My ISP has just announced with the following message that they have improved my usenet service by not offering it to me anymore:
We have recently upgraded our USENET service so we can deliver the highest quality of service. You will receive one free GB every month and have access to extended retention. You also have the option to sign up for a premium service.
Go here for more information, to sign up for your free account, and to sign up for a premium service:
formatting link
Thank you for your continued support, The Sympatico Services Team
To take part in the usenet I now have to subscribe to either a free service from another supplier, or to a 'premium' service from the same people for a minimum of $10/month.
The free service does not permit me to post (!), and comes with other restrictions. I've temporarily set up Google groups, and am using it now bu the interface is terrible.
Has anyone got any suggestions for me other than changing ISPs? (My last resort.)
Nothing is free. Capitalism is democracy in finance......
Everytime you spend a dollar you are voting. And you get to hold the election whenever you have the liquid assets to vote with.
All I can offer you is that I would feel real good about voting for another company. You make me appreciate my ISP (socket.net) which has been good forever and when they make an improvement, it is an improvement.
I can fully understand your situation. I recently switched ISP's after having been with my previous one since 1996. Why? They were charging double the monthly access charge for half the download allowance compared to the ISP I moved to, plus the new ISP offers a VoIP service for $0.04 extra per month!
There were complications. When I initiated the change it should all have gone through before Easter, but our illustrious national telephone company used the coming Easter break as an excuse to delay things. Then I had a domain name hosted with them and at one stage I was even considering leaving that with them to avoid problems. When they received notification that I was churning to another ISP they sent me a short sharp e-mail advising me that all associated accounts would be terminated. Now I had to find someone else to host my domain name and the last thing I wanted to do was be held hostage if I switched in the future. Fortunately I managed to locate a hosting service that offers an excellent service for 1/3rd what I was paying.
Lastly, when my previous ISP advised me they were to terminate all associated accounts, I replied telling them I would pay out all outstanding accounts but would like them to release all links to them. My old ISP account was terminated on May 6, but my domain name hosting account terminated on May 10. Now despite terminating my ISP account on May 6, and with no facility for me to re-assign the e-mail address to my new ISP or hosting service, they insisted that because the domain name hosting account had 4 more days to run, they would re-assert that they were the domain name hosts. This meant that for 4 days e-mail sent to my domain ended up going nowhere. It was only when the Domain Name Registrar was notified of this that they ceased this one day before the account terminated.
So yes, there is pain in changing and humans do not like being changed. It caused me more than a few problems, and yes there are some quirks with my new account. What I did take out of this was to make sure that if in the future I had to make a change again, it would be a hell of a lot easier.
You mention you are a hostage because of your address book. Why should that be a problem? After all, when I changed my ISP I did nothing to my address book and it all still works. If it is your own e-mail address, then the only solution is to use a free service that allows you to forward e-mail to you current ISP address, or register a domain name (which I believe you have) and use the e-mail forwarding your domain name host offers.
This is one reason I would never subscribe to "web software".
Use Outlook Express or some other email client software. Yes, you will need to enter all your email addresses in, but once that's done, you own it and can use any ISP.
I meant more that changing email addresses is an unwelcome disruption of my business. It happened not to long ago when I had to change hosts. I still get the odd problem over a year later.
Now that I think about it though, all of my business email comes through my own domain, so it is totally portable to another ISP.....There are only two high-speed options here, AFAIK, and the other guy has a tarnished track record as well.
It looks like a Samuel Beckett situation.....we could hang ourselves, but our pants might fall down ; )
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