Charter Communications, one of the largest cable ISP’s in the United States, accidentally deleted the saved e-mail of 14,000 subscribers.

Charter regularly deletes inactive customer e-mail accounts. Operator error caused the accidental deletion of 14,000 active customer e-mails accounts.

All of the saved customer e-mail is irretrievably lost. Charter is giving every customer who lost data a $50 credit. That amounts to a $700,000 penalty to Charter’s bottom line.

Customers can avoid this issue from affecting them again by linking their Charter e-mail to Microsoft Outlook and storing their email on their own computers.