If You Advertise An 'Unlimited' Email Service, It Had Better Be Actually Unlimited
from the truth-in-advertising dept
A year ago we praised Yahoo! for taking the bold step of offering its email customers unlimited storage space. It was a great concept, but Lee Gomes at the Wall Street Journal recently discovered that we should all start putting scare quotes around "unlimited." It seems that if you leave too many messages in your Yahoo! Mail inbox, you start running into problems. Gomes got a mysterious error message, followed by several years worth of email disappearing. Yahoo! says it can get the messages back in a few hours (presumably restoring them from backup tapes). But this is still pretty embarrassing for Yahoo!, and it's unfortunately all too common in the tech world. Companies love to advertise unlimited service when their systems aren't actually set up for "unlimited" usage. Yahoo! shouldn't advertise an unlimited service unless it's actually unlimited, and somebody should have given some thought to what happens when people store a ton of messages in their inbox. Maybe there's something to be said for Google and Microsoft's approach: instead of claiming that your service is unlimited, pick limits that are high enough (2 GB in Microsoft's case, 6 and constantly growing in Google's) that most users will never have to worry about them, but still give the IT guys a specific number to aim for.
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"unlimited" by Magnus on Mar 24th, 2008 @ 10:14pm
Kind of like Etisalat's "unlimited' 3G dataplan (usable with iPhones, for example) which is really only max 10GB per month.
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Yahoo mail by Brad Werth on Mar 24th, 2008 @ 10:25pm
This happened to me with a Yahoo account. Yahoo actually assured me that they could not restore the missing emails. This really sucked, as I had foolishly been using the email to archive some important information. Of course I wasn't going to use Yahoo again. I didn't want to use my ISPs email, as it is a real pain switching emails when switching ISPs. I decided to switch to an actual host (one that got good reviews at the time, Startlogic) and began using their email. Everything was going great until about two weeks ago, when Startlogic went and go themselves added to every spam blacklist on the planet. Many ISPs will block you from running your own email server. Moral of the story? I guess email is just gonna suck from time to time...
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by Jake on Mar 24th, 2008 @ 10:53pm
I have limited sympathy for Gomes here; occasional hardware failure is a fact of life, as is new features throwing up the occasional weird bug. If all 55,000 emails are important enough that he'll need to refer back to them at all, which I find a bit unlikely, he ought to be making his own backup copies rather whining about the fact that him being too lazy to organise his email archive into sub-folders threw a wrench in the works.
Besides, is it really that hard to sift through your inbox every so often and delete anything you won't need to refer back to?
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by linuxamp on Mar 24th, 2008 @ 11:10pm
Jake, it all depends on their terms of service. If they don't explicitly state limitations of liability then they are responsible for his data loss. As for the mis-representation of the word "unlimited" that's also a matter of the fine print somewhere in their license. If the big headline print was legally binding we'd all be rich since battery lives, usable drive space, available bandwidth etc. are never as great as advertised.
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It's not just e-mail by Tamara on Mar 24th, 2008 @ 11:51pm
That is also a common tactic used by ISPs in Australia. It started off with just 1 (The country's biggest - Telstra) offering "Unlimited" download, when unlimited meant 3GB with high excess download charges. But they also offered an "Unlimited Pro" with a slightly higher included download limit. Other ISPs followed but all of those shaped the excess data rather than charge extra for it.
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it's not a new problem by John Kahler on Mar 25th, 2008 @ 1:08am
I hit the limit a while ago - right after they "gave" all that space though I was well below the limit - and actually diagnosed the solution, though tech support really kinda didn't acknowledge it and haven't fixed it. Seems the limit in the "In" box is at 65,536 messages, which is 2 to the 16th - hex - and as long as you keep the message count in your main folder below that there's no problem (which means deleting excess messages, using subfolders, etc.). Tech support said they couldn't "restore" the messages too, but they're not lost, they just can't be indexed, but they reappear once you remove enough files, by delete or moving to folders, from the main directory. Note that I continue to use that Yahoo account - get Techdirt there daily, for instance, and all my "lost" messages are again found. I've gotten better at organizing and housekeeping so rarely have all my messages "disappear" any more.
Why no fix? I suspect it would mean rewriting the whole database/index behind the system. Who could imagine that anyone would have anything near 65,536 messages? Who could imagine that a personal computer would need more than 10 meg of storage - on something called a hard drive - and 64K of memory???? Now, WHY I have that many messages in my in box is a totally different question...
- John
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They're not lying though... by PaulT on Mar 25th, 2008 @ 3:19am
In most of these cases, they advertise unlimited but then confess that there is actually some kind of limit. That kind of this is unacceptable and deserves to be exposed.
However, at least Yahoo are being honest here. They're not placing any limits on the service, it's just that they've had a few technical hiccups while running it. They're not trying to penalise Gomes for using the service in this way and they should be able to restore emails for him so nothing is ultimately lost.
To me, this is a non-issue. There's nobody trying to mislead anyone, it's just a tech issue that Yahoo should be able to resolve at some point. As Gomes says "Turns out Yahoo isn’t really prepared for users doing what we do–namely keeping all their mail in a single inbox–as opposed to moving them into sub-folders.".
If Yahoo are aware of the issue, it can be fixed. In the meantime, he's already noted his own workaround for the problem - make a few subfolders (maybe one for each month of year rather than content), and spend 20 minutes moving messages out of the inbox.
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I keep a local backup... by TX CHL Instructor on Mar 25th, 2008 @ 3:22am
I use gmail, which, while not "unlimited", has a pretty hefty chunk of storage, and seems to be growing faster than my usage. It's convenient, and it's nice to be able to access my mail from places other than home.
But once a week or so, I download all my gmail to my home system with Thunderbird (free, open-source news/mail reader). Once a year, my emails get archived to CD. That way, I will still have my back emails even if Google decided for some reason to terminate gmail, or maybe an earthquake or tornado took out one of their datacenters, etc.
I keep all my non-spam email forever. I occasionally retrieve emails sent to me more than 5 years ago.
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by Jake on Mar 25th, 2008 @ 4:38am
Granted, Linuxamp. Nevertheless, it sounds like Yahoo! did everything reasonable to resolve the issue when they found out about the bug, and I really feel for the tech-support guy who had to deal with Gomes if he took the same tone as that column.
And while we're on the subject, using the WSJ's name in connection to an issue with an email he owns as a private individual -which is strongly implied in the column- was grossly unprofessional. 'Mainstream media prerogatives' my good right boot!
Sorry if I'm not being very objective here, but the man's attitude just infuriated me; you'd think someone in his line of work would have figured out by now that shit happens.
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Beyond unlimited by Steve Johnson on Mar 25th, 2008 @ 4:39am
The real challenge is that no one who develops these services has any idea the crazy things that people will do when it hits the market. Who at Apple thought that people would have 160G of music! Who at Google thought that people would use gmail as an offsite for their data (need a backup, just email it to yourself)? So when a company quite innocently advertises "unlimited," they are invariably shocked at how the service will be pushed to the limit by a tiny minority.
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Google's Limit by Killer_Tofu on Mar 25th, 2008 @ 5:19am
I always liked the picture that represented google's mail limit goal.
Infinite +1
Was going to find a picture and link to it, but don't have enough time to find it. Sorry.
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Re: They're not lying though... by Chronno S. Trigger on Mar 25th, 2008 @ 5:20am
From the sounds of the article someone is trying to mislead us. Gomes. He's acting like this is an undocumented limitation when it's just a technical glitch.
"Like many other cubicle dwellers saddled with slow-poke corporate Microsoft Outlook email, we regularly forward our regular work mail to an outside account"
I don't think I have ever heard of anyone doing that and if they did that's grounds for firing around here and probably a lot of ether places as well. I hope his boss doesn't read the article he wrote.
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you actually TRUST Yahoo!?!?!? by ehrichweiss on Mar 25th, 2008 @ 5:36am
.....With your email!??! HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! I have a yahoo so I can use their IM and that's it. Their spam protection is non-existent, their customer service is slow beyond belief and now I'm supposed to be surprised by this?? There's a reason I run my own (legit) mailserver: at least if there's a problem, I'm the only person I can blame.
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by Rekrul on Mar 25th, 2008 @ 6:29am
Which perfectly illustrates the dangers of relying on some online company to store your data. If you want to use such services as a backup, or to allow access to the data from any computer, that's fine, but for anything important, you should always make sure to save a local copy.
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by Chuck on Mar 25th, 2008 @ 7:06am
This is exactly why your email should be on your own computer, backed up, not on someone's web site. Web mail is convenient when you are traveling, and it's great for disposable addresses or light users, but it's NOT acceptable as a primary email solution for people who need to keep important email archived. If you insist on using Yahoo or GMail as a primary email address, then at least get Thunderbird or Outlook at home and use it to retrieve those messages and store them yourself.
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Re: Google's Limit by Heywood on Mar 25th, 2008 @ 7:30am
Hey, thanks for nothing.
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