I publish below a letter I had to send today to my main email provider, Netidentity.com, in order to retrieve my email locked on their servers for the last 24 hours and get rid of a fraction of my frustration. Similar incidents happen sometimes but it has never lasted so long since 1997, when I first subscribes to my historical « vanity email », christian {at} aubry [dot] com.
Throughout the last decade, this service has been powered by Mailbank (from Vancouver), then Netidenty (from the USA), and now Tucows (from Toronto). However, it looks like I cannot rely on that one to take care of my strategic email and, from now on, I kindly ask all of you, my friends, clients, business partners and other contacts to email meat christian {at} aubry [dot] org — yes, « .org », not « .com » anymore. Without a very, very significative reaction from Tucows I will not renew my account expiring in 2009.
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Hi. It’s been over 24 hours now that I cannot access to my email either via POP, IMAP or Webmail. Last night, I changed my email parameters so that new email are now forwarded to my own domain name (aubry.org) which is hosted by Google. But I still have urgent email stuck in your server AND I MUST RETRIEVE IT NOW.
PLEASE FORWARD MANUALLY AND IMMEDIATLY ANY AWAITING EMAIL STUCK IN MY MAILBOX (christian@aubry.com) TO MY ALTERNATIVE ADDRESS (christian@aubry.org) as configured in my email settings. YOU CAN DO IT AND I WANT YOU TO DO IT WITH NO DELAY, NO MATTER THE COST.
Finally, this situation is absolutely unacceptable and the conclusion I draw is simple. After 11 years of customer satisfaction with Mailbank and Netidentity services, my email service powered by Tucows is no more reliable and I must find another solution.
My accound is paid until 2009 and I will keep it as an obsolete backup but I will now use my own domain as my main address. Unless I have very, very good reasons to recover trust in your services I will not renew my long lasting subscription to christian@aubry.com.
Recovering trust means for me :
- Get your systems back to normal with no delay as soon as possible today.
- Send me a detailed, technical explanation about what happened exactly.
- Tell me exactly what steps you are taking so that such incident never happen again.
- Offer me personalized apologies.
- Propose me any kind of real compensation that hurts you as much as it hurts me today — I mean not a candy nor a credit, but real money via Paypal or whatever else you may think of. If you don’t pay for what happened you won’t care if it happens again this way or another.
- Set up a support blog as iWeb Hosting Services do. That way, you can broadcast technical information to your users but you will also feel the heat of their comments when things go wrong. Being able to liberate your anger in public is the least customers may enjoy in such situations. And if you don’t do it, someone will do it either via Facebook or a Ning community. Please set up your interactive blog as soon as possible.
- Reply to this email within the next hour so that I can feel there is still a pilot aboard the plane.
Ami Calmant,
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C.A.