Mediamax screws over it's clients

The gallery is fixed in case anyone is interested.  I really need to sit down and sort and caption those pictures.  Maybe someday.

As a number of you know, I live off a fairly small disability check ever month.  It's just under eight hundred dollars.  Most of it goes to paying rent as well as my insurance premiums.  I also pay my ten bucks a month for my local calling only phone and buy some food with the left over.  Maybe even occasionally ride the bus.

Every so often someone drops me an email offering me a tip for my online work.  Since I have to report everything and get it nicked off my check, I tell folks that it's usally not worth the effort.  Unless, of course it's some serious money that will make up for what gets subtracted from my check.  I usually suggest sending a gift card for a national chain that's local to me that either I can use or donate myself to one of the area organizations that help the homeless.  Either that or I'll suggest that they signup for the three days free USENET access and have them send me the account details so I can play catch up.  Heck, some folks even pay for *.pdfs of the games that I used to play and send me those links.

The problem with that though is I usually do my internet work at one of the local university libraries.  Since the complex I live in was built shortly after WW2 and we're probably still using the same copper phone lines, DSL is not an option.  Ditto for cable.  Wouldn't have the money anyway.  I use a number of services like Adrive that allow me to store the files only and copy them over to a 2 gig flash drive that I picked up a few months ago. (Mind you, I was also coping over stuff I was working on so I wasn't able to bring stuff home all of the time.)

One of those services that I use is Mediamax.  If I remember right, they gave you 25 gigs of storage for free but only allowed you to download a single gig every month with their free account.  You were also only able to download a file size of 10 megs.  That was how they made money.  Anything larger, you had to upgrade to a larger account.

I also use rapidshare.  They give you 50 gigs of space for free.  The problem with them is that they'll delete anything that doesn't get download after a three month time period.  Since a lot of the data was actually watermarked with my name and email, I couldn't allow others to download the files.  So some went to rapidshare and some got uploaded to mediamax.  I did play it safe though and anything really large got uploaded to rapidshare.

Just to throw this in, I recently discovered adrive and for the last few weeks, I've been combining the accounts and uploading everything to them.  I recommend them highly.

Imagine my complete surprise when I received an email from Mediamax this afternoon (And in GMail's spam folder as well.  Guess they don't think much of them either.) telling me that they're rebranding their service as thelinkup.com (No, I'm not giving them a link) and how exciting the switch over will be.  Of course they'll be raising their rates for the paying clients.

Now here's what bothers me:

Current non-paying users: If you are not currently a paying subscriber to MediaMax, you need to upgrade your account before April 25 to be included in the move. Otherwise, your account will be deleted and all your files will be lost.

That's my account.  One of the non-paying users.  I received that email this morning, the 18th. (That is once I found it in my spam box.  Very glad that I actually skim it before deleting.) I have seven days to grab my files.  Gigs of them.  Mind you again, they only give a gig free of downloads per month.

Of course, they actually announced this on the 8th on their blog.  No where on their site have they mentioned the change over.  When you're logged in, and I log in every day to grab a few files, there's no mention.  In fact, I just checked and there's still no mention anywhere of the changeover and the required upgrade on their site.  I wonder why they're being so quiet about the changes?  Could they realize how upset they're going to make folks when they discover their files have been deleted without notice?  Heck, they turned off comments on their blog.

Now, you'll have to excuse me.  I have to figure out which files I am able to save and which files will get deleted.

Thanks a lot, Mediamax.  Please rest assured that you've alienated me and, I'm sure, many others.  I will not be using you new service and will encourage others not to as well.

[Please excuse any typos.  Using the stand up dumb terminal.  I can barely see the screen as well through the plastic cover that is kept over it.]

edit: Looks like someone over at Blogger.com took out some revenge on them.