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Email only account issues

Bluurg
Hooked
Posts: 5
Thanks: 1
Registered: ‎27-10-2020

Email only account issues

Having been a loyal PlusNet customer for more than 15 years I've always been very pleased with the service they provide and over the years have recommended PlusNet to many friends and work colleagues.

After a rural broadband provider installed 1Gbit fibre to all the homes in my village I had to make the hard decision to cancel my 10Mbit PlusNet service.

When cancelling my service I did request an email only account and, after reading some of the advice on this forum, contacted PlusNet the following day to confirm that my request for an email only account had been recorded.

My service from PlusNet ceased last Friday.

On Sunday email was still not working so I contacted customer services and was told that the email should be working by the next day and that I would get a confirmation text.

Email was still not working on Tuesday so I contacted customer services again and was told that it should be available within 24 hours.

Today I still do not have email access and contacted customer services for the 3rd time only to be told that it would be another 48 hours before my email was re-instated. Basically I will have had no email for the best part of 7 days.

The customer services individual I talked with today was very professional and understanding but that does not really compensate for losing access to my primary email address that is used use for all important account registrations. 

Surely after reporting this 3 times the resolution can be expedited and done in less than 48 hours?

16 REPLIES 16
Bluurg
Hooked
Posts: 5
Thanks: 1
Registered: ‎27-10-2020

Re: Email only account issues

As of lunchtime today I am able to log into my account and access "Manage My Mail".

Mailboxes have all disappeared except for the 2 default ones.

Questions:

  • Do I need to setup the emailboxes I need or are these going to be restored?
  • Have I lost all emails since Friday?
  • Should I enable "Catch All" in the interrim?

Hoping that someone from PlusNet support sees this and can help me!

Townman
Superuser
Superuser
Posts: 22,922
Thanks: 9,538
Fixes: 158
Registered: ‎22-08-2007

Re: Email only account issues

Hi

A warm welcome to the forums.

It would rather look as though someone dropped a ball here!  Resurrecting an account as email only requires manual intervention.  The process should go something like this...

  1. You tell Plusnet that when you leave, you wish to retain the account as email only
  2. You make a note of the email addresses
  3. The account is terminated
  4. Plusnet resurrect the account as email only
  5. You recreate the email accounts
  6. Plusnet restore the email contents

So in answer to your questions...

  1. Yes you need to set up the email addresses
  2. Yes you have lost any email sent to you from after the mailboxes being trashed
  3. If you reinstate the email addresses, you will not need the catchall

 

@Gandalf  - are you able to assist here please?

Superusers are not staff, but they do have a direct line of communication into the business in order to raise issues, concerns and feedback from the community.

car7c
Dabbler
Posts: 11
Registered: ‎09-04-2020

Re: Email only account issues

Not sure of the form with a "me-too" story on these threads, but...

Plusnet had a billing problem with my account, told me they were going to terminate it, and asked me to set up a new account. I agreed, subject to the old email address continuing to work, as it's my wife's only email address (and a useful extra one for me, too). I thought it was a good sign that correspondence about the new account was being sent to the old email address... up until 9:14 last Friday (30 October), when the new account became operational (more or less, but it had settled down by 5:30 pm), and the old email addresses stopped working. I spoke to a Plusnet rep on Friday evening who told me the old account was being converted to "email only", which would be completed by early next day. However, no email address next day either. Rang again (Saturday), this time told it was going to be handled by some sort of different tech team, would take up to 72 hours.

Rang again Monday, again the email problems with the old address referred to a tech team. No-one could tell us what's happening with it. Emails sent to the old address fail with the message "Your message wasn't delivered to name@xxxxxx.plus.com because the domain xxxxxx.plus.com couldn't be found.” So it appears it’s just been wiped from the DNS.

What was even more annoying is that the email addresses for the new account also appeared to be not working. In the end we worked out that ONLY postmaster worked; any other address on the new account did not work. I don't know the resolution of this either.

Guessing that if the email address is re-instated, it will be empty, I've copied the current Inbox into a local folder, so I hope we'll be able to copy that back if necessary. From the post above it appears I may not need to.

I've been a Plusnet user for a decade or more, and actually pay for 3 Plusnet accounts. We're very angry about this problem. Apart from the emails we've missed over the past few days, my wife has been unable to do several internet shopping tasks, and has lost the ability to opt in to several discount offers that are important to us.

My wife would like us to drop Plusnet in favour of another provider, but as part of creating a new account, we've now got a contract for 12 months!

Plusnet really ought to be able to handle this sort of thing properly. When will our email be fixed?

Thrall
Seasoned Pro
Posts: 568
Thanks: 112
Fixes: 23
Registered: ‎28-09-2020

Re: Email only account issues

@car7c Of the steps in this post assuming Plusnet have done step 4 you’ll need to carry out step 5 by going to the Manage tab in your account then Manage My Mail. 

Townman
Superuser
Superuser
Posts: 22,922
Thanks: 9,538
Fixes: 158
Registered: ‎22-08-2007

Re: Email only account issues

1. It sounds like the old account has not been switched to email only.

2. The new account has not had the catchall turned on / there are no other email addresses configured

3. Given that a new account was required to address a billing system failure, the term on the new account should be not longer than the residual term left on the original account

@Gandalf - can you assist here please?

Superusers are not staff, but they do have a direct line of communication into the business in order to raise issues, concerns and feedback from the community.

car7c
Dabbler
Posts: 11
Registered: ‎09-04-2020

Re: Email only account issues

Thank you to thrall and townman for your comments. I shpuld have replied to this a day or so ago. After being told categorically by some tech staff that the old account could definitely no longer be resurrected as email only, I got a reply o a twitter DM to Plusnethelp, who had managed to resurrect it!! She gave me some help in connecting to it.

 

That included the process for creating new email addresses, and in the process I discovered the catchall setting somewhere, which no-one had told me about. Set it for one account, but can't find it now for the other!

 

I did have a bit more trouble, as I'd updated the settings on Thunderbird (unchanged since 2012, I think) as recommended in Plusnet's web site. I kept being asked for passwords and getting timeout messages for imap.plus.net. Eventually we noticed that mail on the iPad was working fine; the only difference was that it was using SSL/TLS rather than STARTTLS (??). I changed Thunderbird to use SSL/TLS, and all was well.

 

So thanks guys for your help.

 

I am still annoyed however that various tech staff could have told me so many contradictory things, and (according to the last tech guy I spoke with on the phone rather than twitter) had failed to raise tickets about the email disappearing. Consistency among the various staff was non-existent. But a good result in the end, thanks to Jess and Noor.

Bluurg
Hooked
Posts: 5
Thanks: 1
Registered: ‎27-10-2020

Re: Email only account issues

Thank you Townman.

Email accounts were all re-created on the 31st October.

I'll wait another day and then chase this as it will have been 10 days since the request to have the email history restored was raised.

 

 

Bluurg
Hooked
Posts: 5
Thanks: 1
Registered: ‎27-10-2020

Re: Email only account issues

It has now been a month since moving to an email only account.  PlusNet have just emailed me closing the case which asked for my email history to be restored from archive.  The emails have NOT been restored.

 

This was the only thing I asked for before moving to an email only account and I was repeatedly assured that my email history would not be lost.

LeChuck
Hooked
Posts: 5
Thanks: 3
Registered: ‎17-11-2020

Re: Email only account issues

This is to confirm that a request to unarchive your email is now in progress, this was submitted by a colleague that you spoke with recently.

Rincewind_
Dabbler
Posts: 20
Thanks: 4
Registered: ‎17-11-2020

Re: Email only account issues

Hi @Bluurg ,

 

I have sent you an email with an update regarding your query. 

 

JuUK
Newbie
Posts: 4
Registered: ‎04-12-2020

Re: Email only account issues

@LeChuck @Rincewind_   I am having the same issues as the above.  Have contacted the PlusNet helpline several times and they keep telling me that the email only account will be activated "in a couple of days".  In fact, on my last call, the PlusNet rep said he would text me in a few minutes to tell me when my email would be activated and confirm the password after he had spoken to his manager.  Of course, I heard nothing.  I am reaching the end of my tether having been without the email address for over a week now.  Please could you help or ask a colleague to contact me as phoning the helpline is not yielding any results? 

NB. I logged the request for an email only account well before my contract ended so I don't understand the reason for the delay.

Thanks in advance for your assistance.

car7c
Dabbler
Posts: 11
Registered: ‎09-04-2020

Re: Email only account issues

I hope your post will get some results for you. When I was having difficulties, I tried various approaches including asking to speak to supervisors on the helpline call, and also using twitter to contact @plusnethelp, via open twitter and also direct messages. I don't know which if any of those made a difference. But I do hope the Plusnet folk on here can fix it for you without those extremes! Good luck...

JuUK
Newbie
Posts: 4
Registered: ‎04-12-2020

Re: Email only account issues

Thanks for the suggestions @car7c .  I have tried all of those options but will keep persisting!

Bluurg
Hooked
Posts: 5
Thanks: 1
Registered: ‎27-10-2020

Re: Email only account issues

@LeChuck and @Rincewind_ thanks for the updates.

Unfortunately no email history has been restored.  The earliest emails available are from 20th November so it seems that not only has the restoration of archived email failed, but email history between the 28th October and 20th November has been deleted.

I'm struggling to remain calm about this. I was assured that moving to an email only account was a simple matter and that I would definitely not lose my email history.  I would have backed up all of my email had someone been honest and said there was a risk of losing all of my history.  

Please can you look at this again? 

This isn't an isolated incident and you really need to escalated this internally and get a proper process put in place for managing the move to email only accounts. How can tasks/JIRAs be raised and ignored for weeks and then be closed without resolution? Surely there is an SLA on these?

Thanks in anticipation.