awful... (bigfoot.com)

Member Name: manc_rob

Product:	bigfoot.com
Date:	31/07/04 (909 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: none

Disadvantages: unreliable, poor security, loads of spam

sorry, but i cant recommend this service to anyone. i signed up for a 'Premium' account a few months ago - my reasoning was that they had to provide a better service than some of the free email services out there, because i was paying them - how wrong i was!
i don't want to start ranting, so i will just list some of the reasons i recommend staying away from bigfoot:

shocking amounts of downtime - the mail servers are often offline, especially the webmail server, once i couldn't access either the POP or webmail services for 4 consecutive days. shorter outages are common, once every few days i have problems connecting.

poor security - i wont go into details, but there is at least one shocking flaw in the security for the bigfoot webmail site, resulting in your password being retrievable from the browser cache on your PC, and occasionally displayed on screen (!) and in your browser 'history'. i emailed customer service about this 3 times, all my emails were completely ignored, and the problem persists.

unreliable forwarding - numerous mails received by my bigfoot account are not forwarded, there seems to be little pattern, sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't

poor customer service - when you write to the customer service team you get an automated response promising a reply within 24 hours, this rarely happens. i have contacted them a number of times about the issues i have described here, sometimes i got no reply at all, on other occasions i just got a vague apology with no real explanation

spam - despite opting out of all the marketing/mailing liss options, i get increasing amounts of spam in my inbox - most of it is written in some asian language, so i cant even read it, and it started when i sent my first letter to complaint to customer services - i noticed that the complaint was delivered to 'someone@asia.bigfoot.com' - go figure.....

other minor niggles include:

inability to send plain-text email from the web interface
here's a fun game if you are ever bored - log into webmail home page and try to find out how to use the email 'reminder' feature. look in the help if you get stuck.

i was reluctant to cancel my account, having just sent out my new address to all my friends and contacts, but after 3 months of this i'd had enough and clicked on the 'terminate account' link on the website - true to form, even the cancellation process was a joke - the link opens up your email client and creates a new mail for you, ready addressed and with a subject of 'terminate account' or some such thing. i filled in the email, sent it off, and got a reply within a few minutes asking me not to use that address, but to use the 'contact page on the website instead. the contact page makes you select a category before you can type anything, but does not include anything that even remotely describes account cancellation. when i eventually got a response from customer support they told me that i could cancel my account if i wanted, but that despite everything they would still be billing me for 6 months service, even though i cancelled after 3

i have since managed to get hold of a GMail account (the new Google email service) and am very impressed - its not available to the public just yet, but when it is i say use them, very impressive interface, excellent spam filtering, and 1000Mb of storage, and its FREE!

Summary: