[Theforum] evolt.org revamp comment period open

Martin Burns martin at easyweb.co.uk
Sat Feb 1 15:50:15 CST 2003


On Sat, 1 Feb 2003, Madhu Menon wrote:

> At 08:20 AM 01-02-03, .jeff wrote:
> >my only concern with completely dropping it is that there are some of us
> >who've used the service (most notably the pop email account) for 3+ years
> >now.  i'd be totally screwed if my meo email account suddenly quit working.
>
> I was talking on Yahoo with Jeff about this and his concern is a fair one.
>
> My solution is a compromise. Stop offering meo email as a POP service and
> keep it around only as a forwarding service.

Ideal, yes. But still costs bandwidth.

Really, given enough notice, people will move without it killing them.

A parallel example: Our work email addresses are the primary contact means
for our organisation which lives or dies by personal relationships - with
past clients, with networking contacts etc etc to run current and be able
to hear about future chargeable work (not to mention friends who email us
at work). This is a tens-of-billions of dollars business depending on
email contact.

Yet when we got taken over by IBM, 1 month after the announcement, emails
were redirected to our IBM email accounts (which we had to figure out how
to access, which wasn't fun), and 1 month after that, the PwC email
addresses just bounced with a simple "user not known".

We had 2 months to notify every single person we cared about knowing that
the address was moving.

Given the motivation, it won't kill members (and I've got a meo address I
use too...). If it matters enough, you'll let people know. If you don't
let people know, it can't really matter.

Cheers
Martin

--
"Names, once they are in common use, quickly
 become mere sounds, their etymology being
 buried, like so many of the earth's marvels,
 beneath the dust of habit." - Salman Rushdie




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