM EST (response times may vary, depending on volume of support tickets. Please check the “Alerts” section of your service for any outage notices, or emergency situations). We ask that during this time, you do not submit the same question via our online system again. You’ll receive a separate mail notification when a response is submitted.
Gee, no “thanks for your inquiry”? or “your question is important to us”? And, why would I ask the same question again if you just told me it’s gonna take a couple days? Maybe I’ll ask a different question in the meantime just to keep busy. Perhaps, “why are you such assholes?”
This story is now on Digg: http://digg.com/tech_news/Lycos_SUCKS_They_held_my_emails_for_ransom_for_19_95_then_deleted_them
Please help it frontpage.
Why does anyone use any web based mail service that you need to pay for, or that places restrictions upon you? Haven’t any of you folks heard of Gmail? It’s free, and it’s for life.
Why bother with Lycos…I didn’t even know they existed anymore….someone has been living in a cave.
Did I mention gmail?
Doc Barnett,
I just checked the Lycos Mail homepage. Going to mail.lycos.com, there is the following notice posted on the page:
“Note: The content of a Lycos Mail Basic account will be deleted if the owner does not login and check the account at least once every 30 days. ”
Now, what I don’t know is how recently this notice was placed on the page with this wording. Maybe it has changed as a result of this conflict?
On a side note: the page renders horribly in Firefox.
What seriously confuses me is that in 2007 e-mail providers are still charging for account preservation. Why would I choose Lycos for a charge when I can get a free Gmail account? Instead of 30 days, there is a 9 *month* dormancy/grace period. Any other e-providers with similar service?
Well, that’s the joy of not clicking “Refresh” in a hot conversation before posting. Seems my comment is out of date already. Oh well.
Wow that’s so frustrating - I had a similar experience with Hotmail, they deleted about 5 years worth of emails and didn’t even respond when I asked if there was anything I could do to get them back - and this was when they had the 2MB limit for email accounts so considering the amount they were getting from advertising I wasn’t costing them anything.
There is no excuse for such awful customer service, I really hope that guy never gets another job in this industry.
Why on earth aren’t you people using gmail?
I just went to their mail page and it does say that mail will be deleted if not logged and checked in 30 days. Don’t know if they just put that up or not, but it’s right there.
On the other hand, the need for good customer service should be pretty obvious. A little courtesy goes a long way, and even if a customer is frustrating you, acting out on that frustration is just childish. Also, in this age of instant fame via sites like Boing Boing, it’s moronic. If I was this guy’s boss at Lycos, I’d be asking him to look for a job elsewhere. Then I’d blow my own brains out because, hey, I work at Lycos!
Ick, what fools. It’s clear that Lycos doesn’t plan to stay in business very long; whatever idiots the parent company is planning to sell them to, I wouldn’t be surprised if the asking price just dropped as soon as this story hit BoingBoing. Whether their anti-customer extortionate policies allow them to treat you this way or not, it’s pretty clear that nobody with a choice in the matter would want to put themselves in a position.
But yeah, folks: don’t go leaving the only copy of critical data on a computer that belongs to somebody else. There’s no telling when they’ll decide to be twits like Lycos about it, on purpose or by accident.
Lycos sucks!
Some people are assuming too much about this situation. Whether you like his attitude or not, Mike J. did NOT delete the writer’s email. I used to work at that hellhole of an armpit of an excuse for a company, and I know for a fact that there is a script in place to automatically purge email accounts that have been left stagnant. Customer service has NO WAY to actively delete anything in Lycos Mail. It’s all done in Korea!
Yep, the Lycos guy was being really unprofessional about it, but on the other hand it not only does say this explicitly on the Lycos Mail homepage, according to web.archive.org it has since August 28th 2006, the same day they started offering 3 gig accounts to replace the old 5 meg accounts.
I second the Gmail recommendation.
Having been on both sides of the customer service experience, my view echoes Jeff’s above: read the fine print. In fact, that was the title of my blog post on the matter a couple of hours ago:
http://www.dickdiamond.com/2007/02/read-fine-print.html
Jeff - I hardly think the punishment (all my old emails being deleted) fits the crime (waiting 32 days between logins). Furthermore, the 30-days thing was new - they changed the terms of the contract from what I’d originally signed on to.
FYI, I do have a gmail account. Probably should have locally archived those old Lycos emails a while back, just never got around to it, alas.
For all those that suggest gmail… yes, most of us have gmail.
HOWEVER!
Short of forwarding every freakin’ message to the new account, it is usually more convenient to simply leave the old account open and reference it as needed.
Though as of this writing, I’m considering finding a way to get my hotmail onto my mac. I’ve heard that can be painful. Squarepegroundhole.
Contracts we undertake are not supposed to be ‘we help you until we screw you’.
This just highlights the fact that no one ever bothers to actually read the EULA’s or terms of use. It does suck and the response was weak at best. We have all been there, free email is not a safety deposit box…back up your information…keep contacts in multiple places…never put all your eggs in one basket.
I mean really this is pretty low level life lesson type ####.
Send Mike whatever his name is one of those
“you my friend are a douche” business cards…suck it up and move on.
As boorish as the customer-service guy was, Googling his name and spreading as much private information about him as you can is far worse.
Sure, he was a jerk (although your bullying e-mails weren’t exactly the type that might get a sympathetic response). But that’s the extent of it. No laws were broken (what a silly suggestion), and no matter how you argue it Lycos clearly had the right to delete the account. Get over it.
Everything you need to know about this guy can be summed up by his crappy tagline.
Live. Love. Laugh. Music. Feel.
What an idiot.
kevin - that’s exactly what i was thinking . . . see what the WayBack machine has to say . . . somewhere between Apr 27, 2006 & Aug 28, 2006 the frontpage TOS changed . . .
this happened to me with hotmail, and again with yahoo, and i now only use gmail. this is the way free email has been going for a while now . . . like the dictaphone, these things change, and generally in unexpected ways. you can stomp all you want - but like Kracken said, it’s all done with scripts in some overseas datastorage center . . .
The problem with saying “read the fine print” is that the fine print always reserves the right to change without notice. Lycos’ terms of service were clearly not the same as they were when the poster first signed up. Whether or not they kept him properly notified, I can’t say, but when I find myself subscribed to a service that makes major changes without notifying me they lose my business. In those cases, the customer service reps love to tell me I should have read the fine print, to which I can usually reply honestly, “I did, but then you changed it on me without telling me, and that’s why I’m canceling.”
Oh, and anytime customer service treats me like the poster was treated I cancel my account, regardless of the reason I initially contacted customer service.
Hmmm…”deleted” rarely equals deleted for sure. You could sue and subpoena Lycos. You might not win but you could get your emails as part of the litigation process.
Every legit comment gets in, period. Positve, negative, it matters not.
Mike, if that’s really you, you got what you deserve. You came off as a vengful, power-drunk asswhole.
Don’t shit where you eat,ass-hat.
Something is going on….
http://**.net/ is blank now.
I’m sure he’s getting a bit of traffic. Say hello to boingboing and digg fans, Mike!
FYI, people, I doubt that’s really the guy - I’ve had no more correspondence from Lycos, either at the Lycos address or the one I was using to correspond with him. In any case, though others may disagree, I don’t think the guy deserves to be fired for this. Repremanded, sure. Taken off customer support, sure. But being fired sounds - again - like the punishment doesn’t fit the crime.
Wow, this amazes me. Mike, buddy, enjoy the love. You’ve got an amazing idea of what constitutes good “customer service”.
OK, so I just deleted 2 comments from someone claming to be “Mike”. However, the IP came from the UK, and “Mike” is in the US…
As usual, the truth in this matter is probably somewhere in between what each party claims.
You should have read the ‘fine print’. In the end so far, what they have actually done does not seem to be inconsistent with their policy… the one you agreed to when you signed up for their email.
On the other hand, this Mike guy shouldn’t be in a position to deal with the public any longer with Lycos. Probably doesn’t deserve to be fired but if what you post that he said is accurate, he obviously has too much baggage to be dealing with non-Lycos people.
OK, so I just deleted 2 comments from someone claming to be “Mikeâ€. However, the IP came from the UK, and “Mike†is in the US…
sesquipedalian_id . . . IP addresses can be located in any country - it does not indicate where a user is located, just where there server is.
“Thanks in advance from this overtired-underpaid-moron of a guy.”
http://forums.oscommerce.com/index.php?showtopic=88541&hl=
It is clear here that someone felt wrongfully entitled. You get free email for who knows how long all you had to do was log in every 30 days. You were sent a notice along with how to resolve the issue but you failed to follow their instructions (a second time!).
You think that Mike is going to have hard trouble finding work? What about you? I would never hire someone that does not know the importance of BACKING UP emails. Keeping useless emails is a horrible habit, and if they were important you were an idiot for keeping it on Lycos and not moving it.
This tool runs another site, which is actually still up:
http://www.moviesnobs.net/staff.php?member=0929
I wonder how long that website will stay open for ^_^
That guy deserves everything coming to him. Acting the way he did, and now he feels the wrath of the internet geeks. Muahahahahah.
Actualy, “webby”, that’s not true. The IP that we logged is from the poster’s ISP, not their ’server’.
yep, it’s the same guy. [his site] is still cached on Google: “He has done design work for local police stations, businesses and has even done some design, content-writing and user-flow analysis for Waltham-based internet company Lycos.com.”
You can also read such gems as:
“Changing the face of the internet, one website at a time.”
Well, I think we should all pay more attention to the “terms and conditions” we blindly accept every day. But at the same time, if you treat your customers like crap, it’s going to come back around.
I bet Mike gets a hard on every time he writes, “I am the manager of all of Customer Service.”
Send Mr. Professional a comment: mike@moviesnobs.net.
The “mike” response is obviously a fake- there’s no way Lycos could fire the guy within a couple of hours of of the story being posted. Their own HR processes wouldn’t move that fast.
Back up your emails locally from now on. You used a free service and lost emails. Sorry.
[...] Idaho Hum has the story of emails lost and customer service managers with compensation issues. [...]
According to their mail homepage, Lycos does have the right to delete your e-mails if you haven’t fulfilled your part of the contract. No question there. BUT, even though they have the right, they are total idiots to do so.
Sure, storing your e-mail costs them money; what, a couple of cents a month? But deleting the e-mails permanently when you’re one day over the limit will lose them a customer forever.
They need to realize that their free e-mail service does two things for them; it brings in ad revenue, and, probably more importantly, it generates GOODWILL, one of the hardest things to do in business.
Or, in this case, it generates ill-will instead.
The Internet, you see, is still Serious Business:
http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/index.php/The_Internet_Is_Serious_Business
I second Jen’s comment:
”
It is clear here that someone felt wrongfully entitled. You get free email for who knows how long all you had to do was log in every 30 days. You were sent a notice along with how to resolve the issue but you failed to follow their instructions (a second time!).
You think that Mike is going to have hard trouble finding work? What about you? I would never hire someone that does not know the importance of BACKING UP emails. Keeping useless emails is a horrible habit, and if they were important you were an idiot for keeping it on Lycos and not moving it.”
Granted, Mike was an ass but so were you. And outing a bit of the guy’s personal info on the internet - yeah, REAL mature.
get gmail. seriously.
The guy being an ass of the first order is an issue. What is more important is that the 2nd part of the equation- email deletions- exemplifies corporate hegemony over us. How many have read ALL of the info supplied with their credit cards? A simple solution in this case that is fair and would have reduced trauma all round would be to issue a snail-mail notice at the 30 day point that “We will be doing terrible things unless we hear from you…” How hard is that? My Verizon account (fortunately brand new) also obliterated my mail after 30 days. Only thing to do is spread the word, change vendors and keep your sh*tlist updated.
Honestly, if those are the terms of service and you didn’t abide by the terms of service that you agreed to when you registered to use the service how exactly are THEY at fault?
Are the emails that important if you left them un-backed up and unchecked for so long?
Unless you have someone contracted to take care of these things for you, it’s up to you to take care of them yourself within the limits specified and agreed to.
I think a mistake was made in not keeping up with the account in the first place and painful as they may be, lessons should be learned from the results and life must indeed go on.
Well they already hurt their reputations don’t they. Use a reputable email service like Gmail or Yahoo next time maybe?
@ reply 72.
Serves you right.. How on earth someone with your attitude could be a customer service manager is beyond me. Even if the policy is correct the way you handled your customer warrents you to be fired. I think I would also fire the person who made you a manager in the first place too.
Raz
[...] Lycos SUCKS: they held my emails for ransom for $19.95, then deleted them [idaho-hum] [...]
http://www.metafilter.com/58262/Now-thats-service
Others have recommended Gmail; I’ll add a recommendation for Google Desktop (if you have a PC). Since it creates a cache of every page you open, you have less to worry about in terms of losing your personal archives.
Sorry to hear about your awful experiences with sucky Lycos, Whitney, but nice job getting the word out.
[...] This caught my attention, originally read on boingboing. Apparently a user of Lycos’ webmail service is having problems with customer service reps. After being inactive for over 30 days, she was denied access to hundreds of previously saved emails unless she upgraded her account for $19.95. You can read the entire story at the link, but here’s what the representative of Lycos eventually had to say: 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. [...]
The reality check on this is simple.
Some cretins seek positions of power out of a need.
The need to be a shining example of stupidity.
The sort of stupidity that becomes a figure of speech. In tribute to the Santorum googlewhack let us so honor Lycos itself. Henceforth the nadir of customer service should be called “Lycos”
As in : Dude- that company has customer service like Lycos.
“Remember- Service is what a bull does to a cow”
the mike guy’s websites are all down
Yahoo Mail ate three years of my courting my (now) wife. Turns out they said they’d delete stuff after 60 or 90 days or something of non-use. My bad. I think the $20 think is lame and the guy sounds like an arse, but I don’t know why folks think the “Terms of Use” ought not apply to them. There are lots of other email options out there.
Actually michelle.maynard@lycos.com seems to be the person you should be complaining to.
Well, their policy does state that they CAN delete your email after 30 days of inactivity. Then you ACCUSE them of extorting you by discontinuing their free service that you decided of your own FREE WILL to use.
Yeah, I can see how they are real jerks. I’d hate to live in a world where everyone acts like this blogger. Heck, the world is almost that bad, there are a lot of you.
I only have one word for you: Gmail
I have used it for a couple of years: 2812 MB space, utilized by only 18% equalling 3289 emails including all sorts of attatchments.
I even use it for backups of important stuff, and have never lost a single email (or deleted on purpose either)
Let me know if you need an invite.
lycos is a dying company, everybody should emigrate immediately
How the hell did this get on consumerist? You should have backed up the emails yourself. God forbid they kiss your ass for a clear violation of their service policy (which you obviously did not read). Now the customer service manager is an ass, but maybe it is justified, after all we have no idea what transpired over the phone between you and the representatives.
I’m surprised by all of the “get over it” and “read the fine print” comments — that’s not what this is really about. Despite the EULA or who was ultimately right or wrong in this situation, what we have is a human being (Lycos rep) acting like a complete Nazi for no good reason at all.
One *slightly* pushy email sends this guy into asshole mode? There were a million better ways to deal with this situation. He needs to get a life and off his little power trip. All his little excercise did was lose another Lycos customer and likely several dozen more who will read about this experience and fear for their own emails/customer service interactions.
The short story: Lycos loses. (Again.)
Why do they owe you anything if you haven’t paid for a service????
“…Lycos reserves the right… to delete materials stored for an excessive period while the user’s account has been inactive. Specifically, Lycos reserves the right, in its sole discretion, to delete any materials (including emails) stored in connection with an unpaid Lycos Mail account or Angelfire Mail account if the user’s account has been inactive for thirty (30) days. If you subscribe to Lycos Mail, you agree to be bound by the subscription agreement. ”
It has been pretty damn clear about it from December 2005 “web.archive.org - lycos terms and conditions.”
On the other hand, this guy is a dink and I have a funny feeling that he will have a very hard time finding another job in any industry. I’m sure, by now someone higher in lycos has seen this and taken appropriate action to preserve whats left of this pathetic company.
Everyone has their bad days.. his is just beginning.
-heres to f*cking up your own life for one angry outburst
Register fly is holding domains names and u have to pay over 100 to get it back or something
Your an idiot, they delete your mail after 60 days of in-activity… you were in-active for 60 days what do you expect.
Both his “Designs” and personal site are blank now - I assume he is trying to stem the bandwidth bleed from digg, etc. But what really cracks me up is the HTML Source for the two pages:
Oh, yeah, I’d trust this guy to design a paper airplane, let alone a site! Moron!!
But, what really cracked me up, when I was looking in the Google Cache for his site, and I mispelt the “cache:” special word - …
Check the suggestion - “Did you mean: acche:http://www.baddesigns.net/about_us.php?”
GOLD!
For what its worth, I know mike in the real world. We used to hang out on a regular basis and hit the bars in Salem. He’s always been an uptight asshole.
Its why we dont hang out anymore…
PS. Fuck Lycos
There are some serious idiots here.
ie: strider_mt2k
from http://www.moviesnobs.net/staff.php?member=0929
one of his sites linked above. i think it sums him up in a few words:
(I can have six, because I said so.)
i didnt feel the need to read anymore lol
i agree that he must be an ass.
this is my 1st ever digg response
what……………the ………….f!!!!!!!
If that was what I faced myself, I think I might just walk straight up to that guy and make sure he’ll never reproduce again. Policies? FINE … suits urself…but THAT talking? jeez. I’d make him suck my dick too, if i had one !
Grow up man, you whine too much over something that was your mistake anyways. Sheeesh!
WOW. I didn’t even know Lycos still existed. This is such a moment for nostalgia.
As annoying as this situation might be for you, the policy is pretty clear. Log in at least once every 30 days to keep your account active, they reserve the right to delete stuff.
And while the support people might not have been as polite and understanding as you would like, you weren’t exactly sunshine and lollipops either.
Why would I trust Lycos, Google, Hotmail, or any other free provider with something as important as my e-mail? They don’t even have a legally binding contract (because I’ve paid them nothing) and they can change their Terms of Service at their whim.
I registered a domain, set up a mail server (and web, FTP, SSH, Telnet, and VPN) and my mail goes there. When my e-mail client picks it up, it stores a copy on my local hard drive. The e-mail client then makes archival copies of the e-mail to my server’s RAID subsystem.
If you cannot or will not set up and run your own mail server, then at least be smart enough to pay for e-mail service so that the company providing it has some legal obligation to store and backup your e-mail. And stop using web mail as your primary means of e-mailing. Set up a mail client that picks up your mail via POP3 so that you store a copy of it locally.
Sorry that the writer lost his e-mail at Lycos, but maybe others will avoid his mistake by not leaving their e-mail on some third-party mail server.
Hardly the best way to get someone to do something for you by ranting about how they holding your emails “hostage”! Being less aggressive and more humble might have persuaded him.
Also, letting people post the online life of this poor guy is something awful! It’s speculation and the worst case you are letting others victimise an innocent!
You’re (mostly) a bunch of unpleasant, immature cretins with waaaaaaaaaay too much time on your hands. Boohoo. Some guy at a company providing a free service wrote you an email that was a little bit rude. Oh noooesss!!!1111!!!1 Let’s find his name! His hobbies! His past! Let’s ruin him completely! Let’s make sure Google is bombed by outrageous and wildly slanderous comments about the guy!
“Mr. * is not a nice person and he has a bad credit history.”
This is proportionate? Fair? Reasonable? Mature? Considered?
Here’s a fun thing for the poster of that message (and others) to think about: you know, what you’re doing here might be a serious legal offence. Oh yes! IANAL, but it sure looks like it could be slander to me: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slander_and_libel
Whoopsy. There you were just being twats, now you’ll have to explain this all to your folks when you get the legal papers through! Have fun kids!
Perplexed at the number of comments directing you toward Gmail. Isn’t the leasson learned here that you shouldn’t be letting large companies store/look after your vital communication? Isn’t that what Thunderbird et al are for? Saving stuff locally?
I have a Hotmail account, but would never allow emails to languish there for long, not when they could be nice and safe on my HD.
I have worked for lycos for several years, always used gmail or own e-mailserver before that. lycos is a global and special kind of company with german management. The attitude has not always been straight forward and that is the result of german way of doing business which I personally don’t think is suited for the creativity and g33k subculture that is so common on the “internets”
.
good luck with your mail and I suggest you use gmail instead of hotmail, yahoo and similar clones.
Grow up already.
When I go to lycos.com (which I haven’t done for years until just now), and click to go to Lycos Mail, it says very clearly:
“Note: The content of a Lycos Mail Basic account will be deleted if the owner does not login and check the account at least once every 30 days.”
That doesn’t say, can be deleted, might be deleted, deleted if your mail people are having a bad day, deleted if we think you dress badly, deleted if the weather is lousy, or anything of the sort. It says *will be deleted*.
Does it get more clear? If long-term storage was your goal, maybe you shouldn’t count on it happening for free.
Certainly, they could have been a bit more tactful, but then again, you could have used some common sense.
So let me get this right. Lycos gives you FREE email service for several years. You thought it sucked, and started using someone else.
Then, when they chose to turn off your account, which you aren’t using anyway, you get pissed off about it, and waste all this time writing about it.
Digg gets wind of the story and now you’re wasting ALL of our times.
Great job there mate.
Someone should teach him HTML. The tags on the blank page are wrong.
I switched over to gmail for personal email earlier this year and think it’s great too. But with terms of service being changeable at the whim of the company, there is nothing that prevents this exact same thing from happening in time.
Gmail is free and it’s for life is naive at best. Hopefully Lycos didn’t cost you anything significant - they’ve cost themselves FAR more goodwill by treating you poorly, but that’s a lose-lose.
Lycos mail has always been accessable via pop3, as I recall.
If the mail that was lost were that important, why not have a backup elsewhere?
Even outlook express supports pop3, and all the account required was to be polled once a month.
In other news, how about accepting a little responsibility yourself.
It’s interesting that the source of mijdesigns.net current blank page has the following tags:
open html
open body
close html
close body
I don’t think I would hire a web designer who can’t even code a blank page correctly.
you really should have called corparate. Or sent emails complaining about the poor customer service at any rate. fricking losers.
Nice job everyone, organizing the modern witch hunt. Good work blowing things out of proportion and trying to ruin someone’s life, especially all the bored people who don’t know the full story and are just looking to perpetuate some drama. You’ll all forget about this in a week or two, and your karma will be sure to thank you.
Were you using the free service? Because ultimately, you get what you pay for, sadly. I would *never* allow a free service to hold any kind of important/business correspondence.
The guy may have acted harshly, but it doesn’t mean he *personally* deleted your email. If it was deleted, then he was being straight-forward and honest. Again, if it’s a free account, even if they had backups, they can’t exactly justify restoring it because you didn’t follow their TOS.
I find it funny that there’s all these posts about how crap Lycos is. They’re only around because the idiots that still pay $19.95 for a pathetic “service” continue to use it. Stop pi**ing your money up against a wall and go use it for something more productive!
There are hundreds of better providers than Lycos - God, they don’t even deserve all this publicity, let them die their death without anyone actually caring one way or another!
P.S. I tried Lycos once, and it’s crap, so i moved.
First, of all, it TOTALLY DOESN’T MATTER that the terms were posted and were easy to read or whatever.
The only thing that matters is the Customer Service guy was totally unprofessional and rude. He SHOULD be fired and his face and his goddamn email should be posted all over the fucking internet so that all companies learn a little lesson about treating their customers with a little more respect than that reserved for pond scum.
You know, if that REALLY was the lead in
Customer Service, speaking on behalf of his
employer, there’s no reason NOT to disclose
his full name and contact information.
Even if he did misunderstand or not read the account policy Mike’s comments were way unprofessional. What kind of ‘top manager’ says things like;
“Your e-mails have been completely deleted, and no amount of money can now restore them.”
Anyway what the hell does ‘completely deleted’ mean? Is that worse than just Deleted?
I’m confused.
You don’t think anyone should be fired? Why, how generous of you.
Don’t be ridiculous. You’re the one who didn’t follow a very clear and simple policy. All the poor guy did was tell you what the policy was and the consequences of not abiding by it. Maybe he was blunt, but I’d rather have the straight facts from a company than some half-assed corporate double-speak.
IF the E-Mails were that important, you should have been using your own mail program such as Eudora, Pegasus, Outlook (Express) or some other mail client that stores E-Mail on your local computer. I have been doing that since 1995 when I first started using e-Mail and the Internet.
Inherently, a “basic service” or “free E-Mail” account is not to be trusted with your life’s history…because they CAN (and as you found out, DO) institute arcane and ridiculous policies.
Let this be a lesson learned: Do NOT trust your E-mail to a basic (free) account. If you MUST use a web-based mail service (Yahoo, Hotmail, Lycos, etc.) you should pay something…
Remember this: If you want your money back in your situation, you’re not getting anything, and you have no recourse. But, wait, if you paid money, and they don’t deliver the services that they promise, then they are in violation of a contract and are liable. IANAL, so consult one as YMMV.
Gregg
Found on their homepage under Terms and Conditions at the bottom. It’s soooo clear dude, you just screwed yourself.
10. MAIL
Before you register for a Lycos Mail account, you must read and agree to these Terms of Use and the Lycos Mail Terms of Service, including any future amendments.
Lycos offers subscription and unpaid versions of its electronic mail services. For users of the unpaid mail services, Lycos reserves the right, in its sole discretion, to limit the amount of storage space available per user or to delete materials stored for an excessive period while the user’s account has been inactive. Specifically, Lycos reserves the right, in its sole discretion, to delete any materials (including emails) stored in connection with an unpaid Lycos Mail account or Angelfire Mail account if the user’s account has been inactive for thirty (30) days. If you subscribe to Lycos Mail, you agree to be bound by the subscription agreement.
It sucks, but live and learn. If these emails were valuable to you, it was your responsibility to log in more often.
And I appreciate your kind behavior toward “Mike,” and your desire not to have him fired, but his job is in “customer service.” If he can’t deal with customers and you don’t want him to be out of a job, maybe he should be demoted to janitor.
Yeah, the customer service guy acted like a douche.
But: “Note: The content of a Lycos Mail Basic account will be deleted if the owner does not login and check the account at least once every 30 days.” Right there on the front page, everytime you log in.
Is it a stupid policy? Yes. Does it help the company retain customers? Probably not. But that is not relevant.
Just because you don’t agree with their crappy policies, does not mean they don’t apply to you. You agree to those terms and conditions every time you use that email account. They are now enforcing those conditions. It sucks, but they’re not doing anything wrong.
It’s lovely to see how much people can complain when they don’t understand something.
In the last year or two, it became horrifically spammy and was often down, so I phased over to other email providers with better spam filters and more reliability.
See that part in bold? If the site was often down, how in the hell do you people expect her to log in per the terms of the site? Is she magic? The way I see it, Lycos violated the contract between her and them by not living up to the services they offered her in the first place, thereby making her unable to fulfill her end of the bargin.
Go ahead, slag me all you want, but that doesn’t change the fact that Lycos did mess up.
Jeez… your FREE email service cut you off?
This guy didn’t make the 30 day rule so I don’t see why you are sullying his name across the internet because he was a little rude.
I have some suggestions for you:
1. Don’t use an unreliable mail service from 1997.
2. Look up the word “backup” in the dictionary.
3. Give your computer away to charity or something. Take up knitting or something.
Alright, everybody who’s saying, “Read the fine print, ” and, “oh, should have checked the terms of service…”
As of now, (and according to wayback for quite a long while) there is a framed message barely one inch from the login button which says.
Note: The content of a Lycos Mail Basic account will be deleted if the owner does not login and check the account at least once every 30 days.
ONE INCH. This isnt fine print, or a special hidden term of service. ITS OBVIOUS!
Stop giving the idiot who wrote this article credit, he’s the moron.
[...] Why am I being so hard on a company that’s been around for ages? Simple - check out this blog entry and see what happens when unprofessional people work for unprofessional companies. (If anyone can suggest where Mr. Jandreau’s petty email is “professional,” I’d love to hear it.) [...]
2 problems.
You messed up, and tried to blame it on someone else.
Their CS department manager has a bad attitude.
Sure, they did a bad thing.
But they didn’t have to do anything for you. You didn’t pay them ever, they were nice enough to let you use their service for free. And they followed their own rules that are clearly visible, and any person with even 1 year of Internet experience would know what that meant. Yes, they would delete emails after 30 days. They are not going to state they are ‘required’ to delete them.
And in return you act high and mighty.
What else did you expect for a response? Flowers and a hug?
Whoa. Lycos still exists? I’d sort of assumed they went out of business with the other dot-bombs. It’s like a flashback to the twentieth century!
I bet they have this poor excuse of a policy because they realize that if you don’t go in and delete your spam, they will get overloaded with email. Sounds like a better solution would be simply to get a better spam filter. There are some pretty good ones out there. The one I use lets less than .25% of my spam get through (maybe 1 message a day out of thousands).
Why do you expect a company to provide you a free account and keep your emails around for you for several years? If your email is that important to you, you should have downloaded them to your own personal storage.
You may not like the Terms of Service but they are there to prevent people from hoarding email on their servers and using up their space. If you really don’t like the ToS, nobody is forcing you to agree to them, you can take your free loading somewhere else. Or better yet, you can actually spend money for a service and get what you pay for.
If email is that important to you, start downloading your email to your own computer for storage. Don’t rely on someone else to do what you should have been doing.
Ew, sorry for being totally wrong about the notice being on the Lycos Mail page. I did go there, but I guess I got distracted by the Google ad (!) right below it. Sorry again.
Speaking of Google, and the 15 children above who have said something like “use gmail you dum-dum,” there once was a time when Lycos had as much respect and credibility as Google does today. (The Internet was much smaller then.) When fortunes change again, Gmail’s terms of service may change to some similar hogwash. You don’t have to wait actually: Gmail lost some account data about a year ago and a handful of people were very upset, but of course Google was protected by it’s (not so cuddly after all) terms of service.
Nor does any free webmail, not even darling Gmail, come with a “backup” service (that would be IMAP). The takeaway from this ordeal is not “Change to the currently fashionable Internet overlord” but “Stop depending on Internet overlords.”
I hope this never happens to my free HOOTERS email account.
I don’t care to get into the argument about who was right, but I will say that if this CSR was working for me, I would fire them.
From his comments, “…There is no one higher than me that you will speak with. … Your e-mails have been completely deleted, and no amount of money can now restore them.” it looks like he has power issues and a poor attitude for customer service.
The initial communication appears to offer the possibility of retrieving the emails upon payment of the upgrade fee. The poor attitude of the CSR eliminated any possibility of the company generating any revenue from this customer, as well as generating negative publicity for the company.
[...] Via Seth Godin, Teaching customers a lesson – a sad and yet terribly funny problem with Lycos (from idaho-hum). The emails back and forth are classic. Here’s a couple from Lycos: [...]
Why would you use lycos? I have two accounts that i use alot, Yahoo and Gmail. Lately gmail has been winning me over due to the yahoo mail anti-spam shit (if you want to send a mail to a major domain such as aol or yahoo from y!mail, you have to type in a code - sucks!). Anyway, if anyone wants a free gmail account, email me at rdejournett (at gmail dot com), i’d be glad to share invites.
You lost all rights to a civil response when you accused them of extortion. A better response would have to to ask them to put the (pay up) policy aside just this one time. Yeah, it sounds like you are bending over for them, but as they say you catch more flies with sugar than vinager.
Ok, this is actually sort of interesting…
1) They state up front (like Hotmail and a lot of the other free e-mail services prior to GMail) if you don’t log in for 30 consecutive days, there’s no guarantee your e-mail will still be there. Reason for this policy - idiots who sign up for the free account, and then never use it, wasting disk space. Yes, one user’s e-mail is likely not to break the bank, but hundreds of thousands? Millions? I have no idea how many people use these services (and Lycos probably isn’t one of the top 3 in terms of number of users).
2) This phrase cracks me up: “This hardly seems like a customer-friendly policy, especially toward someone like me, who has been with Lycos for several years.” Sorry, it just strikes me as funny that you feel you have some sort of pull with the company for using their free service (debate all you want to about “hey, I allowed them to put the banner ads and whatnot on my webmail client that I ignored, that’s worth something!”).
3) Thinking about this logically; if they did have some sort of 30 day daemon running that deleted e-mails, in order to restore them for somebody, they’d probably have to go to their backups. Assuming they’re offline or “nearline” stored, I can actually see why it would cost a certain amount of money to go to the trouble - actually, $19.95 is sort of cheap for that sort of thing.
4) Admittedly, the “we told you what you had to do 48 hours ago, now we’ve REALLY deleted the e-mails” was over the top and deserves the sobriquet “dick”.
Lycos is still around? I had no idea. Now I understand why.
prety much shows you why Lycos has gone the route of the “Never Was” , sorry to here about such asshats
Sara Wrote: Couple things I find interesting… the number of people that feel that this is an APPROPRIATE response from lycos is boggling.
Actually I believe that there is only one or two doing multiple posting to make you believe that there is a lot of them.
The RIAA is using this method two where they actually pay some bloggers to post nefarious comentson blogs with various stupid names.
It might be that this great company (LOL) is doing the same.
Mate, you deserved it for being a complete tool. What gives you the right to demand that someone restore your email when you totally fucked up. They told you what you needed to do, you ignored it, and now you reap the consequences.
You get what you pay for, and you paid jack.
the thing i find most facinating about all of this . . . 90% of people who’ve commented, both here and on digg and on metafiler and elsewhere . . . refer to the blogger as “HE”.
now, irrespective of the fact that several people have said “SHE” - there is an underlying basis of assumption of “male-ness” in all things internet . . . historical paradigms continue on.
interesting . . .
Dirty Bastards, I say Boycott
I find it fascinating that some people are completely missing the point here. Its not so much the fact that the emails were deleted (although that was rather poor behavior on their part), but rather that the manager she corresponded with was such a royal douche-bag.
The posts dogging the blogger are interesting. Many have the same syntax, gramatical errors and read similarly.
Should the TOS have been read on an ongoing basis to determine if there are any changes over the years? Technically, yes. How many do that? Hands, two in the back?
The CS was rude. Period. He should not be in customer support. If that’s the way he handles someone irritated how the heck does he deal with the truly pissed off?
Things happen, people make mistakes. The Blogger did pay for the use of the service, spam and ads. Seems to me they should have been able to remove their e-mail or had an, “I am so sorry. You must have missed the changes, but those have all been deleted. Unfortuantly we will not be able to recover them…” This whole thing would not have blown up like this.
I agree. I worked in Customer Service for many years and the customer IS always right, no matter how frustrating that may be to a CS rep. The CS rep is the one who must “suck it up” and “move on,” as so many [Lycos employees or friends of Lycos employees] have suggested here. Of course, Lycos will be moving on very soon as a result of this Customer/CS rep interaction. Too bad, so sad for them!
Man, we keep losing users. How can we regain marketshare?
I know! Treat them worse! Delete their email! They’ll be signing up in droves!
Goodbye sad Lycos.
All of your pathetic over weight employees will have to make $8/hr somewhere else.
I used to work in CS at Lycos when it was owned by Terra. You were talking to the CS manager, at this point Lycos has less then 5 people working in CS for all it’s products, they are getting around 5000 cs emails a day. I’m not defending them I’m just saying your probably lucky you even got that level of response.
Pay close attention, it’s not so complicated:
No one is complaining about the terms of service or EULA. The issue is not that his email was deleted.
The issue is how it was handled by this customer service guy. He shouldn’t be fired because the email was deleted. He should be fired because of the way he treated a user of the service.
Why is this so hard for some people to understand?
Sure, deleting email after 30 days is a horrible policy, but gosh darn it, we must unquestioningly obey every single rule laid down by any company. Why, if we were to complain to the company, and blog about the horrible policy, it could lead to the policy being changed. Just keep quiet, follow the rules. And kudos to the Customer Service rep, who held the line by robotically repeating the policy, with added severe and contemptious attidude, and who took company time to personally compose these several missives to a lowest tiered customer. The one with the attitude is the Blogger, who didn’t swear or make any personal insults, but questioned the validity of a policy that was never agreed to by contract. After all, it’s a free account. Contracts can be changed at will without proper notification, and you can be treated badly, and your property can be destroyed if something is free. Hard to believe anyone can take the side of the individual here, faceless corporations all the way!
Well now you guys have done it!! /.’d the
guys site–serves him right.
Get a real job you bum.
To all of you who have trash-talked this blogger and stated the their policy was clearly on the Lycos homepage I submit the following:
1. Lycos’ HOMEPAGE
2. Lycos’ Email Subsection
INTERESTING! The policy IS NOT on the homepage. Anywhere. It’s on a page linked FROM the homepage but not on the homepage itself. Mike was wrong and was an ass about it. So please, before you trash talk somebody make sure you don’t come off looking like a complete ass yourself (oh, wait, you people must be related to Mike. My bad).
Thank you for alert us to Lycos’ customer service policies. I’ll be sure to lobby against them forever (or until they restore your email and submit an official apology for treating you so poorly).
Might I suggest emailing Brian Kalinowski (I bet firstinitial+lastname@lycos-inc.com works)COO for lycos. Given the publicity you’ve received I’m sure Brian would want to talk with you.
At the very least mail Ms O’Reilly (koreilly@lycos-inc.com) media relations.
I suspect there’s a customer service manager who’s going to be cleaning the server room for years to come)
I love the power of a single voice on the net! Go!
where the fuck are all these trolls coming from? So Lycos had the legal right to delete this guys email. They’re still dicks for doing it.
Wow, learn to back up your stuff and not count on a third party to ensure things are done properly.
If the service is free, they don’t owe anything to anyone, the email stored on their service is their property. Can’t belive this even got on slashdot!
The point isn’t the policy - as several have said, it’s fairly common and is understandable. The point is the person they have hired to interact with customers. It’s possible that it’s just some random disgruntled jerk. But I’ve found time and again that a company’s attitude towards its customers flows straight from the top.
As for people blaming the blogger - companies provide services for free for their own reasons. Those reasons are extremely unlikely to be purely altruistic. And we have every right to complain about those services if they are poor or inadequate, even if we have never given that company a dime.
JM,
In multi-dimensional sites, the homepage term can be used either to describe the very main page of the site, or the main page for the product/company under the main holder, especially when such a unit is very distinctive from its parent or positioned on a subdomain. you are only squaking at a loosely based term. the message was pretty straightforward, on the login page for the email–a page most people visit before checking their lycos email.
in all honesty, its tough shit for you. you agreed to such policies when you signed up for the account. if they did something far more sinister, say deleted your emails if you were previously paying for the service, then yes, you have more to compain about. but face the facts, you’re just pissed because your expectations of free services being spectacular were destroyed and you needed some method to vent.
What a disgusting whiner. Get a life
Typical, you want to bash the crap out of a company that offered you a free service. Clearly the terms of service indicate they can delete your emails after 30 days. Wake up to yourself how much do you expect from these people for free. Everyone has to make a living to survive including Lycos, what makes you think they owe you a free lunch. Now get off your high horse, get a job and find out what it’s really like in the world of comercial enterprise.
Freeloader!
Mark said “I can’t believe nobody has commented on how effective the manager was in this situation.”
Yeah, boy, WalMart got where it is today with this kind of customer service. They may treat their EMPLOYEES this way, but the last person on earth they diss is a customer.
Thanks to word-of-mouth, Lycos just went further down the shithole.
Everyone should create a free account on Lycos and sign up for every possible newsletter. Then let it just fill up.
Lycos was so 80s, even in the 90s when it got started. Only dimwits would trust Lycos to do anything right. Thankfully, Google has put Lycos out of most of its former victim’s misery.
A good business person, and especially a good customer service person, knows that the goodwill or a customer is worth a LOT. They talk to their friends. A good word from a friend is worth a lot more than 60 minutes of commercials or 50 web banners.
If the customer is in the wrong, but you FORGIVE THEM and give them what they want, you have earned a GREAT deal of loyalty and admiration from that customer. You can’t buy that kind of good will! And what does it cost them to have this capability? A few cents per customer to keep some extra hard drives online. It makes very good business sense.
Unless, of course, you really can’t afford a few extra hard drives or staff to maintain them, in which case, you are going down the tubes anyway. Then it doesn’t matter what people think of you, cause you’re just doomed.
Anyway, despite laudable efforts to remove the guy’s name and web URLs from comments here, i still found the guy’s self-named domain.
the front page of the suspected site is blank, but there’s a subdirectory still there at
http://www.mikej*.com/mail/
those who have no sympathy for this situation are either trolls, plants, or belonging to the same subclass of human that mike “head of all customer service”-ha!-ha!-ha! is.
It’s NOT about whether they had the rights to do that, clearly they did. It’s how stupid they are to do it _and_ treat the customer that way. This one incident has pushed them 10 steps closer to bankruptcy, even IF they fired the people responsible.
I just want to say that gmail has a similar policy (though it lacks a specific time period which could prove to be for better or for worst). I have a gmail account myself and trust it but it’s still free and most of the agreements for these services are the same. But honestly if I get an email so important that it will be needed two years later I save it to my computer/print it out once I get it. I feel your pain however and I hope you are able to do something about it.
This is not an acceptable customer service response. Being in the business and running medsocial.com, people come to rely on you and a consistent level of support and assistance with matters like this. First, I would never have this person working for me. Second, they need to re-evaluate their approach to customers.
-Medical Info @ medsocial.com
It’s ironic that so many people claim their “service” is “free” considering it states very clearly: “Ad Sponsored”.
Also amazing no one has caught on that it would be possible to “magically return said deleted files if the account were to be upgraded for only 19.95 (what reasoning was behind this?, why is it that a ‘mail preservation’ only applies in this scenario opposed to a $5.95 or ‘any preservation enabled account’ instead?)
If your going to rag to claim someone was right, you can prove it, half-assing it doesn’t cut it - it just makes you look stupid.
I love this tidbit from Mike J.’s now off-line web design company website:
“Each customer is given the attention and personal touch one would want from a design company, without losing any of the professionalism and expertise you’d expect from a large company. Twenty-four hour customer service is the standard at MJJ Designs, as is the fast turnaround time for your maintenence [sic] requests.”
To the “Read the fine print” crowd. Please come and borrow money from my new bank. The loan contract is really great. We will give you $100 dollars, and the terms are 0% APR, and 10 years to pay. But we reserve the right to change these terms without notice.
Oops! I forgot that doing that in a bank is illegal and frequently called loan-sharking.
It may be legal for Lycos to do what it did, but the policy is stupid from a customer service point of view. Your utilities are regulated to prevent this kind of behavior, but it sometimes still happens, even with heat in the winter in the north and electric in the summer in the south.
The poster should have been more careful, but the behavior is way more than just not good. the customer service rep could have said “I’m sorry, I can’t help you due to policy/scripts/gremlins or whatever.
I hate saying it, but we should probably be asking congress to regulate this kind of thing. Not so much the stupid policy - Companies should be allowed to be stupid, but the ability of an internet service firm to have a contract with no penalties on their side - which is how the “any change without notice” thing ends up. Living up to a contract would seem to be a reasonable request, changing it without notice is illegal in other realms wy not ere too.
There’s such an easy way to tell if the warning was on the Lycos MAIL homepage (our friend Mike, since they were discussing an email account, can be assumed to have been talking about the MAIL homepage and not LYCOS’ homepage):
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://mail.lycos.com
The latest archive, from August 2006, clearly shows the warning:
“Note: The content of a Lycos Mail Basic account will be deleted if the owner does not login and check the account at least once every 30 days.”
Sorry, it was there, you missed it. It’s like telling the cop that you didn’t see the 25mph posted speed limit when you were doing 50. You were mistaken, accept it,
It doesn’t mean Mike should have responded the way he did.
I’m surprised there are people who comment on how the CS rep was unnecessarily rude. She accused the company of extortion even though the rules for their free service are clear. The CS rep didn’t swear back at her nor make any counter accusations, he merely said that their business relationship was over.
Makes sense to me, maybe she should have asked if there was anyway to recover the email for a reduced fee before starting up with the libelous statements.
Wow, a lot of nimbyism going on here. As an admin of another site that offers a free mail service, I can’t imagine doing this to people. This is exactly why I admin my own e-mail and keep offsite backups just in case. Even gmail has a clause that allows them to do this same thing at their leisure. To the commenters, just remember just because it’s legal doesn’t mean it’s nice!
hey Realist, why do you sound like Mike J. You fail to understand the concept of “libelous” like him, and hold his douchy world view.
She never swore, nor accused the company of extortion. She did liken it to holding her email hostage, which is very apt metaphorcally. He began with the contemptious tone, and he crossed way over the line. Why would he make counter accusations, Mike? I mean “Realist?”
I think that it only takes one crummy customer support person and a company can lose a lot of business. I’m glad you posted this - I can now say that I will never use any lycos services.
Thanks for the heads up.
Maybe you should take a look at gmail.com. It is one of the most popular and well designed email around. Also you need not log in to your mail every 30 days. Rather you need only log in once every 6 months or so before your account gets suspended.
In my opinion, nothing beats gmail. Not even Yahoo mail.
Lycos as of today is the 635th most popular website according to Alexa. That’s pretty sad for an company of their size.
The issue is not about the email retention policy! It’s about how the CSR acted like a total dick about the blogger’s problem. His emails appeared to be full of contempt and completely unhelpful. Good way to give a company a bad reputation. I would’ve fired him immediately.
Seems that if you are getting something for free (like you are getting your mail in this case), you’re not a customer. You’re using a service and giving nothing back in return.
At least you should follow their rules, and if you broke them, pay the $20 for a subscription and get your old e-mails. Now they probably deleted them off the system to cover their behinds, and you will get nothing.
Maybe public restrooms should provide you with soft fluffy Charmin toilet paper instead of the free cheap stuff. Just cause you want it. The should give it to you free too, even if you’re not a customer.
Hi,
i had an account with lycos . Suddenly it got deleted . No warning nothing . No response from the lycos staff either !!! Does not seem to be worth the fight as apparent from the email. Switch to yahoo or gmail.
Bye
1) Get a gmail account
2) Run Thunderbird on your machine, connected to gmail’s pop server
3) Browse and search mail via gmail web interface
4) Backup and store mail via Thunderbird
5) Everyone wins
I feel for you having had emails from email.com, yahoo.com, msn, hotmail, aol, netscape and a few other of the free web based bastards destroyed all because I didn’t check in with them like a good little troll.
Doesn’t it also seem like no matter what email name you choose you seem to get spam? You can create a name that isn’t even words - just random numbers/letters and in a day you will have 300 spam messages sent your way. I swear they sell your email address for extra money.
Well anyway I finally found one email account and service that gave a crap about me as a person. Yes I’m talking about Gmail and the good folks over at Google. Since its start Gmail has said they will always allow their users to:
a) forward email
b) keep their email account indefinably without having to log in during a specific amount of time c) have the ability to use Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird or whatever email program you like to check your email
d) have vacation and auto-responders
All without having to pay for their services. All that and a ton of other great features - with more added all the time. All that without having to pay a dime for your account!
I am pretty sure lycos.com is owned by IAC and IAC is the owner of ASK.com, which is no surprise because the CEO is pocketing 100s in millions in CEO pay. At least we know why the customer service sucks. To bad the bush administration will not do anything.
I agree Lycos handled this very badly. The head of customer service is the usual corporate arsehole you tend to find at large companies like Lycos, Hotmail, Yahoo and the like. They have no idea how to treat customers.
However, and I don’t say this to spite you, you have got to trust me on this, if you value your old email conversation, use a reliable commercial email service, and have some sort of backup in case it fails. I know web email is convenient and accessible, but POP email still rules.
Just use Gmail combined with a good email client. Then you can have both! And do get a Mac, they are much more reliable and fun than Windows PCs.
Cheers from Britain
I sympathise with losing the emails, but seriously, you provoked the replies you got, and it’s free. You’re owed nothing, but you complain with a wounded sense of entitlement, then look surprised when someone summarily LARTs you.
Pragmatically, if the email you lost was so awfully important, it would have made sense to pay the paltry $20, back it all up THEN take on customer services in a polite and reasoned fashion to get an apology and perhaps a refund.
I hope you’ve picked an appropriate new service to fulfill your needs.
Lesson: Always do backups of webmails. I read them in a normal email client through a POP-gateway program and never have to worry about going back at least once every month or anything. All install http://www.freepops.org/ for example and be done with it.
So let me get this straight,
The manager says “You’re account was deleted, now no amount of money can bring back your account”
Notice that he said “now” meaning that they deleted your account afterwards, previously they were trying to ransom your account to you - pay us and we’ll bring it back, but NOW they’ve deleted the account - after you’ve made it clear that you are unwilling to pay.
Report it to the better business bureau (BBB)
Mikey,
From the above mail:
“…you’re holding my emails hostage until you get $19.95 from me?”
and
“…There were many times when Lycos was not in compliance with its own terms of service, and I didn’t try to extort $19.95 from you.”
She is accusing them of holding her emails “hostage.” - Not “liken to”, but flat out accused them. Then she implied that they are extorting her. She wasn’t speaking “metaphorcally”, as you put it, but being flat-out confrontational.
As for him being “contemptious”, as you say, from the beginning; this is not so. In his first mail to her he clearly explained the situation and the company’s policies. He was being calm and professional. I don’t know if you expect him to finish every sentence with a smiley and sign off every email with love and kisses, but please don’t feel slighted just because you think he was being unfriendly.
Our crusading blogger then decided to reply with a contemptuous (yes, that’s how it’s spelled) tone and make accusations toward a stranger. Not even a paying customer can behave in such a crude way and then expect the company not to show the customer the door.
Holding the emails hostage is not the same thing has offering to do the customer a favour by giving her back her email after she violated the TOS. He could’ve deleted the mails immediately, but decided to offer our belligerent blogger an out (to which she