Migrating in - couple of quick questions?

Hi Folks - I'm leaving F2S as my speeds have been reducing gradually over the last few months.

At what stage during the sign-up do you get to choose your e-mail address - and what format is it?

Can you pay by direct-debit? On the sign up it was purely card based ad I don't like having anyone having CCA (continious card authority) on my account.

From memory you don't choose your e-mail address on sign up, you are assigned a [email protected] address where xxxxxx is a user number. You can then ask support to assign an alias to this in the format [email protected].

Once you have signed up however you can also login to the portal and create some new addresses in the format '[email protected]' where you choose the 'myname' and 'mydomain' part.

And yes you can also change the recurring payments to direct debit - again via the portal.

All from memory so there might be slight errors for which I apologise.

Yes that's right you are assigned an email address, however when your line goes live you can access the portal and create new addresses, I don't think I've ever used the one zen gave me except for setting up router, you can also set up DD in portal

Blankfrank and tobykim have pretty much covered all the bases, except to say that Zen only take the initial payment (setup fee plus first months payment) by card. Thereafter you can setup and pay by DD; otherwise, Zen will send you an electronic invoice each month which you can pay by credit or debit card. Note that this isn't the same as a Continuous Payment Authority as you have to enter your card details in each time.

If you really don't want to use your card, I believe you can make the initial payment by cheque BUT your order won't be processed until Zen receive payment.

Thanks for the replies chaps,

I've noticed however that the e-mail addresses appear to be in the format of [email protected]
These types of subdomained e-mail addresses are quite messy in my opinion. Hardly makes for an easy to type/remember/quote e-mail address.

My current one is [email protected] - much easier.

Still, I suppose you can't have everything. I just hope that the speeds and reliability are worth sacrificing the lost 30Gb and few quid a month for!!

Your account gets 11 POP3 mailboxes. One of these is in the format [email protected] where zen99999 is your username. You can then create aliases for this POP3 mailbox (via Customer Services) in the form [email protected] (where xxx can be whatever you like - provided it doesn't already exist).

Your other 10 POP3 mailboxes are of the subdomain format.

I'd agree that the subdomain format appears a little clumsy, however I can't really see any other way to give customers the choice for the user-portion of their email addresses without causing conflicts with others - short of giving each customer their own unique domain (which would be a pain to administer). The disadvantage of the [email protected] or [email protected] type of format comes where you want a particular name for the 'xxx' portion and someone already has it!

Granted the subdomain method will generate conflicts as well where someone has already created a particular subdomain, but for those with families who want to setup a separate POP3 account for each member of the household, it means only having to resolve one conflict instead of the potential of one for each family member.

I would think that anyone who is that bothered about their email address formats would tend to register their own domain (or should certainly consider it), as this has the added advantage of being ISP-neutral.

In reply to:

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ou can then create aliases for this POP3 mailbox (via Customer Services) in the form [email protected] (where xxx can be whatever you like - provided it doesn't already exist).

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I didn't know that!!

When you say via customer services, do you mean I have to call/email cs and ask for it?

Yes.

Thanks.

In reply to:

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When you say via customer services, do you mean I have to call/email cs and ask for it?

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Yes, that's correct.

Remember that we're talking aliases - NOT mailboxes. The alias email addresses point to the one mailbox, and any/all mail sent to them arrives in the one place.