crazy email address

[#1]

Hi, I am a brand new customer, having migrated from BT because of their dreadful support staff. I expected to get an email account along the lines of username@plus.com or similar. However, Plusnet seems to follow a bizarre and obscure way of assigning email addresses. Firstly, I had no idea what my email address was and had to search all over the place to find I have to set one up myself on a rather confusing page about email addresses, mailboxes, aliases etc. and then I find I have the stupidly clunky address of fredbloggs@fredjbloggs.plus.com (where fred bloggs is to cover my real name). How can I change the username after the @ to something more professional?  If I was aware of this format during signup I would have picked something more sensible. I suspect you have set it up this way to discourage your customers from clogging up your servers.
Regards, SJW.

[#2]

You can't change the part after the @ it will always be username.plus.com. If you go to http://email.plus.net you can create an unlimted number of mailboxes, aliases or redirects which vary the name before the @.
Edit: I thought during the signup process it advised you when choosing the user name that this would form part of your email address (it always used to).

[#3]

Thanks jelv. The signup process may well have suggested the username will form part of the email address but I guess I assumed it would form the prefix part of the address like every other provider on planet Earth. I won't make that mistake again.
If I can't cancel now I will wait 12 months then cancel and if I rejoin it will be with something that looks less childlike. It's funny how the simplest thing can really turn you off a product.
Regards,
sjw

[#4]

As mentioned, if you don't like fredbloggs@fredbloggs.plus.com (I agree it can appear a bit daft) then why not set up something like email@fredbloggs.plus.com? - see jelv's post about aliases/redirects etc.

[#5]

While Plusnets address system may seem novel when compared to  VM, TT, BT, etc,  it's more because the others chose a more restrictive system and Plusnet chose what was the most common system at the time for the features they provide (i.e. your own domain).
The biggest advantage (IMHO) of Plusnets approach is the ability to use unlimited email aliases,  where you can give every company, forum, etc an email address unique to them,  which makes blocking spam and dealing with the company that leaked you details easier.
One other approach to changing account is to get your own domain name (e.g. fredbloggs.me.uk, sirBloggs.co.uk) via Plusnet.  This has the secondary advantage that when/if you move away from Plusnet you can transfer the domain,  and you don't have to change your email address.

[#6]

Freeserve's email naming convention back in the day was practically identical.
@SJW - This convention allows us to allow our customers to have multiple email addresses.  As you can probably imagine, with in the region of 1,000,000 email accounts, if we had username@plus.com for example, the ability to chose an email address that would suit would become rather tricky!
Have you given thought to a gmail account or perhaps even getting your own domain name?
It would be sad to lose you as a customer on the basis that you didn't like your email address.

[#7]

As I was reading through this topic I was thinking to myself "this is no different to Freeserve" - as the last response mentions. There I had firstname@fullname.freeserve.co.uk and didn't like that either! I'm also sure it was note clearly during the sign-up procedure here - but that didn't worry me as I'll explain.
Right from the word go - in 1999 - I registered appropriate domain names so currently have a collection of about a dozen that I use for various things. I use 123-reg.co.uk and they're cheap enough for .co.uk and .org.uk names for it not to matter - about £3 or so a year.
The other advantage of this is that it means you can switch ISPs without changing your email address - since I never use the "base" ISP email address for anything so it's a simple matter of changing the redirection.
I would strongly suggest doing this rather than "suffering" a year and then changing your Plusnet address to something else (though I also took the precaution of not signing up here on a 12 month contract in case I had problems - that was now over twelve months ago so I'm happy here as it turns out).

[#8]

I dont know if you can still do it, but I set up a free Plusnet dialup email address for those times I did not want to use my main address.