Comment by cj
8 hours ago
Yes.
Photobucket emailed many warnings over the course of multiples months saying "Your account will be deleted in X days" with a prompt to subscribe to keep your account.
At the time they were sending the emails, you could still login and download your photos (that's what I did). It was all very transparent.
The fact that the author missed these emails isn't really photobucket's fault, IMO.
(But not giving a preview of the account you're reclaiming isn't a good UX obviously, not going to defend that!)
Yes, I'm at fault here with missing the e-mails. The Photobucket account was registered using an old e-mail address that I was using as a kid. I happened to find the account by accident, by scrolling through my password manager.
So these are the unfortunate circumstances. This post basically shows what's it like to be a living and breathing edge-case (missed e-mails & no images in your account).
This actually made me think about the edge-cases I must have shipped at work and how they're affecting people.