How did Plusnet win customer service awards?

[#1]

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@Townman wrote:

This Gmail issue is down to gmail delaying acceptance of emails sent to free accounts ... not Plusnet delaying attempts to transmit.

Try sending an email addressed to both a free and paid for gmail account and another. The paid for and another addresses will receive the email promptly. The free gmail account will not receive the email for a delay time determined by Gmail.

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I must be lucky then. Emails to my gmail address arrive immediately, but then they are sent from my own domain and not the PN servers.

[#2]

If a user has their own domain hosted on plusnet servers and the use that as the sending address ... Gmail does not delay receipt.

So send from @Username.plus.com to a free address and Gmail delays the hell out of it. Use your own domain name or send to a paid for account and it arrives straight away.

Now tell me that Gmail is not messing with delivery!!!

[#3]

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@Eavestile wrote:

Thanks. Why don't PN publish that Gmail are restricting access. And nothing to do with us Gov.

It is one thing for users to publish their empirical evidence, but it is quite another for one corporate organisation to cite another's apparent failings.  It is just not cricket old chap! 

There is some thinking that IN SPECIFIC RELATION TO Gmail FREE ACCOUNTS Google is (inappropriately) treating *.plus.com as one big bulk mailing service.  If that is in fact the case (Google has not confirmed that in the query I have open on their support forum) then implementing SFP for each and every individual Plusnet email user might ameliorate the situation, but there is no firm evidence it will.

Under RFC specifications, the absence of SPF should be treated as being neutral and processed normally.  Therefore, if Google are somewhat insisting on the presence of SPF records to resolve this "issue", then they are admitting that they have deliberately not correctly apply the SPF RFC rules.  Whatever, even without SPF being in place they do not inhibit email being recieved by their paid for email users.

@It is nearly as though Google has taken the stance that they do not care if their free of charge email users find that they need to wait to receive their emails.  Personally I would ditch any such Gmail accounts and opt for an @outlook.com one instead.

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[#4]

@Townman

Cricket ain't what it used to be.  PN's legal department is more likely to be behind the failure to give better customer service by coming clean about the problem and what PN is doing about it officially with Google.  Has the Company actually lodged a complaint with them?

I was told that the billing system was at fault at around 6.30 pm on 25/9. Another caller has said the customer service help line denied there was a problem.

These were some of the answers PN gave me on livechat when I asked why my sister got my email two days late:

"Electronic email is not instantly, if her webmail was full then it will have waited till the inbox had room before arriving. If she is using an email client then there may be an issue with her gateway

But again I see no issue

Then it is your gateway that is the issue. so do you use email client or webmail

Then it the email client at fault"

This from PN that is well aware there is an issue.

If nothing else the Director in charge of Training should be finding out just how little the employees managing the switchboard actually know.

I have just tried to ring up to find out why I have not had a response to my overdue request for information but the current 25 minute wait time put me off.  The wait time on the two calls I did previously attempt were 20 minutes and 30 minutes (no answer- call abandoned).

Customer Service - are you HMRC in disguise?

[#5]

I agree that sometimes the advice given by front line agents on complex issues can be (shall we say) lacking. It is a subject oft discussed in the super user space.

The reality is that were humans are involved there is likely to be human failure. There will always be generic answers to generic questions, there are though specific circumstances such as this where precise circumstances produce non generic failures.

For example I email using my domain name (via Plusnet relays) and experience no problems anywhere. However if I change the email address in my mail client account details to the generic PlusNET domain name, emails to free Gmail accounts can be delayed (never lost) whilst those to paid for accounts remain unaffected.

Looking at Google’s support forums, it is evident that this is not an issue they are prepared to engage with. At the very least they could be clear about why there is a differing behaviour between free and paid for receiptents and confirm for sure what will resolve the issue ... which is somehow not required for delivering mail to their paying clients.

Personally I suspect that they have little care about supporting non-paying users.

Remember that the RFC provisions being muted around here have no firm supporting evidence that they are the solution. It is very much in the realms of its something to try and see if it makes a difference.

If the absence of a feature inhibited all emails to Google regardless of the use of a personal domain name, I’d buy the argument. Right now it’s not that black and white.