I am thinking this is a consipracy to rid the world of all the junk mail as well as the old accounts on their servers, sorry Orange you have gone about this the wrong way, I have sent an email to the Oleaf guy (Probably spelt incorrectly but who cares) and had not reply yet, my guess is we are stuffed just like kippers in a can with no escape out of it!
what were they thinking?
Here is my short version of what went through their tech heads before they did this.
Tech 1 person "Whats this for?"
Tech 2 person " No idea it looks like a delete key"
Tech 1 person "Lets screw up peoples lives and press it, no one will ever know it was us"
Tech 2 person "Yes lets!!!"
Tech 1 person "Click"
Tech 2 person "Opps I think we had delelted all the old freeserve accounts"
Tech 1 person " I know lets blame the people who use these accounts and then we can get away with it and we can go our merry way again"
Well sorry to say you morons you wont get away with it!!
We are on your case and will hound you just like you are now screwing up people lives and causing misery, ever heard of stress? You have created a lot of stressed people and you can be sued for that!
You make an excellent argument.
Lets make sure that we keep up the pressure. What Orange have done is absolutely unacceptable. Their blatant disregard for our personal and private information is a disgrace
Like many others I used my account daily and was completely unaware that Orange would do this. If I had known of their intent then I would have removed all of the mails with my bank details, passwords reminders etc from the mail history.
It begs the question what will happen to the archive records?
Are the files still protected or can they be retrieved and the information used to hack into our other personal data?
Posting new terms and conditions on a web page is a feeble excuse and certainly does not absolve them of the responsibility that they have to all of us.
They had the chance to end the Freeserve and Wanadoo e-mail customers at the time of the take over but they willingly accepted the accounts and as such they have an obligation to behave responsibly.
Orange were not backwards when it came to contacting us via e-mail with their promotional offers were they? There is absolutely no excuse for not contacting the dial up customers and warning of their intent; with current technology available they could have easily identified active e-mail accounts by the usage dates.
I wonder if anyone else received the same reply as I did when I called the Support Team? After taking my name and my now deleted Freeserve email address I was told that Orange would contact me???!!!! I offered them my hotmail address but was told that there was nowhere to capture that information on the complaints form???!!
I asked the individual just how they proposed to contact me as they have no other records for me?
The reply? "They will find a way somehow". Absolutely brilliant. Orange have obviously deleted our accounts and have opted to replace them with telepathy.
If Orange wish to resolve this they should re-activate all of the deleted accounts for 30 days to enable us to port our address book and sensitive information to another e-mail account or our own archives.
Oh and maybe they could publicise the dates for this in a suitable manner for all of us to see, perhaps in place of one of their quirky "Orange Wednesday" adverts and not rely on the power of Orange thought transfer!
Further to you recent contact from Dan, I have taken this opportunity to
update you on the actions we are taking to resolve your outstanding
issues.
Our Technical Department are still investigating the possibilities of you
regaining access to your email account and we are doing everything we can
to rectify the problems.
Please accept my apologies for the continuing problems you are
experiencing and rest assured we are doing everything possible to rectify
the situation.
Joined: 05 Sep 2007Posts: 3Location: Milton Keynes, UK
My freeserve account suffered the same fate. I logged in as normal on 21st August, the following week I couldn't log in and Orange support told me the account was deleted. No warning, nothing. A few days later my father's freeserve account was also deleted.
Like many others this was my only personal email account and I have lost many contacts, details of travel bookings and countless else. I don't dispute the T&C's but the fact there is no warning is inexcusable.
Skype credit expires after a similar period of non-use but at least they have the courtesy to send warning emails 30 days, 7 days and 3 days before it happens.
To me dial-up email was just regular email with the convenience of web-access (I work abroad a lot), the fact that Orange regarded it as a burden to be off-loaded asap has only become apparent as I have done further research.
I am a long-standing customer of Orange telecom (> 10 years) and unless I get compensation from them I will be taking my business elsewhere, never to return. Believe it or not when owned by Hutchison Orange were an industry leader in mobile telecoms and customer service was second-to-none and I had no hestitation in recommending them - how things change.
I now have both a Gmail account and Fastmail subscription account (USD 19.95 per year). I have checked the T&C's on the latter and not only is there no advertising but I get advance notice that a payment is due BEFORE they actually delete anything. Fastmail allows synchronisation between the email stored on their server and your home PC too, so you can access your historical email whether you are at home or not.
I take it that my new orangehome email address I had to start up due to this fiasco is also going to be delelted if I dont dial up or is that one immune to this problem, or will I have to dial up for ever and a day?
What happens if you start up an Orange account on orangehome and you dont have a modem?
Looks like you maybe screwed there too.
I have started a gmail account and will dump Orange as soon as I know what is going on, never going to go to Orange mobile now either, did consider it in the past but they wanted to screww me on that too, sticking with a much better company, I hope all those who have lost accounts move thier phone accounts too, maybe Orange might wake up then.
The most annoying this is they said that the freeserve account were safe, what a lie that was!
Thats a very different senario, nothing I've heard has pointed this as anything but accounts expiring natually and being deleted by the system for going too long without dialup access.
AFAIK PlusNet, who seem to attract email problems, weren't able to recover a large number of those emails.
A new orangehome email account, setup as a pay as you go dialup account, will delete eventually if you don't dialup or retrieve the account.
Site AdminJoined: 07 Apr 2006Posts: 784Location: United Kingdom
Orange wrote:
Orange Statement to The Regsiter regarding deleted email accounts:
Orange sent us (The Regsiter) the following statement: "Some of our Orange dial-up pay-as-you-go customers have experienced an issue accessing their Orange email accounts. This is because when a pay-as-you-go dial-up account has not been used for a long period (260 days), it is deleted and along with it, so is any associated email account."
But Orange was keen to show it was all heart: "We are aware some customers want to retrieve their email accounts and were unaware that their account would be deleted. As a result of this customer feedback we are working to restore these email accounts and are reviewing this as a priority and will update you soon."
The legal position is not clear, but Orange likely has duties under the Data Protection Act to restore people's personal information. It is also required to keep copies of emails for possible police investigations under RIPA, assuming Orange stores the emails in the UK. More angry customers on OrangeProblems.co.uk here.
Some customers claim to have complained to the Internet Service Providers Association, of which Orange is a sponsor, but it was unable to comment by press time.
Updated: A spokesman for Ispa told us: "It's a little early for us to take action. The complaints procedure is that people must complain to their ISP and give them ten days to respond before we take action. We understand that Orange is looking to restore access to these accounts."
We also asked for a comment from Orange but so far they have not responded!
We'll keep you updated, along with our friends at The Register
I have just emailed Micheal Ramage asking for my emails on my accounts under the DPA "Right of subject access", it will be interesting to see what the reply is.
I wouldn't be surprised if OFCOM "advised" Orange that they must recover the deleted emails (but not necessarily re-instate the accounts) because of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA). If they do, then it may not be in a format that can be accessed by the account holders but would be capable of being searched and retrieved by the UK security depts. using RIPA warrants.
I believe Council Directive 97/66, The Data Protection Telecommunications Directive, applies to all EU countries but RIPA goes one step further by allowing data access by security depts.
_________________ An ex-Orange guinea pig
"The first third of our lives is ruined by our parents, the second third by 0range then along comes 02 and you die happy."
Further investigation has revealed that the *content* of e-mails, the full URLs browsed and any other information such as the content of filestore is *not* covered by these RIPA powers.
The RIPA powers only apply to communications data, in other words data about the *use* of networks. The Act divides communications data into Three, rather unclear, types, these seem to mean:
information about individual users (e.g. the name of the owner of an account);
information about use of the system (e.g. times when a user logged in);
Information about communications (e.g. the time and to and from headers of an e-mail, or web servers, not pages, accessed by a particular user).
So it would appear that if Orange are legally forced to recover data its content will be limited and will be of little or probably no use to ex-account holders.
_________________ An ex-Orange guinea pig
"The first third of our lives is ruined by our parents, the second third by 0range then along comes 02 and you die happy."
I'm not so sure that saving reputation comes into their strategic plan. This is proved by their performance as an ISP to date.
Now I've looked at RIPA it does seem possible that they have committed an offence by "destroying" (if that has happened) data containing names of account owners, network access times and email to / from details.
If they have committed an offence, this alone will force them to recover just the data required under RIPA. And as I said earlier, this may not be in a format that can be used by ex-account holders.
_________________ An ex-Orange guinea pig
"The first third of our lives is ruined by our parents, the second third by 0range then along comes 02 and you die happy."
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