When Your Inbox Disappears

It's scary to think about how much “free” stuff we depend on: we watch network TV, and check out books from the library, and use coupons that promise “buy one get one free” – all on the assumption that we're getting something for nothing, when we really are paying, one way or another. The network takes our time (and hopes we watch its ads), the library stays open because of our taxes and donations, and the “free” sweater we got with our coupon is actually one-half of the total we spent on the first one.

But most insidious of all is our dependency on the “free” communication networks of the Internet. Take away Wikipedia or Google search, and I feel lost. Take away my free email, and I'm bereft, not just of my primary way of communicating with friends and colleagues, but also of all the information I've save in those messages: the instructions, the jokes, the stories, and of course, the contact information.

The fragility of this communication system came home to me in a very real way a few days ago when I was reading messages in my Yahoo Inbox. Suddenly, as I was in the middle of a reply, I received a server error message, and then another one, and as the little hour glass icon stubbornly turned round and round before my eyes, my email messages began to disappear.

Unable to find the scroll bar on the right hand side of my Yahoo window, I used my arrow keys to try to move to the next message. And then it was gone. I moved again, and another message vanished.

I tried to see if I was somehow accidentally deleting the messages, but my Trash box was empty as well. So I closed the window, and rechecked my mail. Now my Inbox was completely empty; every single message there, read and unread, had disappeared into the ether.

So I did what I always do when confronted by a serious technical glitch; I called my local IT guy, otherwise known as my husband. “What did you do?” he asked accusingly. “What did I do>” I answered indignantly. “What did Yahoo do to my mail? That's what you should be asking.”

Suffice it to say that despite “live” chat with two Yahoo customer service agents who asked a lot of questions and then disappeared, perhaps to take a tea break somewhere on the other side of the world where they are undoubtedly underpaid to provide minimal assistance to end users like me. After all, Yahoo Mail is a “free” service, and therefore Yahoo is not going to go out of its way to help those who get into trouble using it.

Still it was discouraging to wake up the next morning and find out that “Santi” had never reappeared in any form to answer my increasingly urgent queries: “Are you there?” “Hello, hello, hello.” “Please contact me at -------------- when you find out what went wrong” “Is there anyone else there who can help me?”

By dint of much searching, I finally found a link where I could request restoration of my email, which I did, not realizing that when someone finally set back the clock twelve hours, it would completely overwrite any messages that I'd downloaded in the interim. “We're not yet set up to support integration of messages. We regret the inconvenience” is the gist of the email message that arrived to inform me of this unfortunate side effect, well after I could do anything about it.

So here I am, a chastened user of the wonders of the Internet, rapidly transferring my most precious emails to my Gmail account. And why do I trust Google more than Yahoo, you might ask? Gmail is also a “free” service and one that is still in “beta” mode, at least officially.

Well, the truth is that there is one thing that trumps “free” on the Internet, and that is having “connections,” not in the sense of high speed access, but actually knowing a human being I can call on when I'm in trouble. Even in cyberspace, it's still worthwhile to have that human connection, and as long as I know I can reach a real person at Google, their “free” service offers me a lot more value than I can ever expect from Yahoo.

So caveat emptor, and while you take pleasure in the freebies of the Internet, don't forget that they can come with an unexpected price.