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Mailbox Glut

Anyone who has had their mailbox flushed clean for not having logged in for 30 days will be able to relate to this woman's frustration with Lycos and giving her attitude to add insult to injury. The story has been Slashdotted and greatly commented upon needless to say. A lot of people believe that she was naive, foolish and in as such, her case was ab initio void.

When Hotmail introduced us all to the brave new world of free web email, it was like been ushered into an all you can eat buffet and told "Oh, by the way. This is all free". To make up for the storage limits per email account, people created half a dozen different ones and it was just too hard to remember to login to every one of them at the right frequency.

Then one day you open a long forgotten mailbox and voila it was completely empty. The inactivation policy had kicked in and nothing short of paying $20 to reactive it would restore your old mails. Should the consumer blame providers of all you can eat free buffets for baiting and switching on them ? Or should we chastise ourselves for our insatiable gluttony ?

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