All those of you using the Rediffmail Email service – beware!!! Please go through your old emails and check whether they are still okay. For all you know, they may be corrupted!

I was just going through my old emails recently and happened to notice that a lot of them were corrupted. The mails look fine in the summary list, but when you actually open them, you see nothing! The sender is shown as “Unknown sender”, recipients are “undisclosed”, and the message body is empty. See the below images:

My initial reaction was to think that something was wrong with my Firefox browser. So I opened my email account from Internet Explorer. Same result!

I immediately contacted Rediffmail customer support. They asked me to forward details of the email that was corrupted, including date, size, sender, recipient, etc. While gathering the information, I found that they themselves don’t display the message size. How do the expect me to provide the information?? Anyway, I gathered the other information and replied to them. Below is the latest (and last) email from them, dated May 11, 2010. Nothing since then.

Subject: RE:’Rediff=010-374-029′ Astrology: Feedback
From: “Support” <customersupport@rediff.co.in> on Tue, 11 May ’10 @ 01:07 PM
To: “Vijay Padiyar”

Dear Rediffmail User,

Greetings from rediff.com

Thanks for writing to us.

Your mail has been forwarded to the Technical team. You can be assured of prompt and efficient service.

Please feel free to contact us incase you have any further queries or suggestions.

Warm regards,
Prakash
Rediff.com Customer Care

NOTE: Do not change the subject line of this message, for further correspondence.

—–Original Message—–

From:   Vijay Padiyar
Date:   Saturday, May 01, 2010  01:27 PM
To:   customersupport@rediff.co.in (customersupport@rediff.co.in)
Subject:  Re: RE: Astrology: Feedback   Hello

Following are the answers to your questions. I have attached the screenshots.

1. Name of sender is “BizzHost . com”
2. Date of email is June 5, 2006
3. Subject is “Registration Activated for Biz”
4. Size of email is about 4-8 KB
5. Error is that when email is opened, there is no message body, and “From” and “To” fields display “Unknown sender” and “Undisclosed recipients” respectively. Also, subject is shown as “No subject”.

This is just an example of one email. Similar problem is there with many of the old emails in my account.

Request you to take urgent action.

Regards

Vijay

http://www.vijaypadiyar.in

On Fri, 23 Apr 2010 09:52:12 +0530 wrote
>

Dear Vijay,
>Greetings from rediff.com

We thank you for taking the time to communicate with us.

Kindly get back to us with the complete detail of the mail in which you face these problem and also forward the complete error message along with screen shot as it will help us to investigate this issue better.

1.Name of the sender
>2.Date of the mail
>3.Subject of the mail
>4.size of the mail.
>5.Error while opening the mail.

Please feel free to contact us incase you have any further queries or suggestions.

Warm regard
>Samidha
>Rediff.Com
>Customer Care

NOTE: Do not change the subject line of this message, for further correspondence.

—–Original Message—–
>From: Vijay Padiyar
>Date: Thursday, April 22, 2010 04:28 PM
>To: customersupport@rediff.co.in (customersupport@rediff.co.in)
>Subject: Astrology: Feedback

———— START OF MESSAGE ————

Name: Vijay Padiyar
Phone Number: xxxxxxxxxx
Message : Hi

I am unable to view many of the old emails in my email account <myemail>@rediffmail.com. Please restore my old emails.

You can check the oldest emails in Documents folder in my email account. They are all corrupted.

Request you to look into this ASAP, or else I will go public with this matter, which will certainly lead to a loss of reputation for you.

Thanks

Vijay

———— END OF MESSAGE ————

I absolutely never imagined that I would face this sort of problem with a well-known Email service provider like Rediffmail! I guess it’s best to stick to the bigwigs like Yahoo! or Google Mail in future! The only reason I’m continuing with this account is because of the headache involved in moving from an old email ID to a fresh one.

Some other points that are irritating with Rediffmail:

- Very poor spam filter. Pretty much doesn’t work. In fact, it SUCKS! Recently, I marked one email as spam. That same email came again later in the day and again found its way to my inbox!!

- Poor to very poor customer support. In fact, the customer support for Rediff.com as a whole sucks. It is very poorly organised and getting past the FAQ to a real ticket submission form is difficult! Also, not all their product categories are covered.

- By default they block images on all emails, even those in the inbox. So, for every single email you open (and even if opening the same mail again), you need to click on “View images” at the top of the mail to see the images.

- Certain email addresses can’t be mailed. Recently, I tried unsubscribing from some mailing list. They sent me a confirmation mail with a long email ID full of alphabets and numbers that I was supposed to mail to confirm my unsubscription. I couldn’t send a mail to that address because Rediffmail wouldn’t allow me to. But I was able to email that same address from Yahoo! Mail. And their customer support just won’t understand such technical details, so it’s useless to raise a case.

- Earlier (few years back) there was a consistent problem of some emails not reaching me at all. These included some important mails, and I had to face a lot of problems because they didn’t arrive. But Rediffmail customer care refused to accept the problem, and simply asked me to check my spam filter settings.

- Even now, mails don’t arrive instantly. They take several minutes to several hours to arrive. This never happens with Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, etc.

- In their older email version, it was not even possible to view the user-created folders from the main view. One had to navigate via a series of links to access those folders! Now, thankfully they’ve fixed it.

- Again, earlier they used to send a lot of their own advertising emails. This was irritating, since you couldn’t even block them! Even Indiatimes used to do the same. But then these guys stopped it. But recently they’ve again started it. Very irritating!

- Being a fringe player, probably they don’t have the kind of bugdet and development team to develop and offer cutting-edge features like the bigger players can. I guess one has to live with it…

These are only some of the niggling issues. Will add more when I can think of them. Probably the only plus with them is the unlimited storage space, which again isn’t really useful unless you’re using it as a file storage account.