Yobo, sorry but cannot agree with you at all. For a start the solutions
suggested by Virgin mean passing email addresses & contents to third parties
which Virgin specifically point out that they will accept no responsibility
for.
Virgin have gone down the old British solution of not actually saying WHY
they reduced the maximum email size, customers making excuses for a supplier
degrading what you are paying for is not reasonable (but very British), the
cost to Virgin of providing the service will have fallen. They have not
reduced the cost to the customer when they pulled the service. Analogies to
postmen have little relevance other than the customer cost of a service
increasing when it should be decreasing. The original penny black stamp cost
about 13p in today's money, the post office for generations did not have to
answer to customers and despite postcodes, automation and grossly reducing
customer deliveries etc we will be paying 30p for a 1st class stamp in a few
weeks.
If virgin did hit a problem (storage ?) a year or so ago then they should
have firstly spoken to customers and secondly provided some service to deal
with these things The cost of hardware to store email is low - Google will
store 1GB for you free of charge and offset costs with advertising. For
Virgin to leave customers to hang, to have them left to invent possible
explanations is frankly bizarre but is all too typical of large UK
businesses and why they ultimately fail in the market. Too many UK companies
(not to mention the civil service) are hidebound by a self serving
bureaucracy which does not understand or care about customers. They think
that customers don't understand what they want and should be told. One
famous example was that early post WW2 UK cars only had a external lock on
the drivers door, when they exported them to the USA they kept the lock on
the right hand door. Not surprisingly there were few customers in the US who
wanted to enter the car via the passenger door. The attitude of the UK
companies stank, arrogance and ignorance did not stop them going out of
business.
The UK ISP business is rather hidebound and its reasonable to suppose that a
large number of those now in the business will fail, the reasons they fail
will look no better than the reasons the UK car industry collapsed when
viewed from the future.
Cutting service and not talking to customers is a pretty good marker that a
company is heading for big problems and I would speculate already in trouble
right now. At the start of this thread it was said they had not actually
fixed a server failure after almost a week, this says a lot, can they not
afford a few more blade serves, hard drives or whatever?
Post by YoBoPost by anonSnap, I want to send large files to a small Print Shop and its got to be
very, very simple for them, if they have problems I don't get my printing
done in time. It would be fine if they were a large organisation trained to
handle FTP etc but alas not. It's good to see other folk talking about
similar problems, that should be one step towards things getting fixed
(apologies for this naive fit of optimism, I'll wake up and remember I'm
British).
Not normally one to defend the corporations of the world I do feel a sense
of disagreement with the general feelings shown thus far.
Email is, in my view, comparable to the standard letter mail service. What
you seem to want to do is load the postman down with ruddy great heavy
parcels. He will not last long if everybody puts that load on him. It's not
what he was intended for.
Maybe what we need is a form of parcel service. Where you just point to the
file and it is uploaded, an email with the link sent and the recipient's
system then offers the choice to fetch it. I think some photo repository
sites work in a similar way but I have never used one to be sure.
Would that save any bandwidth/resources? Maybe not but it would allow
letters and parcels to be separated.
YoBo