Retrieving Lost Emails

[#1]

Hi 

Not sure if anyone can help with this but I'm hoping someone might know how to fix it ?

We have always had our internet and email provided by Plusnet but recently changed internet provider in order to get fibre broadband.  Plusnet advised we could do this and still keep our email/domain provision with them and that, although we may lose access to it for 3-5 days, all emails would be retrievable for this period.

Sadly it took 3 weeks to get our email back up and running, and they now seem unable to find or retrieve the emails lost in this 3 week period which is really frustrating as many of these are important and work related.

Is it possible for us to go onto our account and retrieve these ourselves ?  Or does anyone know how we can fix this as i think there is a 30 day window and time is running out !!

Many thanks JT

[#2]

@JohnnieT Any emails sent during the time it took to restore your email access would unfortunately bounce back to the sender as 'undeliverable' as there would be nowhere to route  them to until your 'email only' account was set up and configured, so you were slightly wrongly informed, if that is what you were told.

Out of curiosity, why did it take so long?

Maybe @Gandalf could have a look and see what can be done for you.

[#3]

Thanks for your help and no sadly we weren't told this, only that it would be a 3-5 day wait to setup the email only account.  It seems it took 3 weeks (and about 5 hours in phone calls) as no-one seemed to really know how to set it up and then the Tech Team passed it to the Email Team that is apparently outsourced by Plusnet and we can't contact them direct.  I think the domain with the account also seemed to cause further problems !!

[#4]

Ah - OK. Unfortunately, not all the call centre/first line support are fully aware of the retained email policy, and the fact that it was linked to a domain would have caused even more confusion.

[#5]

Yeh that all sounds familiar ... all the staff we spoke to at Plusnet were really helpful as always, but you're right some just hadn't heard of it and just didn't know how to action it.  Thanks for your help 👍

[#6]

Thanks for your post @JohnnieT and welcome to our Community Forums. I'm really sorry to see the problems you've had getting your account changed over to an email only account and how we've handled this.

Having a look through this, I can see we cancelled your account on the 25th June, then reactivated on the 29th June. Your mailboxes weren't recreated until the 16th July, I suspect likely as we didn't call or text you to make you aware we had reactivated your account as you wouldn't have received our emails saying so.

On the 20th July, we then restored your mail that were present in your additional mailboxes at the time your account was cancelled on the 25th June. I'm afraid that any mail you may had received between your account being closed/mailboxes destroyed, and the mailboxes being remade on the 16th July would've bounced back to the sender.

Also unfortunately we wouldn't have received anything from anybody who may had sent you emails within that time, because your email addresses wouldn't have existed, so the senders would've received an undeliverable report.

(Basically to confirm what jab1 has already said and beat me to:))

I've added more information to an open support ticket on your account Here about the billing side of things and other concerns you'd raised. I'm taking personal ownership moving forward, however I am though going to be out of the office very shortly for the weekend, so if you get back to me and I don't respond today, I'll pick this up on Monday.

Once again I do sincerely apologise for the bad experience you've had.

[#7]

Thanks for getting in touch Gandalf and for clearing things up about what has happened over the last few weeks with our email account.  It's frustrating to know we won't get the lost emails back but it helps to know why.  Thanks for prioritising this yourself and for taking it on 👍 

[#8]

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@Gandalf wrote:

Having a look through this, I can see we cancelled your account on the 25th June, then reactivated on the 29th June. Your mailboxes weren't recreated until the 16th July, I suspect likely as we didn't call or text you to make you aware we had reactivated your account as you wouldn't have received our emails saying so.

On the 20th July, we then restored your mail that were present in your additional mailboxes at the time your account was cancelled on the 25th June.

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Hi Anoush,

There are three significant delays here...

1. Account reactivation - 25th to 29th June
2. Mailbox recreation - 29th June to 16th July
3. Mailbox content restore - 16th to 20th July

Is there any insight as to why these stages of a migration to an email only account took so long?  What might be done to improve this journey?

It is understood that stage 2 is very much in the hands of the user, but not stages 1 and 3.  In respect of stage 2, we had discussed the merits of setting CATCHALL to ON when reactivating the user account and email component so that during the time it takes the user to rebuild the email accounts (stage 2) no mail sent to the domain will be lost (it all gets delivered to the default mailbox).  Accepted that it might not be in the right place, but at least it will not be bounced.

[#9]

Good morning @Townman

There are a number of reasons as to why the re-creation and restore of this particular account were delayed.

Account closed - account reactivated (25/06/2021 - 29/06/2021): this was due to an open Ticket on the account not being picked up by our CSC Team. The Ticket was picked up, and the task was raised on 27/06/2021, the Mail Only account was then re-activated by our NetOps Team on the 29th.

Mailbox recreation (29/06/2021 - 16/07/2021): As @Gandalf has mentioned, this is likely due to the fact that we did not let the customer know that the email account had been reactivated. Our NetOps team don't make outbound calls, although it appears that we didn't take the opportunity to advise the customer of this when they made contact between these dates.

Mailbox content Restore (16/07/2021 - 20/07/2021): Agent error is probably to blame for this one, in that the task to restore the contents of these inboxes was not raised until 19/07/2021.

Ideally, our team, or a particular department should have followed up on this account at each stage, instead, once tasks were raised, they were not followed up on properly.

[#10]

@JonoH

This frank response suggests a number of learning opportunities. Is this something you can catch please … especially enabling CATCHALL on the account resurrection do as to minimise the window during which inbound emails might be lost?

[#11]

@JohnnieT wrote:

Thanks for getting in touch Gandalf and for clearing things up about what has happened over the last few weeks with our email account.  It's frustrating to know we won't get the lost emails back but it helps to know why.  Thanks for prioritising this yourself and for taking it on ‌‌ 

No problem at all. After our conversation on the ticket 215290800 I believe this should be all sorted now. 

Really sorry again for the poor experience you've had. Let me know if there's anything else you'd need help with.

@Townman, The first delay is due to how fast we can pick up a ticket, sometimes it's within 24-48 hours, but there can be a bit of a delay depending on how many tickets we have to get through. 

The second and third delays are due to agent error we'll ensure feedback is passed on about.

With regards to enabling catchall, I've discussed this with a colleague from our NetOps team and as they're a team of two people, they sadly haven't got the time to drill down into a mailbox to enable catch-all after reactivating an account. In an ideal world, I agree it would be good. In my opinion, it's down to us as agents to set correct expectations. 

[#12]

@Gandalf 

"they sadly haven't got the time to drill down into a mailbox to enable catch-all after reactivating an account. In an ideal world, I agree it would be good. In my opinion, it's down to us as agents to set correct expectations"

Hi Anoush,

Might this disposition be reviewed please?

1. It used to be the case that when the email component was built, CATCHALL was set by default - that might lead one to surmise that CATCHALL on or off might be a build configuration option.  If that is correct, setting it on for mailbox only account resurrection might not require "time to drill down into a mailbox" but simply choosing the "right" options when rebuilding the account would significantly enhance the user experience
   
   
2. I totally agree that it is down to agents to set the correct expectations - something clearly not achieved in this case...
   • Will only take 3-5 days - it took several weeks
   • Mail during this time will not be lost - mail was lost for circa 3 weeks
   • Account resurrection was not clearly communicated to the user so that they could reinstate the email addresses

If those reasonable expectations set by agents cannot be met, then it becomes even more imperative that any potential delay in the acceptance of inbound mail should be mitigated by all means possible.  Can (1) above be reviewed with JW please?  Sorry but "We've not got time to do this properly" so "That'll do!" is not adequate.

In the meantime, I will update my "Migrate to mail only account" boiler-plate guidance so that it advises customers to check regularly (at least twice a day) for the resurrection of their account and not to depend on notification of account resurrection via email or any other means from Plusnet.  This should help the user to reinstate the email addresses at the earliest opportunity, so as to not lose inbound email.  It is not an ideal approach, but certainly one which will mitigate the size of the window during which emails will be lost and sets appropriate expectations that they should do some leg work for their own assurance that the process is progressing according to the expectations set by the business.

As you note in an ideal world, the business systems would more ably support the service offer - broadband service termination ought not to kill off the email service, if the business is content to offer departing users an email only service.

This is but one facet of the driving forces which create "butterfly" users who hop from one provider to another having very little in terms of service differentiation, but based solely on price, be that telephone / internet communications providers or car insurance providers.  Charging existing customers more than new customers is a widespread consumer cancer which needs to be remedied.  The insurance sector gets the bullet on this in September, let us all hope that the ISP market gets the same bullet sometime soon.  More focus on existing customer retention would go a long way to mitigating the need for customers to move and thereby require email only accounts.