> They are by a long way the worst experience I ever had with a provider of any online service, so much so that I’ve since moved my own e-mail that was there back to outlook before some arbitrary spam caused the same thing to happen to me.
Well, I misunderstood you here. Wrongly assumed you meant it happened to you again.
The account was just.. gone. That's what was so shocking about it - I realised pretty much immediately at the time that there would be no way to recourse a locked account because any means by which you could prove the account would be yours (other than having the password, which we still did, but which was not acceptable to unlock the account according to PM) is inside the inbox itself. More than that - they weren't asking for more information. They simply said it was permanently locked and nothing could be done.
This has happened to others too, as has been posted elsewhere in the thread.
All of that said, if it says nothing else it at least suggests that larger providers seem to have a better grasp of how catastrophic being locked out of one's own e-mail can be - PM really don't seem to understand the responsibility they bear being a provider of such critical infrastructure. If this were happening in this same way at larger providers like Google and Microsoft, I'm quite certain there would be heavy regulations by now.
The evidence would be the e-mail account which PM now hold and aren’t going to give over.
I didn’t say it happened more than once, if anything I was saying once was enough and it was a risk I didn’t want to take ever again.
Also, I hadn’t realised this before, but a reply further down the thread has linked to many instances of this happening on reddit.