It’s good practice to repeatedly warn customers over a span of months.
Can’t tell if you’re sarcastic or not 😄
I have moderate to severe ADHD and even -I- find over a quarter of a year an excessive amount of time to consider whether your photobucket pics are worth keeping or not!
Not sarcastic. I work for a provider, and we warn people of service changes a bunch of times over a period of months.
Despite this, you will still get a bunch of people complaining that they were never told, we surprised them with it at the last minute, etc.
A change that deletes customer data brings in legal as well. If one of these people tries to sue for losing their data you want to be able to show that you provided plenty of notice and warning.
Companies will often “scream test” a data loss change. Meaning you turn it off, but don’t really delete right away to see who screams that their data is gone. Anyone screaming gets some short time period to recover the data.
Despite this, you will still get a bunch of people complaining that they were never told, we surprised them with it at the last minute, etc.
If someone has an email address they never check, it doesn’t matter if you notify them once or one hundred times. They’ll still never see it. Do you try more than one pathway or are your warnings dependent on a single point of failure?
For commodity online services, you are lucky that people even give you their email address. The number of people who provide anything more is extremely low. OP is freaking out that they are emailing. If they called him on the phone, he would lose his shit.
The terms of service explicitly state that any communications and legal notices about the services will be delivered via the email address that must be verified at sign up. It is not unreasonable to ask customers to provide a valid way to send them service related messages.
Google isn’t going to call you or send you old-school paper mail when they discontinue a service. Even if they did, 99% of people would think that it was a scam.
All that being said, we will always scream test things like EOL of a service just to catch anyone who missed the communications.