Destroyed Email Account

[#1]

My mum recently moved house and cancelled her broadband/phone and was informed she could keep her email address, with no problem. 

She requested this on the 3rd Feb and customer services said her email would be down for a couple of days (to me this sounded quite odd and antiquated way of doing things). Plus she wasn't even offered an automated forwarding mechanism while it was due to be down. 

She still doesn't have her email account back and was told it was accidentally destroyed! She has no access to old emails either.  I'm really concerned about this, she's not getting anywhere with customer services over the telephone and no one seems to have the power/knowledge to sort it out.  

It's her only email address and has a lot of important correspondence on that account.  It's 2021, not 1991! The service has complete lack of consideration for importance that email plays within our lives now. 

I'm incredibly frustrated on her behalf, it's causing a lot of issues.  Does anybody know how we get this sorted quickly?

[#2]

Hello @MarieH21 

A warm welcome to the forums.  Closing an account and retaining an email service is not a straightforward process ... to be honest it is asking a lot for an email service to be retained on a non-account.  Note that the concept of a forwarding option without an account is a technically non-viable concept.  The email address / account has to exist, so that the inbound emails can be received, in order to be forwarded.  This explains the process, which appears to have failed!

Email only accounts

When your account is cancelled, any additional services you have such as email, web-space, cgi-service, etc. will stop working. If you want to retain your email service after your account is closed, you must advise Plusnet before the account is closed. There used to be a charge for email only accounts, but they are now free of charge.

Resurrecting an account as email only requires manual intervention from both yourself and Plusnet. The initial stage in account resurrection gets the default email address restored. You then need to setup any secondary Plusnet email address(es) yourself, at which point you'll be able to once again send and receive emails from those addresses.

If you have secondary email address(es), after you have recreated those email addresses, you will need to ask that their contents are restored by updating the existing thread or try posting on the generic email restore topic. Please note that these backups are kept for 30 days only.

The process should go something like this...

1. Prior to your account being closed, you must tell Plusnet that after your account is closed you wish to retain the account as email only
2. You need to make a note of all of your Plusnet email address(es) by going to manage my mail at https://plus.net/email
3. Your account is terminated
4. Plusnet resurrect the account as email only
5. Plusnet will restore the default mailbox - you might need to change the name before the @ symbol to what you had before
6. You recreate any secondary email address(es) and then request that their contents are restored
7. Plusnet restore the secondary mailbox(es) content

Everything should then work as it did previously, however please note that emails sent to the email address(es) between the account being closed and the email addresses being recreated might...

1. Be returned to the sender as undelivered (no such addressee)
2. All be delivered to the default mailbox if catch-all is enabled

Superuser citation

This topic has been cited by one of the Superusers; the purpose of which is to provide a note for information which might help to focus continued discussion (but might not result in a staff response).

[#3]

DON'T RELY ON 'FREE' ISP EMAIL!

Really sorry to hear of your mother's lost emails, but any broadband forum carries warnings against relying on ISP email. I learned the hard way that with a free service, as always you get what you pay for ... so don't be surprised when your 'free' service goes wrong!

My first experience was BT Yahoo email which soon became target for every hacker on the planet, at which BT then tried to charge £1.50 per month for this 'service'. On moving to Plusnet I didn't bother with its convoluted email setup and followed forum advice to buy email from an independent provider. This enables you to change ISP and keep your email addy without break in service or risk of termination as happened in your case.

Usual disclaimers: I'm very happy with the Plusnet services I pay for, and with my email provider Fastmail at about £16.50 per year for its basic service. Both based on six years' experience.

[#4]

Moderators Note
This topic has been moved from Plusnet Feedback to Email.

[#5]

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@MarieH21 wrote: She has no access to old emails either.

Oh dear, sounds like a recipe for disaster. A bit of personal experience gained over the years. I tend to use the free Thunderbird email client, which not only downloads emails locally for me, to store wherever I want it but also even allows me to archive emails. Again to a location I can choose.

But like others have mentioned elsewhere, I've tended to avoid using ISP supplied email addresses by buying a domain and tagging the email to that. So its cost me about a tenner (maybe slightly more now) a year. But it follows me where I decide to go. No need to contact anyone else if I decide to move on - i.e. the log on details don't change. I've also got multiple Yahoo, Hotmail, Live email addresses that are free. You can never have too many email addresses. Indeed there is so much choice available.

But good luck on getting the email address restored - I seem to recall @Gandalf doing it once but it looked to be quite an effort to do. Personally I'd put it down to experience and move on.

[#6]

I expect this will be fixed ... when it’s catches the eye of a staffer, though all inbound email between account closure and restoration will have been lost.

[#7]

Thanks for your post @MarieH21 

I'm sorry for the issues with retaining your mum's Plusnet email address after cancellation.

Can you drop me a PM with her account username so we can fix?

[#8]

Hi Gandolf, sorry to be heaping another similar problem on you. But we moved to a different broadband provider back on 20th Jan - nothing Plusnet have done wrong we just wanted all the other stuff Sky can provide.

I called Plusnet customer service giving them notice that we wanted to retain our email account as we hadn't got round to switching everything. I was told this would be sorted 72hrs after the broadband account was closed.

Since then we've not been able to access the account, I've called customer services 4 times since then, each time I was assured it would be sorted but still hasn't been.

Can you help at all?

[#9]

Thanks for your post @Digger528 

Apologies for the difficulties you've had with keeping your email address after moving your broadband away from us. I've raised a task to our NetOps team to reinstate your mailbox within the next 3 working days although normally a lot sooner, but this will just be the default/primary email address. 

Once that's been done you'll need to log in and go to manage my mail at plus.net/email to recreate your additional email addresses. If you've lost any emails afterwards, let me know and I can see what we can do to restore your mail.

[#10]

Thanks for responding so quickly Gandalf. Will the NetOps team need my original email account details?

[#11]

No problem @Digger528 we've got your account details

(I found it from the username you entered in your forum profile when you signed up)

[#12]

Hi @Digger528 

We've reactivated your account now. Could you head on across to manage my mail at plus.net/email to recreate your additional mailboxes? Let me know once you've done it and I'll see if we can restore your emails that were present in your mailboxes at the time your account was cancelled.

There is a chance we won't be able to though due to how long ago it was, we generally only keep a backup of this nature for 30 days. I appreciate the delay caused would be on us though but I'd only be able to apologise if that's the case.

[#13]

Thanks, I've done that so fingers crossed you can restore.

[#14]

Thanks for getting back to me @Digger528 

Unfortunately it's bad news. We've basically waited too long. We're getting the below message when we search the destroyed mailboxes backups on your account:

Checking directories in the destroyed folder.

Cannot find destroyed folder for this user [redacted account username]. Exiting

Apologies again if there was something important you'd needed to keep you haven't backed up locally. 

[#15]

OK well thanks for trying. Will any new emails come through to the account now it's been reactivated?