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Here's the email with the innocent subject of "historious hasn't seen you in a while!":

  Hello!
  We noticed that you haven't logged on historious in a while. Is there anything we can do to help? Please don't hesitate to reply to this email with anything you may need.
  
  To refresh your memory, historious is a new kind of bookmarking service which creates your very own, personalised search engine of things you like.
  
  Just as a reminder, our address is http://historio.us/ and your username, in case you have forgotten, is "nikolay".
  
  Please note that, if you do not log in or historify something for two months, the data in your free account might be removed to ensure that our service always remains fresh. If you are not using historious, you can safely ignore this email.
  
  If you would like to prevent this, just log into historious or historify something in the next month. If you are a subscriber, you don't need to do this, as we will not touch any of your data.
  
  Thanks!
  Team historious
It says "the data might be removed". Typically, you get multiple warnings before your data gets deleted, because people forget, and the warning is alarming. All these emails were unread - we all get a lot of spam and lots of informative emails and many of us just read the subject. If the subject is not suggesting that action should be taken otherwise there will be dire consequences, people might just read the subject and not open it.


> It says "the data might be removed". Typically, you get multiple warnings before your data gets deleted, because people forget, and the warning is alarming.

Sorry, but it's quite explicit. Might be removed means will be removed!

> All these emails were unread - we all get a lot of spam and lots of informative emails and many of us just read the subject.

Is it stavros fault?

> people might just read the subject and not open it.

Your problem!


No exactly. It is his problem, as otherwise I would have paid 14 years times $30, i.e., $420 of lost revenue just from me.


I’m sure we’re all very sorry that you didn’t read an email which, in retrospect, was important. It was careless of you, but we’re all careless sometimes.

I doubt stavros has the ability to force you to read your emails, though. Given that, it’s possible they aren’t at fault for your oversight.


He definitely can by putting a warning on the subject. If I read every email from every online service I've ever signed up for, I would be doing this all day long and be unemployed!




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