Reseller Account Finally Closed

Yes, my reseller account has finally been closed. Yippee!!!

The reason for all the lateness was given in a series of blurted excuses. I can only vouch for the credibility of one of them: they had got my email address wrong. I had been a customer of theirs for years and they had got my email address wrong.

Specifically: my surname is contained within my email address. My surname is "Goodfellow", but they had used "Goodfella" (you know, as in the pizzas and the gangster movie).

They have also sent me an invoice for over £2,500, casused by excess bandwidth which occurred when their bandwidth alert system turned itself off (because it had previously detected an issue with excess bandwidth, a "curiosity" of their system which they deny exists - see previous posts). That this invoice was sent through the postal system may mean that it was simply an automatic despatch. But if they follow it up with demands then there is going to be trouble. I might even reveal who the ISP is!

Review: Credit Card Matters

Empty Emails

This is about co-called empty emails. Following on from silent phone calls it's no surprise that I don't much like empty emails either. But there the comparison ends.

Because empty emails originate from possibly the worst kind of Internet scum-life.

Empty emails are spam, certainly. But they go beyond spam. Empty emails consist of nothing in the From line, nothing in the To line, nothing in the Subject line and no content whatseover. It is a blank email. Pointless, you might think. Not so. Because, instantly recognisable sitting there looking quite useless in your inbox, they have but one purpose: to trigger autoresponder emails of the type that announce that you are away on holiday for a couple of weeks.

If that happens then the senders of the empty emails will try to find your physical address, and then sell it to criminals who will then break into your home, steal your belongings and turn your life into a nightmare upon your return from holiday. That is what empty emails are for.

Notice how you get much, much more of them during the summer months?

Caution: never set up an email autoresponder letting the world know you are away from home. Would you pin the same message to your front door while you were away?

One final point. The reason that as few details as possible are given by the empty email sender is that they will want to leave as small a footprint as possible. To trigger an email autoresponder all that is necessary is to reach that address, Subject line or no Subject line. If you want to know who it's from then you will have to look in the Headers (see my post in this blog 'What To Do With Spam').

ISP Reseller Account Closure Delays

Last week marked the end of my reseller account with the ISP I haven't named yet. Whoopee!!! The date that the account was due for renewal fell on the Saturday, and I couldn't wait to cancel it. But it seemed that my ISP (identity to be revealed later, folks) had other ideas.

Several days after my cancellation request they wrote that I had to apply for a special cancellation form. This took me over the threshold of another year (the account is billed annually) and another £450 + VAT, which I'm not going to pay, obviously. Then I got a phone call from the accounts department saying that they had received notification that I wished to cancel my reseller account, but that I had several resold accounts still active. This was after I had carefully deleted all of them several days before.

That their system did not pick up on
the deletions did not surprise me. Anyway, I deleted them again while the representative was on the phone. I then mentioned that I had asked for the cancellation forms for my reseller account a few days before, but had not received them. By the end of that working day I had received no fewer than five emails with the cancellation forms as attachments (sounds like the different departments aren't communication properly with each other, eh? Again, this did not surprise me.)

Today I completed and signed the cancellation form and tried to fax it to their fax number. My fax machine just kept on going on auto fax but their number was busy for several hours continuously. I emailed them to ask them to either free up the fax machine or provide another number. They did not reply.

Mid afternoon one of the many fail reports I was getting caused a paper jam. I was getting nowhere. I checked the fax number they had written on the cancellation form and found that it was different to the fax number on their emails. They had sent me the wrong fax number!

I used the new fax number. It was engaged. It was engaged a further three hours. I eventually managed to get the cancellation form faxed through to them at a quarter to six in the evening.

But probably the fax will get "lost" as nobody was there during office hours to receive it, and they will bill me a further year's account charge.

Over my dead body.

This story, unfortunately, will continue.