Er...hello?
Think I must have misrepresented my response to the mail.com crap (below) in some way - I've had a bunch of email from people castigating and/or chuckling at me for being surprised at this turn of events. Really, I wasn't that surprised.
We knew the "free for life" thing rang hollow even when we signed up for it. Fully expected them to throw the billing switch at some point in the future. Even if natural TANSTAAFL suspicion were not enough, soon as you see something like this (from mail.com’s parent co.) you could pretty much read the writing on the wall.
So. For the record once again: I promise I’m really not that dumb. Ask David. No, it was the manner of the thing, not the thing itself, that pushed me over the edge.
You know, if they’d asked me, I guarantee I would have responded entirely differently. Sausage and I were quite attached to our all-purpose email forwarding address thingie, and it really is quite a pain to have to switch. I’m sure we probably would have agreed to cough up a nominal annual fee to keep it active. All they had to do was ask - use the freakin' voice, Luke.
In fact, knowing what it can be like living inside a cash-strapped tech company, struggling to make a bean – if they’d appealed for help I would probably have forked over a not inconsiderable amount for the continued service out of straight sympathy.
But no. They chose blackmail. And with Columbia House, of all things - give me strength.
All this demonstrates quite clearly their qualification as a shining example of what Chris once memorably described as one of those: "...companies so lobotomized that they can't speak in a recognizably human voice..."
So bollocks to them.
Think I must have misrepresented my response to the mail.com crap (below) in some way - I've had a bunch of email from people castigating and/or chuckling at me for being surprised at this turn of events. Really, I wasn't that surprised.
We knew the "free for life" thing rang hollow even when we signed up for it. Fully expected them to throw the billing switch at some point in the future. Even if natural TANSTAAFL suspicion were not enough, soon as you see something like this (from mail.com’s parent co.) you could pretty much read the writing on the wall.
So. For the record once again: I promise I’m really not that dumb. Ask David. No, it was the manner of the thing, not the thing itself, that pushed me over the edge.
You know, if they’d asked me, I guarantee I would have responded entirely differently. Sausage and I were quite attached to our all-purpose email forwarding address thingie, and it really is quite a pain to have to switch. I’m sure we probably would have agreed to cough up a nominal annual fee to keep it active. All they had to do was ask - use the freakin' voice, Luke.
In fact, knowing what it can be like living inside a cash-strapped tech company, struggling to make a bean – if they’d appealed for help I would probably have forked over a not inconsiderable amount for the continued service out of straight sympathy.
But no. They chose blackmail. And with Columbia House, of all things - give me strength.
All this demonstrates quite clearly their qualification as a shining example of what Chris once memorably described as one of those: "...companies so lobotomized that they can't speak in a recognizably human voice..."
So bollocks to them.
