Correct. Plusnet have to release you without any penalty.

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Plusnet have to release you without any penalty.

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Or rather they would have done if you acted within the 30 days. Just checked & I got the email (as I presume everyone else did) on 25 September. Whether people read it or check the email address it is sent to is a different matter.

Good point. Any idea when the change was made though?

And I although I haven't read the actual T & Cs where it has changed, that in itself is not relevant as customers are not expected to check all their T & Cs daily or even monthly.

The date of notification of the change is the relevant date. As email to the user's registered address is presumably the declared method, if the user allows that to go out of date then Plusnet can claim to have fulfilled their responsibilty. However I don't know the case law on contract changes especially regarding receipt of mail-list emails and detection of rejections.

The date of reading the email from the user's mail server and then actually reading it on screen will be irrelevant, in the same way as snail-mail left in an incoming mail-box or just unopened is the recipients problem.

mkelly said earlier in this thread (here) that it was implemented on 29 October.

Plusnet T&C also state:-

"8.1.1 You must accept and read regularly email to postmaster@<username>.plus.com." (Although I thought there was talk of a change to that some time ago - as long as there was another email address official stuff could go to.)

If someone signs up with Plusnet then they've agreed to check their postmaster address - if they don't that is, as you say, their problem. As that is a Plusnet managed address the only place mail is likely to get rejected or blocked is because of something that the user has implemented.

I think the main problem is how Plusnet can insist on payment of deferred charges, in a contract they have changed to the customers detriment, if the customer rejects the changes.

They can't, but that's what the dates discussed in the last couple of posts or so are about.

The user has a limited time to reject the change from the date of notification, otherwise acceptance is by default as in all such changes at other companies.

I would argue that the "false" information given by Plusnet could probably have influenced some customers to accept against their better judgement.

I hope such misinformation is not an indication of the "old" Plusnet re-emerging.

Depends on whether they are considered separate contracts or not. If the deferred payments are a separate contract then they could still enforce even if they change the terms of the ADSL contract.

I fail to see how they could be. Plusnet agree to supply ADSL. They also offer to defer certain costs as part of that agreement. The various ADSL packages refer to these deferred costs as inclusive, should the customer wish to take them. Therefore the deferred costs are part of the ADSL packages.

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Plusnet T&C also state:-

"8.1.1 You must accept and read regularly email to postmaster@<username>.plus.com." (Although I thought there was talk of a change to that some time ago - as long as there was another email address official stuff could go to.)

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Indeed we did talk about that - We got the sign-off in principle to change the wording of the AUP and I was planning to get it changed the next time we did an update. Annoyingly there wasn't time during the latest round of work though and a number of items we had hoped to add in had to be dropped. We have a bigger project underway to look at the wording and structure of all our contract terms and AUPs (For Plusnet, Metronet and MAAF) to see what we can do to bring them together and improve them generally (we've been looking at things like Plain English reviews as well as the terms themselves). However it's a far from easy rewording such things as we've no desire to make our terms seem less attractive to people, which is easily done without taking a lot of care.

In regards of other ISPs passing this charge on, I have a feeling it's inevitable at some point, but I think people should wait and see a bit - especially in the current climate a lot of businesses in our market have a handful of hard decisions to make. It's normal for supplier costs to be passed on, but they can take a while to filter through so it's probably too eatly to identify who will charge this and who won't long term.

Ian