Coms email and web hosting discontinued

Dear Customer,

I am writing to provide you with 30 days� notice of our intention to vary the terms and conditions of your contract with Coms Ltd, specifically in relation to the provision of services.

After careful consideration we have decided that on the 31st September 2014 we will be terminating our email and web hosted services. Our decision has been based on the ongoing viability of providing these services, which is unsustainable.

All of our broadband and telephone line connections and associated packages will remain unchanged. I understand that this decision could have a negative impact for some of our customers and I would like to apologise in advance for the inconvenience this may cause.
Please ensure that you migrate your email and web hosted services prior to the 31st September 2014 as our supply of these services will cease on this date.

We are here to help should you need anything further in relation to this or any other matter, please either email our customer service team, or telephone the customer services department on 0330 300 9000.

Yours sincerely,

Steven Shears
Head of Customer Services

My biggest fear of changing ips is changing all my email address

Sigh, the reason i don't jump ship and run even from a poor isp is the hassle of changing my email address. So if there's no email then there's nothing stopping me from moving on. Absolutely brilliant decision there COMS.
Oh and one more thing. Bye Bye.

You can have your own domain and web/email hosting up and running within an hour of signing up. Then you read on new and existing, but only send from new. You can even have one of the new .uk TLD domains!

Tell all your contacts, change all shop etc. accounts, and you are not having to panic and screw up. By the end of September you should have picked up any contacts/ accounts you missed.

See this page on my website. That has a link to Tsohost that I recommend. It isn't the cheapest, but reliable and superb CS if you have issues.

If you like to check the IP addresses of visitors to your website, do not take the Cloud Hosting. For some reason the stats on that don't show it. On the cPanel Hosting they do. I have one on Cloud and several on cPanel. Always take domains for 2 years - much cheaper than 1 year.

the letter said

After careful consideration we have decided that on the 31st September 2014

There ain't no such date !!

Sadly telling your contacts to change your email address in their address books will have totally zero effect on a considerable portion of them
I know - I've tried....it's like trying to explain to a 2 year old.

Whats more of a worry is how coms are slowly bringing changes in that effect users. They said nothing would change after the switch from ADSL24 then traffic management came in. Then they changed their contact phone numbers which instead of a 24hr line is now 8-8pm (although i did ring them once at 8:30 and got an answer) and now its removing web/email.

What next? Price? Static IP? Usage?

Maybe not many customers rang them during the early hours so no worth having a 24/7 line, and maybe not many use email/web hosting i dunno, but its abit concerning

In reply to a post by goldenoldie:

the letter said

After careful consideration we have decided that on the 31st September 2014

There ain't no such date !!

Well spotted i missed that.

Maybe that's another change they are making.

Yet another demonstration of incompetence?

That's why I advise doing it the way I say. Bear in mind that by telling them using the new address and asking for a reply, (and setting your email client to request an acknowledgement if not using webmail). A reply from them using the Reply button will add it to their address book.

The poster has to change email address!

Edited by RobertoS (Sat 05-Jul-14 09:58:31)

Well spotted on the wrong date, haha!

They really know how to pee people off don't they. It must pee off one or two of their other existing customers I would have thought too. Mind you, is it because they have lost so many people from their services it is no longer cost effective???

I have said for many years, get your email separate from your ISP for just such reasons, mine is with my web hosting company, but I know a lot of others pay a small fee with a paid service for their email so it is totally independant.

woody

Unsustainable seems to be their favourite word when it comes to going against their word. Still, going by the quality of my connection, the fact they are now supposedly using a foreign call centre plus the hilarious translator messages that have been posted here, it's blatantly obvious Coms is a no frills budget ISP that are going around pretending they are premium.

... and 10 years can often be cheaper than 2

There are lots of places that offer email-only hosting for £10-15 a year, so it's well worth just spending a little to get an address that is unlikely to ever need changing, or can be moved.

Matt

In reply to a post by ukwoody:

I have said for many years, get your email separate from your ISP for just such reasons, mine is with my web hosting company, but I know a lot of others pay a small fee with a paid service for their email so it is totally independant.

Good advice here.

I made the mistake of using the ADSL24/Coms ISP email as my main email address. I lost all of my recent emails (from Feb) as a result of the server failure debacle. I won't make that mistake again.

Good advice here.

I made the mistake of using the ADSL24/Coms ISP email as my main email address. I lost all of my recent emails (from Feb) as a result of the server failure debacle. I won't make that mistake again.


I've a big chunk of missing emails 10th Feb to 19th June thought i had accidently deleted them . I knew nothing of a server failure did coms send letters out ?.

Edited by deleted (Sat 05-Jul-14 23:41:06)

In reply to a post by Mucron:

I've a big chunk of missing emails 10th Feb to 19th June thought i had accidently deleted them . I knew nothing of a server failure did coms send letters out ?.

Yes, Coms sent the communication out via the ticketing system. You would probably only have received it if you logged a ticket. Here's an excerpt:

"Dear Customer,

As you maybe aware we have experienced some technical problems with our email servers. I would like to take this opportunity to explain what has happened and the actions we are taking to put things right.

The server that processes all of your email communication unexpectedly failed due to a problem with the hard drive within the machine, our back-up server was initiated, however restored service to February 2014, resulting in all emails between February and June 2014 being lost. We understand that this situation is frustrating and are doing what we can to ensure that a similar situation is alleviated.

This work is ongoing, however I can confirm that the email service has been restored, along with access to Cpanel and the SSL Certificate issues have also been resolved.

We are implementing a further change to increase the level of security for your email accounts, and you will be required to change your email passwords when this change happens this Friday. This is as a result of email spamming or junk emails being sent, which is due to some customers email passwords being compromised by external spammers. Your password security is vital to ensure that your email account does not get compromised externally and therefore the change of your email passwords will be mandatory, as we have noticed a dramatic increase in the volume of spam emails originating from the adsl24.co.uk domain. "

In reply to a post by ukwoody:

I have said for many years, get your email separate from your ISP for just such reasons, mine is with my web hosting company, but I know a lot of others pay a small fee with a paid service for their email so it is totally independent.

Sure, the way to go but something only a small percentage of private individuals actually get round to doing. It is only when the email service is withdrawn [or changed] by an ISP or you switch to another ISP, that you realize the enormity of the task of using a new email address.

To me getting the shortest domain name length possible, and hosted, is a no brainer but entering the credentials into a email client on a laptop for optimal usage for reliable usage wherever you are in the world, is more of an issue, so recommendations of the following would be helpful:
A) POP3 or IMAP? [bearing in mind emails would not be read on any other device]
B) The settings to use for SMTP?
C) How to have a secure backup of your email client contents?
D) Anything else to consider?

In reply to a post by trolleybus:

A) POP3 or IMAP? [bearing in mind emails would not be read on any other device]
B) The settings to use for SMTP?
C) How to have a secure backup of your email client contents?
D) Anything else to consider?

a) POP3
b) As supplied by hosting company
c) Mailstore Home - it's free and backs up *all* my email accts (incl Gmail, Yahoo etc)
d) No

Nice affiliate code.

Good spot.

The one in my sig here doesn't have one.

If the money is there for the asking, would anyone turn it down? It's not as if I don't believe what I preach . I'd be out like a shot if problems arose, as they did at Purple Cloud. Which I left because of the problems a year before they folded.

Oh - and they do daily mail and website backups! I did need the mail one a few months ago.

Edited by RobertoS (Sun 06-Jul-14 18:49:56)

Domains can be registered cheaply these days and you can often either set up mail forwarding or go the whole hog and get a very cheap e-mail hosting account.

You can always move the domain between registrars and move hosting providers if you wish to/need to but it means that you'll never need to change your mail address again.

I went through a stage of moving ISPs to get the best deal and had this issue but making the decision to register my own domain was the best one I ever made.

(Was that meant as a reply to me?)

I quite agree. I went ISP-independent at the time of my first migration, many years ago.

Edited by RobertoS (Sun 06-Jul-14 19:16:11)

On receiving the email from Coms about discontinuing email, I initially thought it was some kind of spam and even emailed them to check (no response yet!).

It's almost unbelievable, and the email address is the only reason I've stayed with Coms post ADSL24 migration.

However, in response to RobertoS post, yes, TSO host are outstanding when it comes to service etc and I wholeheartedly recommend them.

In fact, it was through googling "TSO host Broadband" (to see if they may have started offering Broadband) that I found this thread. I'd go as far as to say they are the best company I've ever dealt with and even repaired my website within 6 minutes of me emailing them at 5am one Sunday morning to say I'd crashed it and needed help.

Responses from Coms RE: Above post:

Good Morning Mr.XXXXX,

Unfortunately, our email and web hosting services will be terminated on 30th September 2014. We recommend you back up your emails and look for an alternative email and hosting provider.
We have passed your query to our engineers to advise if there is any way you can set up auto forward from your adsl24 email to your new email address and soon they get back to me we will update you. In meantime if you require any further assistance do not hesitate to contact us.

Many Thanks & Kind Regards
| Networks Support Analyst


And confirmation they cannot set up an auto-forward rule:



Good Afternoon XXXXX,

Unfortunately we have received confirmation that it is impossible for any auto-forwarding measure to be implemented as the server itself will be shut down at the end of September.

As my colleague previously advised, it is recommended for you to start up a new email account with an alternative hosting provider.

Kind Regards,

XXXXXXXXXX
Coms Senior Analyst

This is why I never use an isp email address as my primary email. If you move or they end support its too much hassle

I left Plusnet when they introduced traffic shaping almost 10 years ago but I still have my email account with them.

In reply to a post by parsimony:

I left Plusnet when they introduced traffic shaping almost 10 years ago but I still have my email account with them.

I still have 2 of my Tiscali email accounts working out of the 3 I had .

One was linked to my Broadband account and stopped shortly after switching to Newnet the other 2 were set up when it was dial up in 2004 so were never deleted.

I still have access to all my tiscali email accounts and have had them for over 10 years.

Absolutely disgraceful.