Advice of the day: ARCHIVE THOSE EMAILS!

I had a very "happy ending" situation today.  In going over my bank statement, I saw a charge for $27 from some company I'd never heard of.  Contacted the bank, who gave me the phone number of the company.  Turns out, they've been charging me that same charge every month...since October 2009!  My bank said even if they did pursue a fraud investigation, they'd only retroactively refund charges for 6 months, tops---and that is if they determined it was fraudulent.  Plus, they'd have to cancel my ATM card and put a hold on my account, so it was turning into a major hoo-ha. 
I had no idea what this company (something called "Questia") was.  I spoke to a representative from there, who told me it was a bank issue, not theirs, even as I insisted I had never used their service and had no idea who they were (they kept enigmatically calling
themselves "an on-line library"???).  I escalated the issue with Questia to a manager, who sent me a cursory form email, offering me a "courtesy refund" of one month!  I immediately called back and said I wanted to speak to this manager. 

The representative said, "They only interface with customers through email".  "You mean to say, you refuse to connect me to his telephone?"  "That's correct.  Our managers only interface through email".  Is this the ultimate in "lack of accountability" I've ever encountered??  In fact, yes, I'd thought so.  (HERE COMES THE GOOD PART!) So, doing a little "email interface" of my own, I decided to go through my archived email, back to 2009, just to see if I had anything relating to this company from that date.  I have over 20,000 archived emails, dating back to 2004!  One advantage of Yahoo is that there is no limit on how many emails you want to save, so I never delete anything, except for obvious spam.  AHA!  And there it was!  My cancellation confirmation from a "free trial membership" of a photo editing software I tried out (and hated).  I had a cancellation number and everything.  So...feeling fully armed and loaded, I called back with that number, which made it an entirely different matter.  They were suddenly very sorry, and the manager INTERFACED me by email that I'd be refunded the entire amount I'd been erroneously charged within 48 hours.

So what's the moral to this story?  SAVE THOSE EMAILS!  And for God's sake, check your bank statements very carefully (that's the part that makes me feel like a real dummy...but lesson learned!).  

Maybe doing business only through "email interface" is a better idea than I knew?