Charter Communications Accidentally Deletes 14000 Customer Email Accounts   1/28/2008 - 942 views,

According to Charter Communications officials, Charter gives all new Internet users a free e-mail account with his or her service. In many cases, customers decide use other e-mail accounts instead. In order to keep the number of inactive accounts down, the company routinely deletes all inactive accounts – usually around every three months.

Unfortunately, this time, they deleted more than just inactive accounts.

According to Anita Lamont, a spokeswoman for Charter, “During this maintenance we erroneously deleted inactive accounts along with the others.”

Lamont went on to say that, WWe really are sincerely sorry for having had this happen and apologize to all those folks who were affected by the error.”

Of course, that and $4.00 will get them a triple grande half-caf no-sugar frappelatte at Starbucks, but it won’t get them their email back. Doesn’t Charter have backups? Can’t they, you know, restore their email for them?

Nope. Charter Communications, which also provides telephone and high-speed Internet service, says that there is no way to retrieve the lost contents of these 14,000 customer e-mail accounts.

However, Charter, which has a whopping 2.6 million high-speed Internet subscribers and provides service in 29 states does say that this has never happened before and it is taking steps to make sure this never happens again.

So what is Charter doing for the 14,000 customers effected by this “software error during routine maintenance?” Well, besides an apology, they each received a $50 credit for the loss of any emails, photos, messages, and attachments that were in their inboxes as well as their archive folders, when the alleged “gaff” occurred.

So remember, always backup all important emails, regularly. And don’t rely on your ISP to do so.