[MikeS1531]

I see from a couple of other TSG threads that there was a major failure of the Bigfoot email forwarding service at the beginning of August and I'm experiencing something similar right now, with nothing forwarded for the past three days compared to my usual 20/day.

Is anyone else now experiencing a similar interruption to their Bigfoot service?

[tmgp]

mine is down since friday i believe... zero emails this weekend...

at least a warning would be nice...

[darkchocjohn]

Yes - I have had no bigfoot emails since arounf the 15th, certainly over this past weekend. I was able to access their contact us page and left a message but so far have had no reply. I am sadly and reluctantly on the cusp of giving up and losing my for life email address. Anyone any suggestions?

[Fistral]

So here we are 3 months later with no emails again! Oh what a fool I have been. So many posts said dump them and get another address.
Its not that easy though. So many people that you will lose touch with because they've changed their email address, but yours is for life isn't it?

Why are they allowed to get away with it? Just because I got this service for free doesn't mean I don't suffer damages by this.
I can understand a rare, short outage for technical reasons but last time was for 3 weeks. And that wasn't the first.

Previous thread on earlier outage is here
http://forums.techguy.org/business-a...rding-not.html

If I don't change my email this time will somebody please kick me!

[darkchocjohn]

Yes

I took the plunge today and abandoned Bigfoot reluctantly, sadly, a real let down. I feel the loss of a cool address and one that I'd hoped would be for life.

But it has been 5 or 6 days now and no reply from the enquiries I sent which promise a 24 hour response!


Sad sad sad

[tmgp]

the problem is that i don't know how many accounts and subscritions i had with bigfoot, as it was supposed to be "for life"... time to buy a domain i think... cheap as they are...

[darkchocjohn]

Bigfoot have today replied to my weekend enquiries:

We are always glad to hear from our customers whatever the circumstances may be.

This matter is already being looked into by our team and we should be able to fix this as soon as possible. In the meantime, please use your personal account to receive emails while are still resolving this matter.


Sincerely,


Heather Edwards, Customer Support (JVL)
Bigfoot Communications LLC

Too late however

I have switched addresses

[tmgp]

and no feedback about receiving the emails that were sent during the downtime? c'mon, that's a major concern...

[MikeS1531]

Fistral: Abandoning Bigfoot might not be quite as traumatic as you fear. Once you get another address -- g(oogle)mail can also work as a free forwarding service, as Bigfoot is supposed to do -- you send out a change of address notice to everyone in your address book. Ask everyone to reply to your new address to confirm they've put your new details in their address book, and then just start using your new address. There's nothing you can do about people who you can't reach because they've changed their address without telling you, though you might find that some may still check their old addresses occasionally, find your message, and let you know their new details.

But the main thing is not to give up your Bigfoot address. Firstly, you don't want it to become available for someone else to use. Secondly, you'll no doubt have given your Bigfoot address to more people than you can remember to tell about your new address, so -- presuming Bigfoot does sort out their problem -- keep an eye on your incoming mail, see who's still using your Bigfoot address, and tell them your new details. If you currently pay Bigfoot a fee so that they'll forward more than the 50 emails/day that they will with their free service, you'll need to continue paying that until the flow of your Bigfoot mail drops below 50/day. Once it does, though, you can stop paying for the premium Bigfoot service and opt for their free service instead. So it would cost you nothing more, and your old Bigfoot address remains available for those 'bolt from the blue' emails that occasionally arrive from people you've forgotten about, and who haven't tried to contact you for years.

If Bigfoot don't get their service sorted out in a hurry, I think I'll follow my own advice. If I was smart, I'd do it even if Bigfoot does get back to normal!

darkchocjohn: I'm baffled by the part of the response from Bigfoot saying "In the meantime, please use your personal account to receive emails while are still resolving this matter." What are we supposed to do? Ask everyone who now uses our Bigfoot addresses to change to using our personal addresses? If we're willing to do that, why would we need to have a Bigfoot address in the first place? If they expect us to notify only those people who have sent us email since the system failed, how are we supposed to know who they are? Perhaps they have a supply of crystal balls they'll sell us! There isn't a way to log into the Bigfoot website and see the email they've received for us that hasn't been forwarded yet, is there?

[shakers1987]

I too have had no emails to Bigfoot for days now, from the 15th Oct does seem about right. I got a reply from Bigfoot Customer Support to advise to do some tests, I have replied twice now that the problem appears to be at their end.

I was wondering why I have not seen my Tesco and Moneysavingexpert.com emails this week! More importantly password resets on that account are just sitting at Bigfoot, I'm going to have to reregister for loads of websites now.

Not happy (and this is at the time the engine on my car is ruined!).

[MikeS1531]

Since my last posting I've received a reply to my message to help@bigfoot.com -- and it's identical to the email received by darkchocjohn. It was sent to both my real email address and my Bigfoot address and -- surprise, surprise -- I'm still waiting for the copy sent via Bigfoot.

A tiny bit of good news is that I did have two emails arrive today via Bigfoot forwarding -- taking just five minutes in transit -- but that's considerably less than the dozen or so I'd expect to get daily, so there's clearly still a problem.

In light of the comment by shakers1987 that he/she was waiting for some password reset emails that were "just sitting at Bigfoot", I replied to Ms. Edwards at Bigfoot and asked "what has happened to the messages that haven't been forwarded in the past five days? Are they tied up somewhere in the Bigfoot system and will be forwarded once the problem is sorted? I do hope so. If not, were they bounced so that the senders know I didn't receive them? Or have they disappeared into the ether never to be seen again, with the senders thinking I have received their messages?" I expect that the last option is the most likely one, but it will be interesting to see what Bigfoot have to say. I also asked how long it might take before normal service is restored, but I can't say that I expect them to have any idea.

If I have anything further to report, you'll hear about it here.

[honeybee1403]

Very few email messages in the last five days but a few have trickled through. Very annoying. No notification or apology from Bigfoot - their customer 'service' is awful.

[marlar]

Hi,

I am joining this thread because I face the same problem with my Bigfoot account (like I did in August).

I got the idea to log into my Bigfoot account and got this message:

You are a Basic subscriber and your communication preference is set at opt out. To re-activate your Basic FREE email forwarding account you need to opt in and receive future mailings from Bigfoot and/or its external business partners. Please click on the "Opt In" button below to re-activate your Bigfoot account.
You can also choose to upgrade your current Basic FREE account to any of our paid subscription plans and continue using the service while maintaining an opt out status. To upgrade your plan please click on the "Upgrade" button.

Do any of you see the same message when logging in?

Regards,
Martin

[MikeS1531]

Further to my posting on the 22nd, I have received a response from Bigfoot Customer Service which said...

Dear [Username],

Our sincerest apology for the inconvenience you experienced. We are setting up a new system configuration at this time, hence, the forwarding issue that you are encountering now. May we suggest that you directly utilize your own email address so that you will receive all of your emails. We are doing our utmost best to have this up and running in a few days.

Thank you for your patience.

The Bigfoot Team

You'll note that they didn't address the question as to what happened to the emails I hadn't been receiving, i.e being held for forwarding to me later, bounced back to the senders, or disappeared into the ether. At some point I did try sending an email to my Bigfoot address and it hasn't come back to me, so that probably eliminates the 'bounced' option.

Today I've started to receive forwarded emails again. Because I don't know how many were sent there's no way for me to know whether what I'm receiving is all, or only part, of the emails sent to my Bigfoot address. But it's certainly a step in the right direction. None of the recently received emails took a long time in transit, so they weren't the result of being held by Bigfoot while the system was out of action.

As for the posting from marlar... Could your experience be related to the "new system configuration" referred to in the email I received? I'm using the Basic (free) service. I think I've received the occasional marketing email from Bigfoot, so I probably fall in the 'opt-in' category. I haven't tried logging into my Bigfoot account, so I don't know for sure. If the forwarding is working for me I won't risk upsetting anything by logging in. If your service is not working, I'd suggest opting in to see if that helps. If that generates too many marketing emails then you'll have to decide whether to upgrade or give up your Bigfoot address.

[ichibanhombre]

It's been down over a week. A stray email gets through every now and then. Worst part is the test emails never bounce so no one knows you never received them.. I did log into my bigfoot account but most of the links give java errors:
ServletException
CAUSE = javax.servlet.ServletException
(followed by a lot of code errors)