Catch All Forwarding at uk2

AndyRat

I have two domains hosted by UK2, they have been there for about 8 years now.

A couple of days ago, I get an email saying that they will start to charge for Catch All Forwarding, i.e. *@mydomain.co.uk will be bounced unless I pay the extra.

I have always used mail@mydomain.co.uk as my main email address, but now they won't allow this address as it is a "system address", so when Catch All Forwarding is turned off, it will get bounced, unless I pay the extra.

As 99% of my critical mail uses this address, I am prety stuffed, if I turn Catch All Forwarding on, it will cost about £5 +VAT per month, and I will get all the spam that I have been avoiding lately.

Has anyone else had the same problem??

Sorry, thought i was posting in the Techie forum :-(

Paul_Herring

I'd change your hosting company, and tell them why you're moving. This sounds like a money making exercise on their part since it costs them very little extra for that functionality

roymussell

I'm cheesed off too. My primary and sole reason to own a domain is to gain independence from the Email address provided by my ISP. I don't need website hosting or a POP3 mailbox, as I have my own backup strategy for Emails, along with the rest of my stuff. (I've no idea how safe my Emails would be on their server.)
So instead of owning my domain, I now find that in fact I've paid for just 5 Email addresses and if I want anymore, I have to pay extra, each month! When I signed up, I thought this would give me the freedom to have as many Email addresses as I wanted and never change them, as I can forward them to the mailbox of my choice.

If my ISP can filter out all of the spam, why can't they?

So now I have to get in contact with everyone I know and all of my mailing lists etc., and get them to change my Email address - just what I was trying to avoid. And, as I recommended them to my Dad, I'll have to sort him out as well. Joy.

If UK2 were serious about customer support, why don't they offer alternatives to their (currently) free POP3 mailbox such as some extra free email addresses? However I suspect that wouldn't increase their profits as much would it?

Now looking for a new domain supplier - anyone got any suggestions?

Ditlev

Hi Guys,
A few notes on our new catch-all policy:

If you have read the blog posts, I hope you understand why we had to make this move. 91% of all mail going through our system is catch-all related spam - this naturally takes up a lot of resources from our system, but more importantly it causes the UK2 mail servers to be blacklisted in spamfilters in all the major free-mail providers world wide. Please give me a moment to explain how/why this happens:

UK2 has around 7 million mails going through our system on a daily basis, and as mentioned earlier 91% of that is catch-all related spam. Most of that spam is forwarded via our servers to clients freemail accounts such as hotmail/gmail/virgin/.mac/etc. Problem is that when clients open their hotmail account, and see all the spam being sent to them via the UK2 catch-all mail, they click the "spam-button" in the hotmail system, and the mail will be deleted/sent to junk folder.

However, and this is the real problem, hotmail can not see that this mail was forwarded, so they actually think that UK2 was the sender, since that is the last place of origin. Result is that hotmail/gmail/yahoo/etc puts a 100% block on all mails being sent/forwarded by UK2 - also the legit mails that our clients actually wanted to read. Clients are naturally furious about this, as they expect their mail to end up in their inbox, and not the spambox. So while this is easily filtered on your side, the problem is much bigger than just that.

We had two options regarding the implementation of the new price model:

1) Either we let catch-all expire for those clients not paying for it when the free month we have given you is up. Result would be that if you were away from your computer for a few weeks, or if you have very aggressive spam filters (which is very likely if you actively use catch-all) or for some other reason did not read the mails we send out about this change, then you would suddenly start loosing mails, as mails sent to your catch-all mail would bounce. This could be very important mail, and UK2 would surely be accused for any losses related to our clients not receiving their mails. Some clients depend on the mail as a daily tool, and losses to not getting it could be significant.

Or

2) We can auto renew catch-all and ensure that no mails are lost.
Before doing that we send out 2 mails dedicated to this, we mention it in our regular newsletter. We post notices on this blog, on the login on mail.uk2.net and on the main page of the control panel.
What if we auto renew someone who actually does not want the product? Or if someone has missed all the notices/mails/posts about this?
We would naturally issue a full refund!

Those not using catch-all will naturally not be renewed for it.


This is the main reason for the new catch-all policy, and I hope this
is clearer now?

We have lowered the price for current clients to £19.95/year, which is
quite lower than the 4.99/mo new clients has to pay. My hope is, however, that catch-all can be phased out over the next 3-5 years.

Best regards,

Ditlev Bredahl
MD, UK2.net

Pricy147

Must admit, I am also very frustrated and dissappointed with this change. It's not even tied into when you renew you domain, so your pretty much stuck.

I sent UK2 an email onliine about 4/5 days ago - and am still awaiting a response. I'm not prepared to pay for this service (especially at that cost), and would rather change every single email address I have used. UK2 have responded to my mail - basically saying 'Has your question been resolved???'. Urrmmmm no - I'm still awaiting a response!

I also can't even see anywhere on the site you can simply say you don't want this - deliberately made difficult in my opinion. You have three options from what I can see:

1) Allow it to renew and incur the cost
2) eMail them, and not get a response
3) Phone them on a national rate number - incurring more cost

Any advice or suggestions on other providers out there much appreciated. Definately looking to switch.

Paul_Herring

Ah - spin and propaganda. And of course, you allow your customers to use server side spam filtering to mitigate the effect of spammers?

Ditlev

Thanks for your replies
We do/did not advertise catch-all on our website, so this was a "free" add-on that you only learned about AFTER getting access to our systems.

Listen, I do understand if you wish to move somewhere else if catch-all is a must-have, and you do not feel that UK2's offer to current clients is fair. Feel free to go through our move-away process here: http://amail.co.uk/moveaway.htm (or process your request directly with nominet)

I do expect a few thousand clients to move away, but seen in the larger picture, the constrain/cost those clients put on our systems - and our other users - would outweigh the benefit of keeping them on board. I hate to see clients leave us, but in this case there is not much else to do.

Feel free to write me directly if you have questions related to this: ditlev(at)uk2.net, as I will not be checking this board regularly.

Best,

Ditlev

DanRogl

A suggestion is to have a service that offers say 5 email addresses, and designate 1 for your personal mail ie, firstname@domain.co.uk
then use the rest for anything else, ie payments@domain.co.uk for services like moneybookers/paypal etc. and any others for the other 3 addresses.
Then it's just a matter of 1 rule in outlook to separate your private mail from everything else!

Good post tho, logged into my provider and saw a notice saying they're cutting down on catch-all email aswell! Not charging for it yet, but if deleted they wont let you re-create it! Perhaps UK2 could have gone down that route first....

dreamylittledream

As posted elsewhere but I thought Ditlev might like to respond

The MD of UK2.net appears to be being somewhat economical with the truth in my opinion! He says:
ditlev wrote:
We do/did not advertise catch-all on our website, so this was a "free" add-on that you only learned about AFTER getting access to our systems.

Luckily, using the excellent Internet Archive https://www.archive.org , you can go back in time and see what actually appeared on websites in the past! For example on 1 January 2006 they not only advertised the catch-all feature, it was specifically referred to as a feature which other sites didn't offer. Futhermore, a heading at the top of this email diversion page proclaimed: "FREE QUALITY SERVICES FOREVER".

The evidence is there for all to see at: http://web.archive.org/web/20060104042233/amail.co.uk/fwdextra.htm

uk2.net website on 1 Jan 2006 wrote:
EmailDiversion is included free of charge with your domain. All email to your domain will be received on our servers and then delivered to an email address of your choice.

You can change EmailDiversion online by simply logging into our menu system, enter a new email address and click update. The address that you are diverting your email to is not visible to anyone.

CLICK HERE FOR DEMONSTRATION

Some old Internet companies only offer to divert a single email address on your domain and not all email. Hmm. Not with us. You will get everything sent to your domain.

In the section explaining what you get for your fee, one of the features is "Email diversion". If you click on the link for "What is email diversion", it says:

uk2.net website on 1 Jan 2006 wrote:
WHAT IS EMAILDIVERSION

EmailDiversion which is included in your package allows you to forward ANY mail that arrives to your domain to a single mailbox anywhere.

See http://web.archive.org/web/20060103065513/amail.co.uk/youget.htm

Catch all email forwarding was most definitely advertised BEFORE you had signed up for the services. I would suggest anyone caught by this to report it to Trading Standards ASAP.

Ditlev

dreamylittledream wrote: »

As posted elsewhere but I thought Ditlev might like to respond

Thats the whole point.
We are NOT taking away email diversion, it is still here, exactly as it was before.
You will still have 5 email forwarders (email diversion) just like you had before, and like it was described on the archive.org (love that page as well).

Again, pls write me directly, I will not be here on a regular basis

chris_aaaaa

As I read this there should be a big WARNING with this, not only have UK2 started charging for this service, but I get the definite impression they aim to automatically start taking the money, for me hosting would go from about £10 a year to £60+.

They only have details of an expired card fror me, so they should not be able to take it, but who knows...

I do use the catch all a lot, to combat spam, I use chris@mydomain.co.uk for personal stuff, and things like greedybankname@mydomain.co.uk so that I can catch out those selling my email address on.

All of these catchall addresses pass through the excelent gmail service for spam filtering etc where I can pop3 to outlook or view online.

The claim is that thisis to stop spam, then why not just turn it off and let users turn it back on, no, this is in a similar vien to charging for virus/spam detection in email.

No reply to my 'can I move away' email, I guess they are swamped.

Anyone know a good alternative, I just need catchall forwarding of a UK domain, and redirection of www accress to my ISP site.

Chris