Vodafone (Demon) Internet dropping free e-mail service (to be £30.60p.a. per address)

Frank_E

Vodafone (ex Demon) Internet dropping free e-mail service (service to be £30.60pa per address)

I received an e-mail today from Vodafone (ex Demon) Internet stating they will be dropping free e-mail service for Demon Broadband users. I thought it might be spam or a scam but their website verifies it's true.

https://support.vodafone.co.uk/Broadband/Demon-broadband/872225242/What-s-happening-to-my-Demon-email-service.htm

They have given 30 days to sign up to their partner names.co.uk at
£30.60 p.a. per e-mail address.

For the 20 years I've been with Demon and their successors there has been unlimited e-mail addresses and free e-mail transfer.
I have heaps of e-mail addresses to silo different functions professional, personal, comping, different pastimes, spamblock ...
The unlimited e-mail was the last thing keeping me with Demon's £25.20 pcm service

It's going to be an incredible faff if I move ISP - changing user credentials on thousands of sites to an interim cloud address then to the e-mail address on the new ISP.

Anyone in the same boat?
ISP recommendations.

*** This is an automatically generated email, please do not reply ***
<http://www.pbdigital.co.uk/vodafone/demon/img/trans_spacer.gif&gt;
If you can't see all the pictures in this email, view it online > https://support.vodafone.co.uk/Broadband/Demon-broadband/872225242/What-s-happening-to-my-Demon-email-service.htm
An update to your Demon
broadband email service

Hello,

We've been busy reviewing our broadband service. As part of our ongoing upgrades, we’ll no longer be offering free email with our broadband products. Don’t worry – we’ve got plenty of ways to keep you connected. Including a hassle free way to transfer your existing email address.

What happens next?

Your free Demon email will stop working 30 calendar days from the date of this email. So if you’ve been using it, make sure you have a new email service set up and ready to go. Apart from this, your Demon broadband service will continue as normal.

Want to keep your Demon email address?

We’ve teamed up with names.co.uk, expert providers of a wide range of domain and email solutions, to make sure you can keep using your current Demon email address at a great rate.

Packages are available from as little as £2.55 (including discount) a month, and come with a free domain name and website builder. And, when you sign up, you could benefit from one of the following exclusive offers:

* Exchange Essentials Online
40% first year discount
* O365 Business Essentials
30% first year discount

<http://www.pbdigital.co.uk/vodafone/demon/img/spacer_white.gif&gt; Exchange Essentials Online
O365 Business Essentials

* Up to 40% discount
* Online support 7 days a week

For more information, full terms and details on how to sign up, visit https://www.mydemon.email
If you’re happy to change your email address, what about our new Vodafone Business Broadband & Phone packages?


We’re bringing unlimited broadband to business customers, offering fibre speeds of up to 76 Mbps.

Packages come with:

* single or multiple static IP addresses
* a range of call add-ons and call management features
* priority fault fixing


To see if you qualify for a loyalty discount, or discuss the service that’s right for you, register online <http://mailer.pbdigital.co.uk/link.php?M=801130&N=1960&L=1086&F=H&gt; and we’ll be in touch.

And you get a new router and mobile app to put you in total control, making it easier than ever before to boost your Wi-Fi speed, or focus your signal, all from your smartphone.

And as long as you’re in an area covered by the Vodafone footprint, you’ll qualify for a great loyalty discount.

Thank you for your cooperation as we upgrade our services – I do hope these exclusive offers will be of interest. If you have any further questions about your email or broadband options, click here <http://mailer.pbdigital.co.uk/link.php?M=801130&N=1960&L=1101&F=H&gt; to read our FAQ’s.

Kind regards,



Vodafone Enterprise Director
Vodafone UK Limited

onomatopoeia99

I still have a SDU account, just for the email address. I've not received an email about losing my email - perhaps they've decided dialup customers are too difficult to think about, though I haven't actually used a dialup modem for several year,.

I get my broadband from A&A.

Frank_E

You might still receive an e-mail as looking at Demon.service on Usenet it appears the e-mails have been staggered.

I've always had my eye on A&A (for native IPv6). Their accounts don't come with e-mail included though.

anotheruser

NEVER use an ISP address for email.

ALWAYS use a free service like @outlook.com or @gmail.com - two of which will never disappear. They allow you to forward mail to different addresses too if needs be.

Outlook allows you to add alias addresses under the same account (so you have have different ones for professional, comping, banking, blah). If you don't want it any more, just remove it and change.

piscator100

I have been with Demon for 21 years and only really kept it for the email account because Mbs was very poor. However I use the service to have many different email addresses for differnt parts of the business. Today I have cancelled my subscription and have activated my own domain. It is sad that this has occurred. I seem to remeber I paid a one off fee to use Tunpike mailer in perpetuity but Thus PLC dumped that and refused to allow users to have the open sourvce for it. Global capitalism strikes again.

realaledrinker

Left them in 2014 after 18 years as they had no plans to upgrade to fibre on our exchange (still don't have it would appear).


Wish I'd taken the above advice to move e-mails onto gmail at the same time though !

pol098

I've just (11 Oct 16) had the same notification: open an account with names.co.uk (ncu) if you want to keep your email addresses. I've seen some very dire reports of ncu support, mainly taking ages to answer. I rang them and got through quickly. A summary of what I've concluded (rightly or wrongly): you can keep your Demon email address system and have as many incoming mail addresses as you want, all going to the same mailbox. However, unlike the Demon service you have to set up each address; the Demon system delivered all mail addressed to <anyname>@myusername.demon.co.uk, and I used to make up addresses with gay abandon; if you want to respond to this you can (not really) respond to [EMAIL="moneysavingexpert&#64;mydomain.demon.co.uk"]moneysavingexpert@mydomain.demon.co.uk[/EMAIL]; with ncu this will only work if I declare this name. Of course, I don't remember the hundreds of addresses I've given out.

They say you can only have one "outgoing" address, whatever that means (I'm an old-school email person; for me an email is a text file, with headers including "From: ", "Sender: ", and "Reply-To: ", and I can set them to anything i want, regardless of the mail sending system). The technical support person I spoke to said that POP3 and IMAP were supported for incoming mail, and SMTP for outgoing (but not incoming, so you can't run your own mail server). I repeat the details, but don't endorse them myself.

I was given the impression by the tech that I could use my own mail client, in which case I would be able to control my outgoing headers, and do my own incoming filtering. I don't know if that is true; the ncu Web site says "You must have Office Essentials or Exchange Essentials Online to continue using your demon.co.uk email address." One really useful bit of information I was given is that the ncu service is a custom version of "Office 365 Online Essentials", and that I could find all the technical information about these accounts without difficulty (not from ncu).

Unlike Demon, the ncu account provides 15GB of storage (more for more money), and keeps mail indefinitely. I believe that the SMTP ports are 993, 995, 997 (not the standard one, 25 AFAIR), which is not a problem with my email client.

That's about what I've found out; if anyone knows more about using your own mail client I'd be interested to hear.

Best wishes

pol098

My experience so far: setting up the NamesCo account was quite problematical, though I'm familiar with the details of email. If you want to use IMAP, POP3, and SMTP with a mail client rather then be involved with Microsoft Exchange Online: the receiving services, POP3 and IMAP work OK. Your mail client must have the facility to support SSL (encrypted, secure mail); most do.

Problems: 1: after much labour I find, and NamesCo confirm, that SMTP sending is not possible unless you have some form of Microsoft Outlook mail software. (They do mention Android support of some sort.) I am going to take this up with them; they are not providing a full mail service. It is not life or death; it is easy to configure a mail client to receive demon.co.uk mail via NamesCo, but to use another SMTP service for sending.

2: so far I have found it impossible to turn off all mail filtering (junk and viruses). I want to start from there, no filtering at all, and add any filtering I choose. I have gone into the various filtering options, but find that some mail which is not junk, and some junkmail, is not delivered normally. Some of it is put in "Junk email" (available via IMAP but not POP3). Various mail is deleted silently without the option; for example, executable files, those with Subject: "test" (in setting up mail I send a lot of these! Obviously, once I know about this, not a problem - at first I was confused by all my tests failing), and those deemed to be viruses. I may be able to work around these issues, but I do prefer to be in control of what happens.

HTH

onomatopoeia99

You missed the other problem - they impose an SPF record on your domain. Fine if using their webmail client or you are able to use their customer smarthost (SMTP server) but likely to cause emails you send "From" your demon address to be rejected due to an SPF failure.

I asked them to remove it, front line support said "dunno, above my pay grade" (I paraphrase), then one of their "senior network engineers" told me it was impossible. It's just a line in a zone file, it's very far from impossible. He suggested I bought a domain of my own and used that instead!

I haven't been able to figure out how to turn my mailbox into a catchall for the domain either, currently it only listens for my firstname@ so I'm not getting postmaster emails as required by the RFCs. Not sure whether that one is me just not finding the right option yet, or them not offering it.

pol098

onomatopoeia99 wrote: »

You missed the other problem - they impose an SPF record [which they say is impossible to remove] on your domain. Fine if using their webmail client or you are able to use their customer smarthost (SMTP server) but likely to cause emails you send "From" your demon address to be rejected due to an SPF failure.

Thanks for response. As I'm unable to send a message from the NamesCo d.c.u (demon.co.uk) account, I haven't got that far. (This might be due to the SPF issue: the NamesCo Exchange365 SMTP server rejecting mail from an unknown IP address, although with correct credentials.) I think my next action is to contact NamesCo and say "you're replacing an account supporting SMTP with one which you agree doesn't support it. Please give me details of a NamesCo SMTP server, unassociated with Exchange365, I can (and may!) use, to put me back where I was." I can then setup mail clients (on computer, phone) to invisimagically use NamesCo POP3/IMAP to receive mail, and non-NamesCo SMTP to send, including replies. FWIW I use Pegasus Mail, but any SSL-supporting mail client should work.

onomatopoeia99 wrote: »

I haven't been able to figure out how to turn my mailbox into a catchall for the domain either, currently it only listens for my firstname@ so I'm not getting postmaster emails as required by the RFCs. Not sure whether that one is me just not finding the right option yet, or them not offering it.

I'm virtually certain that a catch-all mailbox is not possible. From another forum I think it was supported by the initial d.c.u offering, but no longer is. It is possible, though, to declare an unlimited number of aliases. So I spent a "happy" day going through all my email ever with low-level search tools,finding all the addresses I have randomly given out, including postmaster, and adding them to the NamesCo account. (Ask me if you want details; I'll answer if I see the question.)

By the way, I asked about the price I was offered the service for, and was told, to my unsurprise, that it's for the first year only.

Another issue: there's no certainty that the service will continue. Vodafone continue to own the d.c.u domains, though they don't support them, and negotiations are going on. I was told by the support person I asked that if the hosting of d.c.u was to be discontinued they'd give something like 2 years' notice. I pass this on as something I was told; Our Mileage Might Vary.

Best wishes (and good luck)

onomatopoeia99

pol098 wrote: »

I'm virtually certain that a catch-all mailbox is not possible. From another forum I think it was supported by the initial d.c.u offering, but no longer is. It is possible, though, to declare an unlimited number of aliases. So I spent a "happy" day going through all my email ever with low-level search tools,finding all the addresses I have randomly given out, including postmaster, and adding them to the NamesCo account. (Ask me if you want details; I'll answer if I see the question.)

Yes please - I can configure a mail server fine using text based config files on linux, but find the web interface to manage the office outlook platform a real struggle.