Plusnet's webmail

For years I used to get my email with Messenger Pro. Then last summer I had sundry software problems that were eventually tracked down to a disk fault. In the meanwhile I started to use my ISP’s webmail facility. It had the advantage that I could access my email from anywhere with a capable browser. The disadvantage was a horrid UI. Recently, as my inbox became swollen, I created more folders and subfolders to organize my emails. Then I realized that a subfolder I had created twenty seconds earlier was nowhere to be found. So I telephoned Plusnet’s helpline. “You will not believe” the man said, very candidly, “how many complaints we have about webmail. If I were you I would avoid creating subfolders.” I suggested that a company of Plusnet’s size could surely pay for a better webmail program. He then intimated that Plusnet was reorganizing its business and might not be interested in continuing to provide email services.
Once off the telephone I started experimenting with the webmail and eventually found out how to make the vanished subfolders reappear, at least temporarily and one at a time. I downloaded their contents to my hard-disk and then set about deleting the subfolders. But how? The delete options were greyed out. Eventually I realized that I could make the delete option reappear by assigning an empty name to the folder. The program complained that I could not do this, but the trick worked. I repeat my discovery here in case others encounter the same problem.

Gavin, PlusNet actually have two different webmail systems, both are off the shelf webmail systems, and pretty poor as you have discovered. You want to see all the posts within the PlusNet Community forum about them. I never use them, I download all my email to my ARMX6 and then uses Messenger Pro builtin IMAP facilites to make it available to all my other computers in the house.

After the major outage affecting PlusNet email back in November, It was mentioned by staff withing the community forums that PlusNet management (more likely BT Group management) were considering the future of PlusNet’s email facilities. As a result this spurred me to move my existing personal domains from just forwarding all my mail to PlusNet to be properly hosted and now they never touch PlusNet’s email servers.

It was also pointed that the email service was provided FOC you only pay really for the internet connection and phone line, some who used the old Force9 and madsuafish services did used to pay for the email facilities.

The main advantage of having your own domain is of course if you change ISP, it does not affect your email.

Oh nearly forgot to mention PlusNet have a hard limit of 2 Gb of stored emails, and remember IIRC deleted emails stored in webmail do not drop out of the 2 Gb figure for a set period of time to allow recovery. I can’t remember the figure now. Also the more email you have in your webmail box the slower the system gets apparently.

In my experience, most webmail is varying degrees of horrible.

However, your takeaway from this ought to be:

and might not be interested in continuing to provide email services.

Better start looking for a replacement sooner rather than later.

Domain packages usually offer email. heyrick.eu is with OVH. It’s dirt cheap but since my site is hosted elsewhere, I only really needed the name and access the the DNS config.
They also offer one mailbox (but it can have numerous aliases), and unlike Yahoo it seems pretty spam free.
Yahoo is such a pile of excrement that it’ll happily send me phishing messages claiming to be from Yahoo, as well as PayPal account locked messages. I only still use Yahoo as it gives me the ability to set up disposable addresses, so companies I don’t trust ¹ get one of those.

OVH, by the way, is dirt cheap ² and it’s really easy to set up, though for the control panel you’ll need a capable browser (not NetSurf) and for me the site will send me a code by SMS before letting me in which is a nice extra bit of security.

Example: https://www.ovhcloud.com/en-gb/domains/tld/couk/

¹ That’s everybody unless I strongly believe otherwise.

² .co.uk costs more than .eu – blame Nominet’s greed for that.

I have moved my domains to 20i they allow 10 x10Gb mail boxes per domain for £4.99 per year! and that included some webspace etc. They have Uk based servers and others around the world.