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Alternative to eircom.net email address

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  • 21-05-2020 8:45pm
    #1
    emanresu
    Registered Users Posts: 373 ✭✭


    I have had an eircom.net email address for over 20 years, since the time that it was tinet.ie. I am considering phasing it out now, because many of the emails that I send don't reach the recipients. It happens especially with emails sent to Gmail address and various other addresses like Bellsouth for example. They end up in Junk folders or get blocked completely. I am still an Eir phone customer, but no longer for Broadband.

    I don't know if Eir's recent plans to start charging for some eircom.net addresses (which were then deferred due to the Covid-19 pandemic) would have applied to me. I didn't get any notification from Eir about it, and I only heard about it on the radio.

    I have a live.ie address which I only occasionally used. I have now managed to add that as a second account in the Outlook programme on my computer, along with the eircom.net account.

    I would have to inform many contacts and organisations if I changed my email address.

    Anyway I have two questions before I decide what to do.

    1) If and when Eir start charging for the email address, will they then upgrade the system to modern standards (if that is the problem) so that its emails will be accepted by Gmail and others.

    2) Is it likely that Microsoft will keep live.ie addresses permanently, or is there a possibility that they might discontinue it and make users change to outlook.com. I have a very good prefix part in the live.ie address, but I expect that it is probably already taken with the outlook.com suffix.

    Thanks for any advice, and I understand that no one can predict what a company may decide to do in the future.


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    #2
    28064212
    Registered Users Posts: 10,634 ✭✭✭✭28064212


    emanresu wrote: »
    1) If and when Eir start charging for the email address, will they then upgrade the system to modern standards (if that is the problem) so that its emails will be accepted by Gmail and others.
    Unlikely (IMO). Far more likely is that they get very few customers willing to pay, and after 6/12/18 months they decide it's not going to pay for itself, never mind upgrades, so they just shut it down. Conceivably, they might try to sell it off, similar to what happened to iol.ie (sold by BT to Blacknight), but I think a shutdown is more likely unless they get significant amount of people willing to pay.

    You might ask why don't shut it down right now, and I believe it's a PR move. If they just cut off people now, with thousands and thousands of users, the backlash would be huge. Change it to a paid model first, and people will still give out, but Eir can just point to the paid option. Most people won't be willing to pay, so they'll migrate, with a bit of grumbling, but substantially less than if there was no option to stay. 12 months from now, Eir will have feck-all email users, and a shutdown will only affect them. Those users will be mad as hell, but a handful of really angry users is nothing compared to thousands of mildly angry ones
    emanresu wrote: »
    2) Is it likely that Microsoft will keep live.ie addresses permanently, or is there a possibility that they might discontinue it and make users change to outlook.com. I have a very good prefix part in the live.ie address, but I expect that it is probably already taken with the outlook.com suffix.
    Again IMO, but I think it's very unlikely Microsoft disable those addresses. The numbers using live addresses are way higher than Eir ever had (don't forget there's live.co.uk, live.fr etc, as well as live.com).

    Also, you're already "on" outlook.com. If you go to outlook.com, you can sign in there using your live.ie login. Your email address is still live.ie, outlook.com is just a front-end. So Microsoft have already completed the migration, they don't have any need to shutdown the old addresses

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    #3
    sheepsh4gger
    Registered Users Posts: 622 ✭✭✭sheepsh4gger


    It all goes to spam because Eircom doesn't use sender authentication and encryption. So there's no way to differentiate between a spammer who pretends to be someone@eircom.net and the actual account sending the message. In 90s-style outdated email the 'from' field is just something you can make up.


    https://www.zdnet.com/article/dmarcs-abysmal-adoption-explains-why-email-spoofing-is-still-a-thing/


    Eircom is horrible at everything and I would avoid them like fire.


    Buy yourself a .com domain, it's like 10$ per year. Once you do that you can subscribe to G-suite basic for like 5$ a month and use Gmail with your internet domain. I took it a step further and got it for free from Google. You can use gmail with our own domain for free if you register as a library/non-profit or whatever. (Not sure if it's still available)


    So the only money I paid to send email from somedomain.com is registering it with GoDaddy.


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