Quote:
Originally Posted by samhu
Let me make a wild guess - those of you here who are so easily dismissing "US$14.95 one-time fee Members" grouses aren't in their shoes?
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True enough, but I think it's safe to say a lot of us probably wouldn't have had this expectation in the first place, which is also probably why it's so easy to dismiss it.
The problem is there's a
huge philosophical gulf between the group of happily-paying annual FastMail members and the legacy "Member" users, and it's probably difficult to bridge that gap between those who feel that an e-mail address and account borders on being a basic right and those who feel that anything important is worth paying to get done properly. I'm not even saying that one philosophy is more correct than the other — merely that it's hard for one side to really understand where the other is coming from.
I believe you get what you pay for, and I consider e-mail far too important to me to not pay real money for it on a regular basis, as well as to have it set up in such a way that I'm not beholden to any one provider, regardless of how much money I'm giving them. I registered my own domain name back in 1998 — almost 20 years ago — to use as my primary email address. I've used at least a dozen different email providers in that time frame, and even gone back and forth between some a few times, but my address has never changed, and any policy changes by any one provider or another has never been anything more than a minor inconvenience.
Of course, I don't expect everybody to think the way I did, and as I've expressed earlier in this thread, I really do sympathize with those folks who feel that FastMail made them a promise of a lifetime e-mail account back in 2002, however I can also see FastMail's perspective on this as well — I think there's a middle ground here to understand that 15 years is a lifetime in "Internet time" and things do change, and of course the very fact that FastMail is making a pretty generous offer here to either refund or convert "Member" accounts is a reasonable compromise on their end.