Shell broadband - email facilities provided ?

psychic_teabag

Hi,

   I'm considering taking up the shell deal (despite various warnings expressed on here), but am wondering what email facilities they provide. Ideally I'd ask them, but expect to have trouble getting through to someone technical enough.  Do they host a user forum or anything ?

The ideal would be if they will host email for my domain name, but I'm not really expecting that.  Does the router do port-forwarding, and will they allow incoming port-25 connections to my computer ?  (What router model do they typically provide, or can I just stick with my plusnet one ?)

Do they provide an email server, with imap support ?  How many different inboxes ?

Do they provide an outgoing smtp server which will allow email from arbitrary addresses (ie @mydomain address)

(I'm currently with plusnet, and quite like the facilities they provide. They don't do domain hosting, so I have a computer locally which accepts the mail on my domain, readdresses it and sends it back out to plusnet.  It's just annoying how much it costs to remain loyal to ISPs after the introductory offer expires. I'm hoping they'll offer a good enough deal via retentions to keep me, but need to be actually prepared to switch in case they don't. It's probably still cheaper to switch and pay for 3rd-party email access, than stay.)

thanks in advance

wongataa

It is best not to use ISPs for email use as it makes it harder/more hassle to switch. Use a proper email hosting provider who won't care what ISP you use.

If Shell don't mention email hosting services on their website then they won't be offering it.

psychic_teabag

Yes, we are now largely insulated from ISP's addressing, even though we currently do route the mail through to them for storage. Just need to ensure that any new provider is compatible with the rather odd scheme I came up with.

(Annoyingly, when we switched from previous ISP to plusnet, we swore we wouldn't fall into the trap of using their email addresses; but plusnet's catchall feature was sufficiently useful that we ended up using it anyway. So have spent last few weeks updating the last few remaining usages of plusnet addresses. *Definitely* won't do it again.)

As it turns out, plusnet made a reasonable offer to get us to stay - still more expensive than the Shell offer, but happy to stick with them.

mohammed1111

psychic_teabag said:

Yes, we are now largely insulated from ISP's addressing, even though we currently do route the mail through to them for storage. Just need to ensure that any new provider is compatible with the rather odd scheme I came up with.

(Annoyingly, when we switched from previous ISP to plusnet, we swore we wouldn't fall into the trap of using their email addresses; but plusnet's catchall feature was sufficiently useful that we ended up using it anyway. So have spent last few weeks updating the last few remaining usages of plusnet addresses. *Definitely* won't do it again.)

As it turns out, plusnet made a reasonable offer to get us to stay - still more expensive than the Shell offer, but happy to stick with them.

Probably dodged a bullet there, a move to Shell based on my experience wouldn't have been a good one, !!!!!! broadband / customer service or both as it was in my case 

matelodave

AS said above, ideally dont use the ISP e-mail service, get one with Gmail, Yahoo  etc so you can swap suppliers without the hassle of changing e-mail addresses or having to pay to keep your address if you so swap.

I've been with Hotmail for the past 20 years as I needed an ISP independent address when working abroad and have benefitted ever since by being able to swap ISPs whenever I want to

psychic_teabag

The problem with using gmail for outgoing smtp was that they always rewrote the 'from' address as the gmail one, rather than using may own domain name. (This was a while back - it may have changed now.)