A legal question.

[joe-90]

The legal advice she received was free, The partner called her back when she made an inquiry about the legal aspect. He said it would be far too expensive for him to take on as a case. He didn't have to spend that all that time, but chose to. He basically said exactly what Mitch said on the first page.
The IT person is now harassing and threatening the daughter. Citizen's Advice say it's time to contact the Police. Phone calls at midnight etc. Emails in upper case etc. I think she's the female equivalent of a tarmac con-artist. She's got no hope in the small claims court.

 

[Chud]

Joe it sounds to me like the IT person was archiving the mails for her - for 70000 mails that might well take 19 hours however...it would be 19 unattended hours, setting the process going would take a couple of minutes then they could go away and let the computer finish the job. Once it's downloaded them, burn them to a disc/usb drive etc...selecting all mails in the inbox and deleting them takes seconds.

This is a bit like a readymix firm charging by the hour for the time it takes for the pad they've poured to cure...

Personally I'd give them £20 and tell them not to take the p***

 

[Chud]

You might also want to let her know about this new fancy search thingy called Google - stupid name I know and I'm sure it'll never catch on but it does work quite well...

 

[Chud]

I'm not MCP/MCSE (but know loads working in IT) but if you want to chuck me a detailed description of what she asked the person to do I would be happy to draft up an estimate of the work and sign it (or get an MCP to sign).

 

[mattylad]

In the same way, I was chatting to an MCAD engineer last week - he sets his solidworks PC clash detecting on models and leaves it for 7hrs to finish, still charges them for 7hrs though....

 

[joe-90]

I'm not MCP/MCSE (but know loads working in IT) but if you want to chuck me a detailed description of what she asked the person to do I would be happy to draft up an estimate of the work and sign it (or get an MCP to sign).

Well we are hoping it won't come to that but thanks if she needs it.

 

[Chud]

In the same way, I was chatting to an MCAD engineer last week - he sets his solidworks PC clash detecting on models and leaves it for 7hrs to finish, still charges them for 7hrs though....

To be fair I can kind of understand that as that process I'm guessing is pretty processor/memory intensive so the PC would be pretty much unusable for anything else while it was working on this. Downloading e-mails on the other hand is not going to give any PC built in the last 10-15 years any trouble with multi-tasking