October - Bigfoot is down again. This is getting to be all too regular. I don't know how they can stay in business. I have already changed most of my primary email addresses but there are still many contacts and companies that still only have my Bigfoot address. Their "customer service" is a disgrace. John Reveille

Bigfoot is down again. This is the second time this month. One would think that after what happened earlier this month they would have the courtesy (and a way) of letting users know that they would be down for X amount of days. I hate changing my email address after all these years but I suppose I don't have any other option. John Reveille

Ok, like so many of you I have had Bigfoot.com service for Years and I thought that I would never have to change my email. That was the purpose of my moving to them. Well on Aug 4, 2009 enough was enough with the downed service - zero availability, lost emails and the totally non-existant customer service, I fired Bigfoot.com, Bigfoot dot(net) and Bigfoot Communications. The service has definately deteriorated over the last few years as many posts on this thread have stated. Email forwarding has been painfully slow at times and there were downtimes for there service that were never communicated to their subscribers. Even worse emails/trouble tickets were never responded to. Several months ago I went several days without receiving emails.

My last straw was this week. I had not received email from 8/1/09. I attempted to open a ticket, but when I hit the submit button, I received an error on the page stating that they were in the process of upgrading their servers and to try back again later. What the hay? Have they not heard of redundancy? Hello, they are in the communications business, they should know better. It does not take that long to upgrade email servers. I then dialed the toll free 866 phone number that was on a different Bigfoot communications page. Well, that number does not work. I then found a (512)number after doing a seach on the web for a customer service number. That number is only a general voicemailbox with a canned message. I left a message just to see what would happen. No respose, not a surprise. I also sent an email to help@bigfoot.com. Well, since their email servers are down, this messages has not yet been delivered, I keep getting message delivery warnings.

I had my bigfoot email forwarded to my gmail account for 2 - 3 years now. I found this forum a few days ago and thanks to a previous post, I learned of Pobox . Similar service that works. That is who I moved to.
A dear friend of mine also used bigfoot.com and he moved over to pobox this week as well. Now at hand is the arduous task of notifying everyone and updating subscribtions. It will take a while.

I wonder if Bigfoot Communications is going out of business and just didn't take the time to notify their users. If they did, no big loss, except for our lost emails and time sensitive communications. If they have not, then they need to.

Has anyone communicated their issues to the FCC?

Bye, Bye Bigfoot.com You have been Fired!

Bigfoot Down - No Customer Support or Info
I have been using Bigfoot for years - SOME PAID PERIODS & SOME FREE PERIODS OF TIME. Some similar problems in the past, but short lived. Since at least Sunday, Aug 2 I have received no email, no Customer Support, no info on when/if they will be back on line. I started using Bigfoot "forwarding" because I thought I would never have to change my email address. I have it on business cards & my webiste etc. Now I have to either change my email address (massive headache) or wait to see if they come back on line. I am thoroughly disgusted. I was finally able to login today but when I enter my problem into their online question area (time consuming to cut & paste from my email) I then get a message that my inquiry was not accepted because they are upgrading their accounts to provide me with a better experience. IF THIS IS THE CASE - THEY SHOULD HAVE WARNED ME AT THE VERY LEAST. UNACCEPTABLE TO BE DOWN FOR THIS PERIOD OF TIME. I guess I will change over to "my own domain name" if I can figure out how & hope that it will be somewhat permanent.

I have been using Bigfoot since it's inception with no previous problems of importance. Since Sunday, Aug 2 (Hong Kong time) I have received no email, no Customer Support, no info on when/if they will be back on line. I started using Bigfoot "forwarding" because I thought I would never have to change my email address. Now I have to either change my email address (massive headache) or wait to see if they come back on line. I am thoroughly disgusted. John Reveille

I've just quit Bigfoot after about 10 years. For the best part of a week their incoming SMTP server has been down : : connect to litemail09.bigfoot.com[66.114.252.252]:25:
Connection timed out
I actually paid nothing for the whole time I used them. The service was free for all users at the start, following which they introduced a charge for new users, and tried to encourage old users to sign up for the paid service by, for example, makeing it impossible for a time to change one's forwarding address or password without going over to the paid package. But I did not flinch, and eventually I noticed that they'd appeared to soften and become more tolerant in their handling of old free customers. However, the transmission delays were shocking. Often I'd realize that bigfoot had been sitting on a message for 18 hours before forwarding it to me. With their server now totally out of action, the only choice left is to flee. I've been using gmail since yesterday and so far am thoroughly happy with it.

I have had bigfoot in excess of 8 years. An initially great idea, and free, they later charged quarterly. Still a good value I thought. However, over the last 8 months, the service has been absolutely horrible. I am canceling finally. Emails disappear into nowhere since forwarding does not work, I get complaints left and right that I do not answer mails (because I do not get them), autoresponder does not work, bigfoot sends out odd bounce back messages, and customer service does not exist - at all; even their automated response to my inquiries are NOT delivered to my bigfoot account. I do get spam messages though. So, all my business cards are useless and I have to go through the arduous task of notifying all contacts...but, I'd rather do it now since bigfoot does not work anyway and delaying the task would only aggravate the problem. Recommendation: run away, cancel, DO NOT SIGN UP for this unacceptable service.

I stumbled upon this site after many, many months of issues with Bigfoot. I thought, "hey, maybe it's not just me..." Thanks to Google, sure enough, many other reviews here mirror my experience and sentiment.

I've subscribed to Bigfoot premium for many years. I had decent service at first, that has deteriorated over the years. For more than a year now, I've continued to pay the premium subscription fees (it auto-renews) and then start complaining.

My biggest issue is the almost 10:1 spam to "good" email ratio. I've continued to tune, check settings, attempting to filter and blacklist, all to seeming no avail. I've complained in the past, and over almost two years ago started charting the spam that gets through, versus the ones that are trapped. The statistics are amazing!

I resorted to using SpamAssassin and SpamSieve to filter the "junk" that gets through Bigfoot's filters. I started distributing Bigfoot mail to Gmail and Hotmail. Gmail catches 100% (with no false positives in several months of use). Even my Hotmail account, which collects it's own goodly portion of spam itself, and has caught the spam that is forwarded from Bigfoot. If those guys can do it with such success, what can Bigfoot even make a half-hearted attempt at improving their filtering, with even free open source tools?!?!

Makes me think one of Bigfoot's side businesses is the "processing" of spam, and selling addresses to the spammers...

I guess with this review, I have *finally* talked myself in to cancelling the account and ending the drain of money to support this service.

Appreciate some of the suggestions of others I have seen here, such as pobox.com, etc.

Good luck, from a since long ago satisfied Bigfoot customer. RIP...

I've been with bigfoot since the late 1990s and have been paying since the early years of the current millennium. The webmail service was very useful as it meant that I could log in anywhere in the world. Until the last couple of years it has generally been fine, but since then. Overall the "service" has been extremely poor. I've had periods of a week or so when no emails were getting through to me - I was just continually sending complaints and getting automated messages. When things did work it could take hours or days to receive messages - sometimes they'd end up at webmail but not pop mail, or vice versa ! I was using them for both business and personal use but just couldn't rely on them. All my webmail folders disappeared for several months - but eventually came back. The webmail access was unreliable and extremely slow; I'd try to log on and get "server errors". When I did, eventually, get on it was like watching paint dry. In the early days when I had a dial up connection the "speed" wasn't too noticeable but with broadband it's unacceptable. I've now set up my own domain names/email with Google Apps which costs ten dollars per year (good value in the UK). I've spent time notifying people and changing addresses on various websites but I can't continue with the continual uncertainty from bigfoot. I've managed to download the messages I had stored on webmail. This took a long time as their IMAP access only seems to work with the Inbox so I had to transfer messages from folders into the Inbox so that they could be downloaded/transferred. Ten years ago it was a free service that worked consistently and reliably. For the past couple of years it's been been a pain in the you-know-where that I've been paying for. I've never wanted any bells or whistles - just my incoming messages forwarded to webmail and pop mail. If they could do it in the past why can't they do it now ? It's not rocket science !

Ok, been w/Bigfoot over 10yrs now, but more and more problems in last year, as I now see others have had also. Huge problems last 2 weeks.
How can a Co. not email us that there might be a problem? How can they crash and still not send us any notification for 2 weeks??? Inexcusable, totally inexcusable.
Now seems to be working some, but I have sent 20+ emails to every addr I could find for anyone at Bigfoot. Most ctc #'s are non-working. Call center in Asia now. 1 of their 2 responses says go to website and fill out "contact form"! Done that 6 times already w/no reply! Bigfoot just died, killed themselves, time to move on.
Seems bigfoot has chosen ignore us, and ignore their Guarantee of "Service for Life". We could/should start a Class-Action Suit.

But... in Good News, I found www.PoBox.com and it is the same, but better service, at a cost of $20/year - for 3 addr, and fwdg to 5 addr. Other stuff too, and upgrades avail, of course. The basic serv. is exactly what I was using at Bigfoot.com.
I'm now on the free 30-day Trial, and am signing up so I can get rid of Bigfoot and the headaches & business they have cost me in the last year or so.
Just thought I'd let others know about a nice alternative. Just start fwdg your Bigfoot accts to your new pobox.com acct as you let everyone know.

Bigfoot is Dead, Long Live PoBox!

Jeff

Good Luck,
Jeff

I have a very similar story to all the other people posting on this site. A great concept and idea, very good service for many years, but as of late, and particularly in the last 2-3 months, it has been unrealiable and is now unavailable.

I joint the ranks of people turning on the auto-responder and switching elsewhere. An act which is quickly followed by the sad realisation of just how many people know me at that address.

I can not agree more with comments by "stevelevy".
My experience with Bigfoot is almost exactly the same.
I used them for many years and now they just get worse each year.
I resisted changing because of the size of the task, but in retrospect it was not as bad as I thought and oh so much better than what they have put me through the last few years with lost email etc etc.
Really the hardest part was deciding who to switch to. After much floundering I decided to switch to Gmail and am using their IMAP service with Mozilla Thunderbird. I am quite happy with this.

Bigfoot, I fart in your direction, you cesspool of incompetency and falsehoood.

Same as some, I have used Bigfoot prior to most people even hearing of email. Same as most, reliability was excellent until a year or so ago, got very bad about 6 months ago, and absolutely pathetic for the last several months.

All forwarding and distribution fails every morning INCLUDING FAILURE OF DISTRIBUTION TO BIGFOOT WEBMAIL (Bigfoot Webmail being pretty useless because of the time it takes to load and delete messages). I have begged to talk to a living human being and/or an admission that whatever is wrong they cannot fix, both ignored.

The only plus side is that I do get prompt, non-automated replies to my email, but usually with "explanations" that are almost certainly incorrect if not outright falsehoods.

For weeks the story was my ISP (Verizon) was blocking them. However, mail was not making it to my account at Hotmail and Verizon was adamant that they were not blocking Bigfoot. Although Bigfoot did provide a couple test message responses that implied a block, but every single test message sent by me via Bigfoot webmail made it to my Verizon account.

Then they said Hotmail would block them also. Then I created accounts at both yahoo and gmail, set them to forward to Verizon, added them to my distribution list, and still have regular, daily, complete failures i.e., nothing was being distribute or forwarded by bigfoot to any account).

The only comment after this is that "Our technical support will update the mail rules for the connection to your Verizon.net address every two hours."

Based on the hundreds, if not thousands of my test messages in the last 6 weeks or so, I think it more likely that aliens will land in my yard today than it is that the problem is anywhere other than Bigfoot and it is a major problem that will not be fixed in the reasonably foreseeable future.

Because I have used the Bigfoot address since 1996, I felt locked in and estimated it would take 100+ hours and $1,000.00+ to change. In hindsight, that time and money would have been a screaming bargain compared to the time, expense, and embarassment in trying to deal with the problems.

MY OBSERVATIONS AND ADVICE: (1) IF YOU ARE CONSIDERING USING BIGFOOT, STOP WASTING BRAIN CELL ACTIVITY AND LOOK ELSEWHERE, (2) IF YOU ARE HESITANT TO CHANGE BECAUSE YOU DO NOT WANT TO SPEND THE TIME AND/OR MONEY, DON'T BE. CHANGING IMMEDIATELY SURE SEEMS LIKE THE BEST BET, 3) THERE IS NO COMBINATION OF WORDS, PROFANE OR OTHERWISE, TO ADEQUATELY DESCRIBE MY FRUSTRATION AND FEELINGS, and (4) AS SOON AS REASONABLY PRACTICAL, I WILL SPEND THE 100+ HOURS AND $1,0000.00+ TO DUMP BIGFOOT, BECAUSE IF I DON'T, I CAN ONLY ASSUME IT WILL COST ME MORE THAN THAT, OVER AND OVER, IN PERPETUITY.

I too have been a member since before i can remember it used to be so good, now even the retention features don't work and as for reliability forget it, I am looking for a similar reliable solution so if anyone has any recommendations please post them.

I have been a Bigfoot Customer since at least 1995 and found their service flawless until mid 2007. Since that time, it has been absolute crap. Many emails are not received with some bounced to the sender and some lost with no warning. Almost all other emails suffer delays from 2 to 48 hours before they are forwarded to me.

I've been using their free forwarding service for years and its getting worse and worse. Too many test e-mails I send to myself never get through and if they do, can be delivered days late. I'm looking for an alternative now.

Use a UNIQUE email address when you register with BIGFOOT.
Do not give the email address to anyone else.

Then CANCEL with bigfoot and watch the Spam begin to roll in.

It happened to me. Their anti-spam facade is just that, a facade.

As with many other posters above I have had several problems with both the webmail and email forwarding and have had emails go missing when the service was down, which for a communications company is a big no no. It is a shame because I have used them for several years and they used to be very good, it is only in the last 12-18 months that I have had problems at all.
I will not be renewing my subscription but it will be a painful process changing my email address when it is used so ubiquitously.

i ve been their paidup customer for well over 6 years. their services have become erratic 3 years ago. And it got worse & worse. i like many other victums, use bigfoot as my primary contact address,as well as all those web login backup email account.
basically,instead of stuck to an isp,i am now stucked with bigfoot.damn

my advice is dont pay or cont' yr subscription. switch...

Turn Spam filtering off entirely.

This seems to help right now, but who knows, it may just be a temporary issue. Right now, when I send a test email it gets forwarded to my address and to web email pretty fast, but who knows how long this will last!

Add me to the list of people who has been using Bigfoot as a forwarding service for many years. I noticed in the past few days that expected mail was not being received. I have now sent numerous test e-mails, but less than 10% are getting through, and the lost e-mails do not generate error messages. I will be switching to another service.

I've been a member of bigfoot for years and am gutted to now be so reliant on my bigfoot email address (which I have used for so many years on so many sites and with so many contacts) as I have had nothing but trouble for nearly a year now and would dearly love to be rid of it. My forwarding has failed on several occasions and I'm currently down to 1 of 3 forwarding addresses, including webmail, because it is not working properly. I get the odd response from Heather Edwards in customer support, but once one problem is resolved (having taken a couple of weeks and several emails), another one pops up. I haven't had webmail for over 2 weeks now, but there's never any warning or apology.
Disgusting service all round.

If I recall correctly, I first found Bigfoot.com while I was in Houston, TX in 1996 as a QA Test Engineer under contract to Compaq, at the time the industry leader in desktop computers.

I needed a (private) email address that was easily configurable when I was to change my internet connection and allowed email to be redirected to another address. This was years before gmail and other web-based services that had the ability to redirect (as apposed to forward.) Unknown to many of my friends and associates, I have changed ISPs at least four times, and I have not had to change any of my web logins or for that matter, any of my business cards.

At the time, it was a free service. When the dot-com bubble burst, I was happy to become a paying subscriber (mostly because of loyalty.) Unfortunately, for the past several years(!), there have been reliability problems that (only recently) made me realize that I may have been missing incoming email.

For the past several months I have been seeing erratic behavior from bigfoot.com. For example, if I am to send myself a test email, it can take anything from a few seconds to over _two days_ to have it forwarded or sent to their web-email server. This problem first occurred about a year or so ago, and at the time I received email from them apologizing and things improved (I thought.)

The last straw was when I lost _all_ of the email I had been saving on their web-email server last week (luckily, they are all in my client.) Although redirecting _seemed_ to be OK, I realized that there was a bigger problem.

I plan to keep my bigfoot account for a while, with an auto response configured with my new primary address to pick up anyone I have missed, but they are no longer my primary email address.

It's a shame to leave an organization that was a leader in the field, but technology is, well, technical, and if it 'ain't working, it ain't working.

Thanks for the posts, you guys helped me realize there's a systemic problem with Bigfoot.com... later...

I have been with Bigfoot before most people even knew what e-mail was. No major problems for years until last year. E-mail forwarding went down for like 6 months and I got ZERO ZERO (did I say ZERO) help. mega unanswered e-mails. I called and got no call back from their customer support number (try to actually find that number!). It sounds like a cheap answering machiene in someones closet. It's some east coast number but could be anywere actually. They have Toll Free numbers that forward to the Phillipenes (spelling?). I talked with one of their advertising people and he can't even rely on the bigfoot e-mail service. he said the people don't know what they are doing.I think the owner is more interested in making movies under the Bigfoot Entertainment name than he is about making sure his e-mail service keeps working for long time and paying customers. I will pass any more info along as I get it. I plan to get a number that you all can call. We need to give the higher ups HELL. The peons that get the cust support e-mail could care less. Actually I think the higher ups could care less. I've had to re work tons of e-mail addresses so as not to rely on Bigfoot. DON"T RELY ON BIGFOOT for ANYTHING! You have been warned. These elusive bastards will pay for the pain they have caused us all.

I have emailed bigfoot.com (no telephone support available) three times. The last one I sent told them that I did NOT want another canned reply.
>Service : Webmail
>
>Problem : Others
>
>Describe the problem : PLEASE DO NOT SEND ME ANOTHER AUTOMATED RESPONSE TO THE
REQUEST!!!
>
>I have reported this problem three times now only to get a canned response
from one of your employees! Your POP/IMAP Server at webimap2-int.bigfoot.com is
still not accepting my connection attempts in Outlook nor am I able to see any
emails that have been sent to me between now and 8th May. Yes I have changed my
forwarding address but I still have not been able to get any emails from
webimap2-int.bigfoot.com for before I changed it. My wife is also a member of bigfoot
and we both have for many years! She has the same problem (her email address is
mazf@bigfoot.com). If we both do not have this problem resolved by end of
business today (UK Time), then we will both be taking this further up the food
chain. Three times of reporting this is enough!
>
>To Summarise! Yes we have both changed our forwarding address. No! Webmail
does not work nor des using Outlook to retrieve our mails! We get timeouts on
Outlook and webmail shows no messages are present on the server. EVEN THOUGH WE
BOTH KNOW THAT WE HAVE MESSAGES DATING BACK TO 8TH MAY WAITING ON THE SERVER.
>
>PLEASE DO NOT SEND ME ONE OF YOU CUT AND PASTE STANDARD "We Are Sorry blah
blah... We are looking into it" RESPONSES!
>
>Signed
>
>An Angry customer!


Guess what email I got this morning.

I hope this email finds you well.

It is not our intention to torment our valued customers but we still have an
ongoing reconstruction of our webmail and our other mail servers, and this has
caused the sporadic downtime but once this maintenance is in its completion,
everything will return to normal. Apparently, we cannot give you a fixed date as to
when this reconstruction will be completely rectified for we do not intend to
give you false hopes. Rest assured that our Systems Admin Group are doing
everything, non - stop, to hasten the process of the reconstruction. Please bear with
us.

Does this look familiar??? Its exactly the same as the last person. I don't even believe I am talking to a real person. I think they have set up an auto-responder. How bad is that!!

Today some emails appeared in webmail for 14th and 15th May. I still have lost emails from 8th May to 14th May. Luckily I forward onto another account. My wife is not so lucky. She has lost them all!

Received this response from Bigfoot Support this morning, 17/5/07:

"It is not our intention to torment our valued customers but we still have an ongoing reconstruction of our webmail and our other mail servers, and this has caused the sporadic downtime.Once this maintenance is in its completion, everything will return to normal. Apparently, we cannot give you a fixed date as to when this reconstruction will be completely rectified for we do not intend to give you false hopes. Rest assured that our Systems Admin Group are doing everything, non - stop, to hasten the process of the reconstruction."

If this response gives you hope stick with Bigfoot, me, I have switched to GMAIL!

As at today 16th May, webmail has not been operational for 10 days, and I am now concerned about the reliability of email forwarding. How can one take seriously problems with a server upgarde; me thinks this company is going to the wall, pity because I pay for the service and generally reliability over last 5 years has been pretty good.

Whois lists the registrant as being in Singapore, the Administrative contact as being in the Philippines, but the IP address is assigned to a server in the Republic of Korea (KR)
WTF?

Also, according to their web page, there have been no Newsletters since 2005 and no press releases since 2004. Not good.

I'm finding that forwarding is sluggish, the spam filter has too many false-positives and too many misses, and the web email has been very sluggish for a long time. I received a somewhat linguistically convoluted email about the web email server going down last week, and when it came back up, I had lost _all_ my saved email!

Methinks it be time to look elsewhere before it goes away.

Hey guys, I just found out from Bigfoot customer support (somebody actually answered my email!) that the current problem is due to a server upgrade and only affects Webmail and POP/IMAP retrieval - all forwarding is still working - so do what I did and instead of using Webmail or POP/IMAP just use forwarding to redirect all your bigfoot email to another account until they have finished their upgrade. I have been with Bigfoot for several years because I like to be able to change ISPs without losing my email address, and up until this upgrade I have been pretty happy with them - I don't think they have handled this upgrade well but at least I got some customer service and a workaround for my problem. So I will stay with them for now!

I echo all that has been said here.

My webmail has been down for around 1 week now, though the forwarding apears to be working sporadically.

I wish they would just come clean so that we know where we stand and could make alternative arrangements,

I have been with Bigfoot forever. It was once very good but now blows. No mail, no answers to my email, no webmail, sometimes days to get mail and clients complaining about weird bounce messages. I'm am switching to POBOX.COM and Bigfoot can go to hell.