Archive for May 28, 2012

BigPond emails disappear.

BigPond emails disappear.

If you are finding that your BigPond emails seem to vanish into thin air, even though you’ve called them and had your password reset, etc; there might be a simple solution.

Try logging in to http://mail.live.com with your BigPond email address and password.

If you find your emails there, then great 🙂 However, to get them in your normal email program you might have to follow the steps at http://www.ghacks.net/2009/03/14/hotmail-pop3-configuration/

BigPond, and Telstra, have teamed up with Microsoft to supply some email services. (A bit of a nightmare really, when you can find yourself on the receiving end of a crappy exchange setup rather than a tradtional POP3 / IMAP setup.)

This by the way is why you also can’t go to passport.com and register an identity using a bigpond.com email – a rather annoying problem when you’re forced to have a Windows Live ID to use Windows Live Mail to email any image.

End of rant.

 

Edit 2014: You can also set up Windows Live Mail or use the Outlook Connector for Hotmail and set up your email in that program as if it was a hotmail account.

When Chase Edwards calls.

When Chase Edwards calls.

You might get a Cold Call from a Telemarketer for Chase Edwards.

They may offer to have someone visit you, review your financial position; and if you proceed to the second meeting, they may encourage you to invest in properties / property development in Summerland Point NSW, and other areas in the Hunter.

In our instance, they suggested a likely interest rate of 6.25% if refinancing our existing home loan; and estimated we could build a property worth around $450,000 to $500,000 for $300 starting cost plus about $80 to $100 per week thereafter, after expenses and rental income.

This involved some tax reduction strategies, plus using equity in our existing property.

There were a few reasons I haven’t pursued this offer further.

1 – I don’t believe cold call telemarketing is an ethical method of communication. (My parter is less averse to it, hence the progression.) Given they spend a fair bit of money shipping at least three representatives around parts of Australia, they should be able to afford to use mass mailings instead.

2 – They demonstrated a future forecast using a custom piece of software that allowed them to plug in various variables and see the results in real time. This software was not available to me, and you can bet that if I’m going to be spending $400k I want to have all available data to fiddle with. If they made it available in the form of an MS Access Database, I’d take it more seriously. (Individual figures when clicked bought up many checkboxes, so it probably isn’t easily done in Excel.)

3 – It is a bigger financial commitment than we want to make, given the risks associated if interest rates changed, etc.

4 – I failed to understand why they are looking for people to build the houses rather than just use their own finances to do so.

Those issues aside, if their forecasts are true then the system as a whole appeared to be workable.