I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
My Dad was caught up in the Yahoo Xtra email migration disaster last week.
I logged into his new email service and couldn’t believe what a confusing experience the new web mail is. The screens are full of all sorts of crap trying to get you more locked into Yahoo Xtra services. Dad is in his 60’s (sorry for outing you Dad). He just wants email. It has to be simple.
So I added him to my email domain on Gmail and gave him a simple URL to access. Within a few minutes he was up and running on Gmail.
On the Xtra email service I set up a forwarding rule so that email to his old address ends up in his Gmail account. I also tried to set up a Vacation Responder so that all email to the old address gets notified that dad’s email address has changed. The Vacation Responder (Out of Office feature) does not seem to work on Yahoo Xtra. Grrrr!
Other than that, a simple process.
As Lance noted, separating email from your ISP is a good thing for consumers.
Consumer disaggregation of services is a bad thing for carriers. Screwing up the customer experience and unsophisticated solution thinking can and will now quickly create a tangible drop in ARPU and customer lock in. A very quick way to erode value.
I agree again with Lance, carriers need to reinvent themselves or they will see see value migrate to a new breed of customer centric service providers who use the power of technology and design to build great businesses.
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Separate email from your ISP, that is indeed exactly what people should do. But only few are aware of it. I’ve separated my email since 1996 and it gives you a huge amount of freedom. It also gives you an email address that doesn’t change, just another reason to contemplate that move.
I separated my email from ISP a few years back because it seemed smart at the time. For a while I also redirected mail back via my ISP and that meant I got to run two lots of spam s/w over it which was useful.
I’m mainly with Ihug and in the past year they have had several meltdowns with their mail service (I’m counting 2 -4 day delays as a meltdown also) and so I separated mail out again.
The worst thing about an ISP outage is that you don’t usually know till a customer complains as the message of the day is usually cryptic and understates the problem - which certainly Ihug have done since Vodafone came on board.
I also have a backup mail server offshore just in case as going offline is only an option for holidays - not work.
In my opinion spammers have got more persistent and clever using images and pdfs etc. of late and so simple email is not really an easy thing for the parents. Mine are in the 70’s and even with a Mac and the spam filters on max level - I just don’t think it would be enjoyable for them. (BTW My understanding is that .PDFs are really safe to open any more if you don’t know who they are from; ironically Right Hemisphere helped them embed more functionality for CADs and the like and it has got more complex with other functions now available.
Also I’m concernend with the sheer number sites that I have to register for now. I think spammers are cracking some second tier sites.
While banks have good security and are obvious targets - I think manay spammers get hold of customer lists from the local online book site that isn’t so good so I’ve started looking at how to reduce the number of sites with my main email address on. I know many people use a gmail or similar address for online shopping and so can ditch it UCE gets to be a major problem.
This has implications for password management as well. All things considered email requires much more active management now.