ireland.com Service Discontinuation

KeithGav

You may be aware that The Irish Times has just sold it's ireland.com domain name to Tourism Ireland and that the service will be discontinued from the 7th November next.

Personally, I think this is disgraceful and would urge anyone affected by this to contact them directly at customerservice@digitalworx.ie.
Below is a copy of the email I have sent to them:

I am emailing to register my disgust at your decision to sell the ireland.com domain to Tourism Ireland and the impact this will have on your customers.

As a regular user of the service for over 10 years, this development will affect me in a number of ways- having used the domain name as my main business email account, the address was extremely beneficial as it was easy to remember and is my main point of contact for friends, colleagues and customers. Not only will I now have to go through the tortuous process of having to inform everyone of a change of email address, but I will also need to get all my corporate literature, business cards, brochures, etc. revised, which will be a very expensive exercise and a cost I could do without in the current economic climate.



I have had a look at the FAQs page you have created for service users to detail how to deal with this transition and the attitude exhibited in same is contemptuous to say the least- your assertion that when initially signing up for the service, users implicitly acknowledged the terms and conditions and ownership of the 'free service' resided with ireland.com- this ignores the fact that we have been paying for this 'premium service' for the past number of years...



I would strongly urge you to reconsider how you are treating users of this service and how you propose to manage the transition- while your grubby little deal with Tourism Ireland, which provides you with an exit from the business which you have obviously long sought to do as demonstrated by the minimalist approach used in relation to customer service and technical maintenance of the service in recent years, probably cannot be reversed at this stage, how you treat customers having to cope with this changeover can be easily improved. You state that, after the 7th December 2012, "all data will be removed and destroyed", and that users will have to export all of their emails to a new account- surely in this day of 'cloud computing' and easy remote access etc., it would not be too much to ask that the data each user has be exported to a temporary holding site while they make new arrangements. More importantly, and to lessen the burden you are imposing on customers of the service, it should not be too much to expect that a mail forwarding service be provided so that customers can have emails sent to their existing ireland.com address automatically forwarded to their new address? In my opinion, such a facility should be a basic minimum service, provided on an indefinite basis, for long-standing customers of ireland.com.

Menas

Personally I dont see a problem with the IT selling something that they own to someone else.
They are not contractually bound to continue offering this service to you and are not legally prevented from selling the domain...so good luck to them.

I had an ireland.com email address about 10 years ago but moved to a more stable domain as I reckoned the Irish times would sell ireland.com at some point or would loose money on it and shut it down (this was when all IT content was subscription only).

keithclancy

Only way to make sure you keep your user@domain name is to buy your own domain and maintain your own service.

This has always been the case.

Cabaal

OP, you are far better off just buying your own domain and using that for your e-mail address in future.

I bought my first domain back in 1998 and I've used it for my e-mail address since then, I've not changed my e-mail address since even though I've changed e-mail providers a number of times and currently I'm with gmail.com.

[EDIT]
Just to add, buying your own domain is very cost affective, you can renew a .com domain with blacknight.com for 9 years for just over 80e. Also a domain name for a business or on a CV looks far far more professional then joe_soap@ireland.com any day of the week imho

You can complain all you want about Ireland.com being sold but you are wasting your time, they are well within their rights to sell on the service or to shut it down as they wish. At the end of the day you agreed to their Terms & Conditions when signing up.

Fr Tod Umptious

What pisses me off about it most is that they do not seem to be offering a forwarding service, basically any e-mail sent to my ireland.com address will bounce from 7th Nov.

keithclancy

Fr Tod Umptious wrote: »

What pisses me off about it most is that they do not seem to be offering a forwarding service, basically any e-mail sent to my ireland.com address will bounce from 7th Nov.

Its not possible for them to do this as they will hand over ownership of the Domain.

Functionally ireland.com will no longer point at their servers.

Cabaal

Fr Tod Umptious wrote: »

What pisses me off about it most is that they do not seem to be offering a forwarding service, basically any e-mail sent to my ireland.com address will bounce from 7th Nov.

As already pointed out you can't expect the new owners to do this as they'll be in control of the domain and its nothing to do with the Irish Times anymore,

Once its transferred the name servers and MX records for the domain will be nothing to do with the Irish Times anymore so it would be impossible for the Irish Times to offer a forwarding e-mail service anymore.

It would also be unreasonable to expect the tourist board to offer this service and to incur the expense and time setting it up, it would also cause confusion for people e-mailing the tourist board as you can safely assume they might use the ireland.com domain for their own e-mail service.

galwayjohn89

As has been said before you can get .com domain names for less then €7 a year. I have a .ie domain name for my email

28064212

keithclancy wrote: »

Its not possible for them to do this as they will hand over ownership of the Domain.

Functionally ireland.com will no longer point at their servers.

They could (and perhaps should) have included it as part of their negotiations with Tourism Ireland. It wouldn't be especially difficult to set up. As a compromise, they could have turned off everything except mail-forwarding as planned, then provided a 2/3-month mail-forwarding service. 3 weeks is a pretty short time-line

Cabaal

Vuzuggu wrote: »

As has been said before you can get .com domain names for less then €7 a year. I have a .ie domain name for my email

You can indeed get a .ie domain, however they are more expensive then a .com and the IEDR is more strict about giving you the domain that you want.

For example to get myname.ie I had to send them a scan of my passport, you don't have to do that to get a .com domain

RangeR

28064212 wrote: »

They could (and perhaps should) have included it as part of their negotiations with Tourism Ireland. It wouldn't be especially difficult to set up. As a compromise, they could have turned off everything except mail-forwarding as planned, then provided a 2/3-month mail-forwarding service. 3 weeks is a pretty short time-line

Why would they even care? They got half a mill for something they probably paid less than €100 for over it's lifetime.

say_who_now?

OP you REALLY used a web based third party service for your business e-mail address? Really??

Unbelievable!

I admit I don't know much about ireland.com but I would sincerely suggest that you set yourself up with a proper business domain name asap and then import those settings to Outlook (or whatever your preferred e-mail client is) and send out a group mail to your contacts informing them to update their address books.

You'll have to take the hit on your personalised stationery I'm afraid, as I can't see any way around that one.

And just for future reference OP, every business has an exit strategy built in, I am self employed and I don't plan on keeping working forever. At some stage I plan on selling on the business and my customers will have to be prepared for this eventuality. Ireland.com have handled this as well as any other business that provides a service, and then make a business decision which involves closing down the service because it is not profitable. This is one of the drawbacks even of cloud computing that you mention in your OP. Nokia used provide an e-mail service @Ovi.com but had to sell it off to @yahoo! because it just was unsustainable. Fortunately for me having my own domain e-mail address this change didn't affect me, nor would I use a gmail, hotmail, etc e-mail address for business.

Consumer confidence is inspired by permanency and professionalism, so if you're also using a mobile number alone for your business number, I'd change that now too and get yourself a landline number before you go to vistaprint.com and design yourself a new set of stationery for your business.

RangeR

On that same subject, the amount of businesses that advertise themselves as <insert company name>@eircom.net on their vehicle livery is unbelievable.

28064212

RangeR wrote: »

Why would they even care? They got half a mill for something they probably paid less than €100 for over it's lifetime.

On that basis, why not just switch it off tomorrow? And the absolute minimal costings for a site the size of ireland.com will have been many multiples of tens of thousands of euro

Cabaal

28064212 wrote: »

On that basis, why not just switch it off tomorrow? And the absolute minimal costings for a site the size of ireland.com will have been many multiples of tens of thousands of euro

Because they are allowing a wind down period,

Bottom line is Ireland.com was never a success for the Irish Times, the subscription model never worked out for them on the site and whilst it really should have been the number one news source in Ireland it failed over and over again.

The e-mail service also died a death, I believe it started off free then they stung people by changing it all to a charged service because the site as a whole wasn't working for them and bringing in the money they expected.

Such a shame they could never made a decent job of it,

RangeR

28064212 wrote: »

And the absolute minimal costings for a site the size of ireland.com will have been many multiples of tens of thousands of euro

No. That's the development and hosting costs, that can be migrated to a different domain name. The domain NAME costs pennies.

Potentially, they could move the entire ireland.com website to something like ireland.irishtimes.ie at no cost. Still netting half a mill.

bit of a bogey

OP it looks like it’s the end of the road for Ireland.com email and don't think there is anything we can do. I too am incredibly disappointed.

Did you even get a response from the email you sent?

zokarin

Yeah... have to agree with the OP - horrible form from a horrible operation. Other posters are right that the company has the right (obviously) to discontinue the service, etc. But, most people (and, many lawyers) would argue that the company has a duty of care towards its customers, and 3 week's notice is way, way less than I would expect.

Plus, a redirect service is essentially trivial to set up and the IT could easily have sold the domain with a stipulation that a redirect be offered. This would probably cost a few hundred per year to run and furthermore provide the "new" ireland.com with a ready-made (and cheerfully-disposed) initial set of email marketing addressees to contact for their rollout marketing campaign. There are many, many outsourced services that would operate a redirect mailserver 24/7 at low cost. But, no, it's all too difficult for the guys at Tourism Ireland and the IT to get a handle on. End result: 1000s of pissed off people and probably 1000s of missed emails in the future.

Z

podgee

Like the OP, I find this incredibly frustrating. I have a work email address and a personal one - the personal one is my ireland.com account. I signed up for it when ireland.com initially started (late nineties) and at that time, I had to pay about £30 / year for it. It was a great service and was pretty solid over the intervening years.

Everything that I don't want linked to work is linked to it - my ebay account, credit card account, household utilities etc. etc. - and now to be given really really short notice to transition everything.. Sure, moving the mail and setting up a new email account (be it on my own domain or with gmail etc.) is an inconvenience - it's everything else that's a pain in the backside. Why could they not have negotiated a mail forwarding arrangement with Tourism Ireland ?? As a previously paying punter for their service, I'm really really disappointed. The last twelve plus years of my online life needs to be now repointed at ridiculously short notice. It's not good enough..

P

keithclancy

podgee wrote: »

Like the OP, I find this incredibly frustrating. I have a work email address and a personal one - the personal one is my ireland.com account. I signed up for it when ireland.com initially started (late nineties) and at that time, I had to pay about £30 / year for it. It was a great service and was pretty solid over the intervening years.

Everything that I don't want linked to work is linked to it - my ebay account, credit card account, household utilities etc. etc. - and now to be given really really short notice to transition everything.. Sure, moving the mail and setting up a new email account (be it on my own domain or with gmail etc.) is an inconvenience - it's everything else that's a pain in the backside. Why could they not have negotiated a mail forwarding arrangement with Tourism Ireland ?? As a previously paying punter for their service, I'm really really disappointed. The last twelve plus years of my online life needs to be now repointed at ridiculously short notice. It's not good enough..

P

30 quid a year is a rip.

Its 8 quid a year for a domain and google will host it for free.


God forbid google goes bust you can move the address easily.

podgee

keithclancy wrote: »

30 quid a year is a rip.

Its 8 quid a year for a domain and google will host it for free.


God forbid google goes bust you can move the address easily.

I wasn't clear - £30 / year was back when Google probably hadn't been invented. For perhaps the last 5 or 6 years, it's been free.

P

RangeR

keithclancy wrote: »

30 quid a year is a rip.

Its 8 quid a year for a domain and google will host it for free.


God forbid google goes bust you can move the address easily.

€[£]30 a year isn't a "rip" for a service provided, if you couldn't be arsed with having to worry about DNS settings and MX balloola.

On a personal level, I dumped my @ireland address years ago and got my own domain as I didn't like the way the domain was going.

Spocker

IN case this is useful for someone still using the service, and wants to download all their emails, I dug out some info from a couple of years ago on the IMAP/POP settings:

Here are our settings:
Incoming server: imap.ireland.com
Incoming port number: 993
Use SSL (secure sockets)
Outgoing server: smtpx.ireland.com
Outgoing port number: 465
Use SSL
Username will be your email address everything before the @ sign.
Password will be the password you use to sign in on webmail.


For POP3 Settings:
Username - username@ireland.com
Password - your account password
Incoming POP3 Server - pop3.ireland.com
Incoming Port - 110
Outgoing SMTP Server - smtpx.ireland.com
Outgoing Port - 25 or 587
SMTP Authentication - Yes
SSL - No

I've no way of testing this though, my account was closed some time ago. If someone gets it working , please post here

podgee

Spocker wrote: »

IN case this is useful for someone still using the service, and wants to download all their emails, I dug out some info from a couple of years ago on the IMAP/POP settings:



I've no way of testing this though, my account was closed some time ago. If someone gets it working , please post here

Spocker - you are a genius. It worked perfectly using the online imapcopy - https://ssl0.ovh.net/fr/imapcopy/ - fair play to you - up until your post I was exporting and importing.

P

Paddy and Ice

Maybe we should all email the Irish Times MD, Liam Kavanagh and give him three weeks notice that we will stop buying his newspaper. I have bought the paper 2/3 times a year for 20+ years. That works out at about €250 per year. If they do not introduce a forwarding service or at least a 3 month notice period, that is exactly what I am doing.

yankinlk

I am shocked and dismayed that the good people of boards.ie are more concerned about MX records them the fact Tourism Ireland has literally flushed a half million euros down the crapper.

Wtf ? The app has killed the domain names cache.

Cabaal

Paddy and Ice wrote: »

Maybe we should all email the Irish Times MD, Liam Kavanagh and give him three weeks notice that we will stop buying his newspaper. I have bought the paper 2/3 times a year for 20+ years. That works out at about €250 per year. If they do not introduce a forwarding service or at least a 3 month notice period, that is exactly what I am doing.

Go right ahead....your wasting your time.
You can't expect the Irish Times to change a deal that has already been agreed upon in relation to the transfer of the domain.

Cabaal

yankinlk wrote: »

I am shocked and dismayed that the good people of boards.ie are more concerned about MX records them the fact Tourism Ireland has literally flushed a half million euros down the crapper.

Wtf ? The app has killed the domain names cache.

No they haven't,
If that was the case the actual facebook.com domain wouldn't be worth much....only the app would.

Domains especially .com's are still worth big money, Ireland.com is the perfect domain to be used for Tourism in Ireland and it was a good idea for Irish Tourism to secure the domain instead of allowing a company or organization outside of Ireland to do so.

Domains in general are still very popular and because alot of the good names have been used up on .com, net and .org that is why we such pushes for other domains like the .xxx and .movies etc. Good names such as Ireland.com are as popular as ever though.

To even suggest domains have been killed because of apps is just silly, its as silly as the people that said years ago that IM's and texts had killed e-mail....5 years later we still have e-mail as popular as ever.
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2007/11/the_death_of_email.html

Of course, some people think apps will be dead in 3-5 years...http://www.thedomains.com/2012/01/18/meebo-founder-apps-will-be-dead-in-3-5-years/

podgee

Cabaal wrote: »

Go right ahead....your wasting your time.
You can't expect the Irish Times to change a deal that has already been agreed upon in relation to the transfer of the domain.

I agree. I buy the paper everyday for many years. Stopping buying it will not influence a contractual agreement that's already in place.

According to the article on the sale of the domain, there are 15,000 active users - now if you could form a coherent band of comrades, then perhaps we could persuade the new owners to offer the service for a small premium ?

P

Sorentox

I feel it’s is a disgrace how Ireland.com are off loading their loyal customers. They have sold up and we are been told to step out of their way! Get lost.

My Email address is my Electronic Identity for my personal and business transactions. Most of which are financial and legal as everything has to be confirmed by email for the last 15 yrs. They have decided they want to delete that identification, data history and it’s our tough. This is not acceptable considering we paid, for years, for this service.

The total disregard for there customers is further Highlighted with the time spans they have given there customers:-

“our @ireland.com email subscribers that the service will be discontinued from November 7th “ we received this notification late in the 15th of Oct. God forbid anyone was away on Holidays or in hospital sick – what time does this give them?

“You can set your ireland.com email account so that anyone who emails you receives an automated response informing him/her of your change of address (see instructions below). This will be available until November 7th.” - what’s the rush in cutting off this service? For customers of 10 years, this illustrates even further disregard from Ireland.com to its customers. We all have to get new email addresses now – a notification of change of address should stay up for the next 9 to 12 months advising email senders of this change. It not the address holders who at fault here – but they are been punished.

I take on board that files can be exported and most of the emails will be saved but as they say themselves “we cannot provide technical support for the importing of data to a new or alternative account – this is a task that must be performed from within the account that is to receive data.” Ie) Data can and probably be lost and it’s the users outlook.

I have written to the Data Protection Office about this and they have informed me that it’s the first that they have heard on the issue – typical Irish mentality – lie down a take it! We shouldn’t – we should at a minimum demand the closure dates and notification notices are pushed out further and give people a change.

How many other web sites are we registered with, and our “Ireland.com” address is our identification. Each of these have to be contacted with a new address.

www.dataprotection.ie

email:- info@dataprotection.ie

Phone 00353 57 868 4800

If your annoyed by the way you are been treated – write to them today. It’s your data, your data history, your electronic address and electronic identification. We are not all IT engineers – this is a cumbersome task to complete properly for an average email user. They have to show some respect. Their deadline need to be pushed back significantly.

I wrote an email of complaint to them and they gave me a standard reply dictating that these issues were addressed in my agreed “term & conditions” – I replied, asking for the T&C’s – 36hrs later no sign of the original T&C’s. It’s a big brother approach and it needs to be slowed down a little.

keithclancy

Sorentox wrote: »

I wrote an email of complaint to them and they gave me a standard reply dictating that these issues were addressed in my agreed “term & conditions” – I replied, asking for the T&C’s – 36hrs later no sign of the original T&C’s. It’s a big brother approach and it needs to be slowed down a little.

I'll save you some time there:

From 2005

http://web.archive.org/web/20050423055950/http://www.ireland.com/services/email/termsconditions.htm

If User uses the e-mail service for business purposes, ireland.com accepts no responsibility for deletion, corruption or failure to store messages or content maintained or transmitted by the service. ireland.com accept no responsibility for any business as a direct or indirect result of the Services.

and

MODIFICATIONS AND DISCONTINUANCE OF THE SERVICES
ireland.com reserves the right sole discretion to modify or discontinue the Services, or any portion thereof, at any time, with or without notice to User. ireland.com shall not be liable to User or any third party should ireland.com exercise its right to modify or discontinue the Services. No refunds will be granted to Users in this instance.

Honestly, it would have been worth your while to read the Terms and Conditions if your using it for business purposes.

AFAIK thats been the conditions since 2002