As has been said elsewhere, hotmail is superior to ntl's crappy email offering in almost every respect. I'm particularly unimpressed with ntl's policy of deleting our emails
even if we've saved them because they're important.
So I asked ntl about the deletion policy
Quote:
ntl would appear to be the only ISP that deletes explicitly saved emails in the UK. There is already a 'high tide' limit on the size of a customer's mailbox. Here are some arguments for allowing customers to save mail on the server:-
1. Many customers use the internet to shop. Saving copies of receipts/proofs of purchase online is commonplace. To give an example of why this is a good idea I once had a house fire. The insurance company required copies of cetain proofs of purchase. Luckily I had kept these (tiny) records online so they were not lost or damaged.
2. Account security - Customers can save copies of usernames and passwords online in their mail accounts. This is intrinsically better than storing such details locally or writing them down.
3. Hardware failure - Let's assume that a customer downloads email regularly but their machine suffers a hard disk crash. All local data would be lost. If important emails were allowed to be kept on the mail server (as long as the customer does not exceed the mailbox size limit) then the customer could rebuild their machine and still have access to those important documents from ntl's mail servers.
4. NTL would not compare favourably with other ISPs in this regard. I have been unable to find another ISP that engages in mail tampering of this kind (deleting read messaged that have been specifically saved even if those messages are placed in a dedicated folder on the mail server).
5. Good publicity/customer relations - Announcing an improvement to the mail service would go down well at this time following the problems you've been having with the mail servers recently.
You might say "We need to reduce the amount of data that is stored on our mail servers". I dont mean to preach to the converted but there are a number of ways you could do this without deleting important documents from customers accounts :-
1. By all means delete unread items after 90 days. This used to be 270 days so savings should already be being made.
2. Use data compression
3. Close down accounts that have remained inactive for 6 months.
4. Store only a single copy of "mass mailings" and leave a pointer to the item in each recipients account.
5. Subscribe to a list of blacklisted senders and block mail from these locations.
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they replied with this
Quote:
Hi! Paul,
Please allow me to apologise if you've been given any misleading or contradictory advice in regard to this matter. However I am able to confirm that all emails, including those emails saved in folders via web mail, on the ntlworld mail servers will be deleted after 90 days.
We feel that 90 days is the correct amount of time for these emails to remain on the ntlworld servers as this timescale allows us to maximise the available capacity, plus giving our customers a realistic window in which they can decide wihich emails to download to a local client.
Though we are very sorry for any inconvenience the initial confusion may have caused our customers in the short term I think you'll agree that this action will lead to an overall improvement in service and benefit all our customers.
ntl are commited to ever improving our customers experience and to this end we are presently in the midst of major capital investment project to upgrade and replace or current email servers.
Please rest assured that improvements are at present being made to the service, the benefits of which will be fully evident to all our customers in the next few weeks.
I hope this helps to assure you
Nathan Thomas
Internet Customer Care
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which is complete BS as usual.
btw, the reply came from
internetccare@ntlworld.com so feel free to add that address to your list of useless contacts.