Sky wreaked Be service now lying about mail shutdown!

Hi, sky bought be broadband and I was worried. Rightly so. I enjoyed my Be service , both customer support and delivery and needed assurance that all would continue and in particular that my BE email address would stay. Sky, not BE , assured me that would be the case. I get an email , supposedly from BE, no mention of sky, saying they are closing down email and the domain and I have to migrate to a new email address by the 31st of July when I will be cut off. I called sky and twitter sky customer help and expressed my disgust with the decision and the timeframe and asking for at least the email domain names to be auto forwarded for 6 months to allow the massive task of contacting everyone that holds my address or I have an account with. I estimate 150 200 hours work. I was a very early email adopter and hold all my emails backed up as a diary and record.

Both sky customer services say don't blame us we can't help we only bought the broadband service not the email or the domain. It's BE that's closing it down. I pointed out that it was Sky who made the promise on email to me but the response was , it's news to us too!

I called BE direct as I smelled a rat. Looking at the very bottom of the email from Be in tiny letters. "Sky home communications ltd". The legacy BE support person on the line, it's easy to tell , they are great and soon to be unemployed , try's to help me ease the pain of transfer, not anything he can do that I can't , but says the domain is closing and will disappear so my request for domain auto forwarding can't happen. Then the 69 dollar question , is your part of be still owned by sky? Yes. So sky in a cowardly and mendacious fashion buys Be, splits it and blames the disgusting way it's treating be customers on Be. Another part of sky!!!!!!!!!

Lying Barstewards!

I would like to know who actually controls the domain. Who is it can be manipulated. And why did sky lie about email staying or them being in control of it and their relationship with the current domain holders. Is bethere.co.uk for sale?

Soon to be ex sky customer. TV bet broadband , the works!

https://www.bethere.co.uk/web/beportal/email

Are you sure that Sky previously said that they would continue running the BE email service forever?

In any case, the usual advice on these boards is to have an email service independent from your ISP, which is advice I support.

Very sure O. I was [censored] off at BE being bought and loss of email address was my biggest worry. Asked catagoricly if email would change and was told No catagorically! I asked more than once. Now things change but what a cowardly lying way of trying to avoid flack by saying it's not us , it's be when they are be. We need longer to migrate , a six month domain forward would be reasonable. No one from be or Sky will tell me who I can lobby for keeping the domain open with email forward open a bit longer even if the mailboxes close.

Yes in hindsight seperating email is best and I do to an extent with a seperating gmail account. I've just got 8 years or replationships and accounts to find and change and don't have the time to do it in a month and a half.

I've moved my email to my own domain now so this won't happen again! Sky are still duplicitous Barstewards though. Mucked up transition and speed still not back up to what it was. Even though that was promised too.

In reply to a post by Woody1888:

Very sure O. I was [censored] off at BE being bought and loss of email address was my biggest worry. Asked catagoricly if email would change and was told No catagorically! I asked more than once.

I accept that Sky said that the BE email service would continue post-takeover, which it did. I just have a hard time believing that Sky said the service would continue forever. I've never heard anyone else being told that, and I haven't seen it written online.

Now Oliver , I asked a specific question. Will my email address continue unchanged. Not "will it ever" a "no"is not conditional. I asked multiple times. Same answer , when they (or is it you ) , want to retain a customer.

Btw. They have just deleted an identical post to above that I posted in their help forums. No answer . Post gone. Nice people!

Have you got any proof?

Yes I think I do to an extent. I can't prove the conversations with sky customer support but I can prove they are saying it's not their fault And they own be. I'm surprised on the querying of the veracity of the post? Do you think when asked a few months back on the migration whether email would go they said "it's staying for now but we really don't control it and it might go in 6 months" or they said "no it won't change" given they were desperate to retain accounts?

If you are complaining about something that isn't recorded anywhere it could just be you mis-remembered it.
On the other hand, it could just be that plans have changed.

From what I gather, the BE email service was never very popular with BE users. So given that it has low usage, and BE no longer exists as an ISP, I'm in no way surprised Sky chose to shut the email down. "Forever" cannot be implied when it isn't stated. In the absence of "forever", I would assume "for the time being" is implied.

So I think your allegations of Sky lying in this instance are unfounded.

In reply to a post by Woody1888:

Btw. They have just deleted an identical post to above that I posted in their help forums. No answer . Post gone. Nice people!

I'm not surprised they deleted your post if you accused them of lying. Are you aware that you can be sued for defamation?

Rather strange arguments boys. For the sake of transparancy , do you have any links with Sky Direct or otherwise? They said it wouldn't change. It's changing after much less than a year. They say it's not up to them though they own the rump Be. This can be proved. They are only giving two months notice. When heavy users will need much more.

Why post just about what I can prove. It's all a wee bit strange. They either lied or over promised and were incompetent in thier communication to thier benefit. I.e. After thier assurance I stayed rather than migrating immediately giving me the time to do so..

I have no links with Sky other than being a satisfied customer. I do however think allegations of lying have to be justified, and incidentally so does the law.

Oh dear, you really are a fan boy it looks like. Did you read my post. I deliberately made sure it was in house rules. Happy to post here though on balance of probability and happy to highlight shoddy service..

Now stop towing the party line and being nitpicky for the sake of it. Sky took a very well thought of service with much higher approval ratings and made mistakes in transition and cut off email. Good service?

In reply to a post by Oliver341:

From what I gather, the BE email service was never very popular with BE users. So given that it has low usage, and BE no longer exists as an ISP, I'm in no way surprised Sky chose to shut the email down. "Forever" cannot be implied when it isn't stated. In the absence of "forever", I would assume "for the time being" is implied.

So I think your allegations of Sky lying in this instance are unfounded.

I think the opposite is true Oli. If there is no qualification on the reply "yes" to will my email account stay. You can't assume anything other than it will stay.

In reply to a post by Woody1888:

Oh dear, you really are a fan boy it looks like. Did you read my post. I deliberately made sure it was in house rules.

The "house rules" here do not take precedence over English law. If disliking baseless allegations of lying makes me a "fan boy" then so be it.

In reply to a post by Woody1888:

I think the opposite is true Oli. If there is no qualification on the reply "yes" to will my email account stay. You can't assume anything other than it will stay.

Your incorrect assumptions don't make Sky liars.

I am irritated by your suggestion that I am either a Sky employee or a fanboy. I have been a happy BE user for years before BT Infinity arrived and I was able to migrate to that.

Anyway, looking on the BEUserGroup, there's no hint that your claim of Sky guaranteeing any timespan of @bethere.co.uk email is in any way correct

In reference to beusergroup.co.uk/?id=986:

Sky close @bethere.co.uk email and web hosting.
2014-06-03 13:33:49, by drsox

Sky sent an email to BE webhosting and e-mail customers earlier today warning of loss of their email addresses and web hosting at the end of July 2014.

BE Email and web hosting has always been a paid extra, and for the last ~2? years of BE's existence - wasn't an option to customers who did not already have the add-on.

More information on the closure of Email can be found here and more information on the closure of web hosting can be found here.

Category: Sky Stuff Permalink

Edited by deleted (Mon 09-Jun-14 17:33:22)

I'm sorry that you are irritated. I just find it difficult to understand both of your strange and illogical defence of Sky. I I was seeking logic in it. Ie vested interest.

With regard to your point a lack of a statement of longevity does not in any way absolve sky from reneging on what I was told. I was there. A simple yes to a question on whether my email would stay. Yes plans change but it's pretty cowardly hiding behind BE as if they are another entity and not a subsidiary. Not our decision it's BE's fault. That's not an untruth? If I had 6months auto forwarding I'd still be annoyed but I could take time to migrate. I already have my email domain up and running and in place. It's the notifying and changing accounts that's the rub.

In reply to a post by Woody1888:

reneging on what I was told

There is, apparently, not a shred of evidence you were told this. I think you are mistaken, at best.

In reply to a post by Oliver341:

From what I gather, the BE email service was never very popular with BE users.

I wasn't able to get BE email when I joined BE in 2008 (left in 2012), so it was only very early users who could get email.

So given that it has low usage, and BE no longer exists as an ISP, I'm in no way surprised Sky chose to shut the email down.

I'm surprised Sky haven't just redirected the domain to their own email service and created mailboxes. That you would have thought would be easy. Probably hard because they don't run their own email, they outsource to Yahoo (before that it was Google).

Do Sky own the domain?

In reply to a post by BatBoy:

Do Sky own the domain?

Yes.

I suspect it's because of the low numbers of users. If this were a Tiscali situation with every user getting a mailbox, a large number of whom actively used it, then Sky may perhaps have considered migrating the BE mailboxes. But BE never had anything like the number of users Tiscali did, and only a small percentage of BE users paid the extra for email.

Shutting down mailboxes is always going to irritate some people, but I haven't seen Sky lie about anything here.

Ooo, lookie here

In reference to www.sky.com/shop/your-move-to-sky/faq/:

What will happen to my BE email?

From next April, we�ll be looking to make some changes to the BE email services. We�ll contact you nearer the time if you�re affected and let you know what you need to do to make sure you don�t lose any important emails or contacts.

Ah yeah, I remember that now, that notice was posted several months ago. I do remember thinking at the time that it was a little vague, but it did feel like shut-down pre-warning to me, as it spoke about losing emails and contacts.

It certainly doesn't say bethere email will still er, be there.

There is certainly not a shred of evidence that I wasn't told this. I still have to understand your motivation for disbelieving my account. I was told what I was told. You have not commented on anything else in my post. There are more points in there. However I dispair of any logical thought or discussion on the rights and wrongs of cutting services with short notice. I tried to get over the adversarial tendency of these posts. I'm willing to be convinced that sky are mad not bad or just unconcerned about customers in my position, but the logic given is twisted and it still feels like it's me in the dock with you two. We're at least keeping this topic at the top of the sky board.

In reply to a post by Woody1888:

There is certainly not a shred of evidence that I wasn't told this.

I even quoted the FAQ on the website as you obviously hadn't bothered to check. It is clear the plan was to shut down services that weren't migrated over to Sky.

Well clearly you must have some proof as surely no-one would be silly enough to defame a company on an internet message board without some kind of proof. It's just that we haven't seen it yet.

In reply to a post by Woody1888:

It's BE that's closing it down.

The above statement appears to be correct.

In reply to a post by Woody1888:

I would like to know who actually controls the domain. Who is it can be manipulated.

Be Un Limited

You can apply for the Domain Name on 24/09/2014.

Edited by JimmyBoy (Mon 09-Jun-14 23:29:35)

They haven't deleted all his posts - for example this http://helpforum.sky.com/t5/Broadband-Talk-Orders/Sk... is still there.

It was probably taken offline briefly while they removed some of the language...

I would not read "make some changes" as a statement of intent to close the service. To me this implies a continuing service. Also closure would surely affect all users of email and not just some, so no need for "if you're affected". As for "what you need to do to make sure you don�t lose any important emails or contacts." To me this reads as a warning that data may be lost in the process of alteration, e.g. migration to a new system. It would then be necessary for the user to backup the information to make sure nothing is lost. So really I read that as a covering statement in order to avoid possible liability for loss of the data.

In reply to a post by BatBoy:

On the other hand, it could just be that plans have changed.

If this is the case then how many of Sky's promises to Be customers can be relied upon? None? I've seen posts on the Be group from people promised, in writing too as I remember, they would not be charged more after the migration. Then when the bill arrives there's a surcharge for not having Sky TV . This may not be an extra charge for the internet service itself, but to me looks like deceptive practice. Possibly even a case of mis-selling.

In reply to a post by Kronos2001:

I would not read "make some changes" as a statement of intent to close the service. To me this implies a continuing service. Also closure would surely affect all users of email and not just some, so no need for "if you're affected".

To me it implies that if you want to continue to use email, you're going to have to make some changes such as move to Sky's own email. BE's email was hardly used due to it being unavailable to purchase for the last 2 years of BE, therefore only a very few are affected. There is no intent shown anywhere that Sky were planning to retain BE's email.

In reply to a post by Kronos2001:

In reply to a post by BatBoy:

On the other hand, it could just be that plans have changed.

If this is the case then how many of Sky's promises to Be customers can be relied upon? None? I've seen posts on the Be group from people promised, in writing too as I remember, they would not be charged more after the migration. Then when the bill arrives there's a surcharge for not having Sky TV . This may not be an extra charge for the internet service itself, but to me looks like deceptive practice. Possibly even a case of mis-selling.

As far as I am aware, no-one was charged more after migration, it's just the bill was laid out differently. Also I believe Sky have introduced static IP addresses and are working on allowing DLM profile changes to replicate the USP of the BE Unlimited product..

They are a wholly owned subsidiary of sky. It's sky hiding behind the BE name. Shameful! I've asked for a contact within sky responsible for the domain.

That's the FAQ for the close down of the service. Produced after the announcement.!

treat this as a lesson learned.

do not use isp based email addresses for anything other than throw away use.

Buy a domain preferably but even as an alternative, long term services such as hotmail and gmail are more suitable than using isp based email's.

It's interesting that the isp's are closing the email services down so fast these days. I still have my pipex email account from many years ago! lol

I don't use it. Though I can still login and send/receive emails.

I never got a Be email address. They had already closed it down for new customers. That should really have been the warning shot all those years ago of where the service was heading.

Yes I'm moving to a domain.

In reply to a post by Woody1888:

That's the FAQ for the close down of the service. Produced after the announcement.!

I'm afraid that's untrue. The FAQ clearly says "From next April". Unlucky.

In reply to a post by BatBoy:

I'm afraid that's untrue. The FAQ clearly says "From next April". Unlucky.

The Usergroup spoke of this some time ago: http://beusergroup.co.uk/index.php?id=971

Whilst the FAQ was altered to make it more ambiguous than it previously was, it does not say that the service will continue indefinitely.

I see that's dated 2013-11-01, well before the announcement of the closure not after

In reply to a post by BatBoy:

I see that's dated 2013-11-01, well before the announcement of the closure not after

Well, that was when the FAQ was changed, the previous version of the FAQ prior to October 2013 said for certain that the BE email service would be axed. Probably over a year of notice.