Incompetence or lack of concern for customers?

[#1]

Quote from: matthews

I hope I'm not coming across as argumentative as I'm genuinely interested in this discussion (I like Plusnet and believe that the majority of complaints on the forums are things that can be learnt from and fixed).

Hi,
No not argumentative at all.  Your point was well made and I think many would (not unreasonably) consider a GB not much storage considering how cheap storage is at present.  I have a 4GB disk drive I bought years ago (when 4GB was MASSIVE!) but never did get it installed due to work project distractions and must have paid well over £100 for it.
Recently I bought a 64G USB pen drive for less than £20.
Looking at the problem from that end, more storage does not seem unreasonable at an individual level.  However when you scale it up over the user base, the figures and the management tasks are eye-watering!
To have a frank discussion on the issues of scalability is a useful activity - people learn and are aided to think beyond their own horizons.  I just dread to think about the size of Google's or Drop-box's storage farms to say nothing of the size of their back-up systems, where user's starting point is 15GB.  

[#2]

Interesting discussion.
The IEE had an article some while ago in its magazine exactly about this and the amount of power and other ancillaries required to run Google's stuff.
You wondered where all the money to pay for this sort of thing came from.
(This is a print only mag' for professional engineers).
most of the scale up calc's rely on not everyone using all at the same time.
So for instance electric cooker cabling/fuse sizing calculations are all done in accordance with the regs which assume not all the bits are on full blast all at the same time.
As regards email as I've said on the email sub-forum I can see ISP's ceasing it.
It really must be a load of aggro what with virus, spam and other support issues from people wanting to receive/send emails though some tablet with problems etc.
Significantly the New FTTP altnet companies springing up are not providing email at all - just being connectivity suppliers.
So their customers either go down the  'free' path as in gmail/hotmail/gmx etc or go paid for if they want a business grade supplier.
Maybe sometime in the future plusnet might outsource it with customers being told either they have to pay extra for it or loose it. 
At the moment I understand that ISP all regard email as a free add on gratis to the broadband package.

[#3]

Quote from: x47c

.. that ISP all regard email as a free add on gratis to the broadband package.

As an ISP client I regard email as an unwanted feature added to the cost of my monthly subscription for internet connectivity.  I do actually pay for email services via Google with their business apps because of their high service level and the built in search capability. They bill according to the amount of storage used and not whether the account is active.

[#4]

There's a distinct lack of input from the OP and Plusnet on this thread now.
I too think ISPs like Plusnet don't set out to provide a full email service and why should they. I would prefer they let it wither and reduce costs.
I personally have a domain and email service left over from when I was actively running a business and my practices are a hangover from then. Its my job to manage my emails including archiving. I would never use a mailbox as a dump but clear it out at regular intervals in my case automatically. In my active business days I was responsible for maintaining trading records whether snail mail or email for a defined period and still do out of habit.
Its all down your personal regimen but you can't rely on an domestic ISP like Plusnet to organise your life for you. 

[#5]

I think I am now in a position to answer the question I posed in the title of this thread. My apologies for it taking so long, I have been repeatedly occulting to 10 until I was calm enough to respond without falling foul of the no-bad-language forum rule...
I received a reply to my ticket about this issue which in part made little sense. What little sense one paragraph did make was directly contradicted in the next paragraph, and the member of staff referred me to a section of the Acceptable Use Policy which was not relevant to my case.
I rang up, got no further and eventually had a call back from a manager. He told me that he agreed that it seemed nonsensical to send notification of the archiving and subsequent deletion of my emails because I hadn't accessed the email box for 90 days only to the email address I wasn't accessing. Indeed, it seems this is an issue plusnet are aware of, but the manager told me that not many customers have complained, and it would be too much work to correct the problem.
So, I reckon that answers my question. Incompetence in setting up a nonsensical automated system in the first place, and lack of concern for customers in not dealing with this known problem and in not warning customers in any of their policies, terms or conditions that this is in fact their policy.

[#6]

Quote from: PeterLoftus

Its all down your personal regimen but you can't rely on an domestic ISP like Plusnet to organise your life for you.

Not sure what makes you think I was relying on plusnet to organise my life for me... But I would like to assure you I don't. All I was relying on was my ISP making reasonable efforts to notify me that they were intending to archive / delete my emails by sending me notice of that to the contact email address they hold for me and to which they seem to send copies of all other emails. If I wanted someone to organise my life for me, I would use someone who COULD organise a p.. p... 'party' in a brewery...

[#7]

Sorry for the lack of CRT presence in this thread. I have been watching from afar.
Alan I do think you raise a good point, so I'll get it mentioned. I suppose that I'd attribute this to the lack of change to the fact that we haven't changed the webmail in a long time, and we are focusing on other features at the moment.

[#8]

Thanks MattyC!

[#9]

Quote from: MattyC

we haven't changed the webmail in a long time

Matty,
For clarity, this has nothing to do with Webmail (which has been changed comparatively recently) but rather management of the email host services.  This issue relates to the length of time for which a mailbox has not been accessed by an email client (webmail or any other) and the consequential notification and archiving action.
It is interesting to compare this "management" activity with that for the total email storage exceeding 1GB.  Emails for that are sent to the account contact email address - is their a reason why this is not done in respect of an unaccessed mailbox and / or (especially) one which is a about to be "archived" and subsequently lost?
Kevin

[#10]

Not that I can really think of. Ideally, I think we should be a bit more forward with the policies in regards to what happens with the mailbox if left inactive for three months (either that or change the policy).

Quote from: MattyC

we haven't changed the webmail in a long time

Think I might have been on autopilot there