On February 6 of this year, I posted an article telling why you don't want to use the e-mail service from your Internet provider. Instead, you should be using an e-mail service provided by an independent e-mail provider (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, Fastmail, etc.). I followed that up with a second article that described the bad experiences of 234,000 former Verizon customers in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont who suddenly found their Internet service was being changed to a smaller company, FairPoint Communications.
Fairpoint changed the e-mail addresses of their new customers with little or no notice. In fact, some customers were not told of the new email addresses until AFTER they had been changed! Can you imagine what that would do to your email communications with friends, family, business acquaintances, genealogy mailing lists, etc.?
Fairpoint changed the e-mail addresses of their new customers with little or no notice. In fact, some customers were not told of the new email addresses until AFTER they had been changed! Can you imagine what that would do to your email communications with friends, family, business acquaintances, genealogy mailing lists, etc.?
Fairpoint did not copy saved messages from Verizon's servers to Fairpoint's own servers. Many customers who had hundreds or even thousands of messages stored in Verizon's mail servers suddenly could no longer access those saved messages. Business messages, personal messages, and at least one doctorate thesis draft were lost when the two companies offered no method of recovery.
Even worse, Fairpoint's mail servers collapsed under the load. Many email messages were lost, some were simply delayed, and thousands of users found that they occasionally could not even check their mail for new messages. Perhaps the most maddening experience was when Fairpoint customers could see the titles of news messages, but clicking ion the title only produced a message of "Error."
Now the situation has become still worse for Fairpoint's customers: the comp[any has filed for bankruptcy protection. The New York Stock Exchange also suspended trading of FairPoint’s stocks. At the same time, the company is seeking wage cuts and other concessions from thousands of unionized workers.
Company officials at Fairpoint claim that the voluntary Chapter 11 filing should have no impact on customers nor should it prevent the company from living up to its promise to expand access to high-speed Internet in the region.
“This won’t impact our operations,” said Jeff Nevins, spokesman for the company in Maine. “We are here working. The call center is taking calls. The trucks are rolling to do installations. It is normal operations.”
You can read more in the Bangor (Maine) Daily News at http://www.bangordailynews.com/detail/126936.html?utm_source=BDN+News+Updates&utm_campaign=5f98c4c940-RSS_MORNINGUPDATE_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email.
Now for a few questions: Who supplies YOUR email services? Is that company financially secure? Will they sell out or be acquired by another company? If so, what happens to your e-mail messages? What happens to your e-mail address?
If you still receive your e-mail messages from the same company that supplies your Internet access, you might want to read my earlier article at http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2009/02/why-you-need-a-second-and-better-email-address-by-dick-eastman/comments/page/2/.
