Warning: No, this is not one of Eir’s little jokes.
Find, hereunder, an email being genuinely circulated by the privatised Eircom Limited, trading as Eir. Note, Eir is currently majority owned by Xavier Niel’s Illiad SA and his Paris based NJJ Telecom Europe investment fund.
Their email reads as follows:
Dear Eircom.net user,
Earlier this year we contacted you to inform you of the introduction of a €5.99 monthly subscription for the use of eircom.net webmail. This monthly subscription will commence from the 1st of July 2020 and will be rolled out to customers on a phased basis. This means you can only sign up once access to your account has been restricted, which will happen between 1st of July and the 15th of July 2020.
Once you sign up you will have access to your new webmail account and will be able to send and receive emails, it may take up to 2 hours for your old emails to migrate across to your new account.
Please note if you are using an email client such as outlook you will need to log in through the eir.ie/email page to sign up to the new service.
If you decide not to avail of the new eircom.net email service you can download your eircom.net email data to your personal storage before the 1st of July 2020, as you will no longer have access to the old service. You will have 60 days to sign up to the new service after the 1st of July 2020 before your email address, account and its data is permanently removed, this step is not reversible once complete.
For more information please visit eir.ie/support/webmail/webmail-frequently-asked-questions
This notice is on top of the 30 and 60 days notice provided earlier this year.
Regards
The eir webmail team.
Initially the company had excused this new greedy charge as needed to invest in maintenance and improvement of their service, going forward.
Thurles was one of the towns who in 1997 touted to win the then £15m (Eircom) Information Age Town competition. Looking back, “Thank God we never won it”. Imagine the mess the winners are in today, who were Ennis Co. Clare, in their attempts to amend items like banking and other subscriptions for which they have used Eircom.net email addresses to communicate for some 23 years.
To now charge €71.88 (€5.99 per month) for something that is poor quality and bad value for money, and which in the past was totally free, must surely be the best example of current day big business greed. Most customers here in Co. Tipperary, at least, already pay between €40 and €80 for their internet access package to a company who now openly admit their system needs improvements to their service.
Perhaps this new scenario, justifies fully why the Irish government refused outright to deal with Eir, regarding the much-debated contract for Ireland’s National Broadband planned rollout.
GOOD NEWS
But readers, before you rightly get all hot and bothered, do remember the good news is that there are plenty of superior free alternatives in the marketplace and switching to another free account is basically straight-forward. You will of course need to set up a new free email account, best choice currently being gmail.
You will then have to get your data from your old eircom.net account and inform your contacts/friends that you have changed your email address.
In my own personal dealings with Eir personnel in recent months, I have found them to be possibly the most arrogant mobile and broadband telecommunications company operating in Ireland, with which to do honest business, especially staff in their so called ‘Customer Service Department’.
Eir had confirmed that it would not proceed with plans to charge customers for ‘eircom.net’ email addresses, in light of the current COVID-19 outbreak. It would now appear that the COVID-19 virus as far as Eir is concerned has vanished, and no one has informed residents of Co. Tipperary.
BAD NEWS
Too true George, I too tried to have dealings with the above mentioned ‘Customer Service’, but I would have been better off talking to an imaginary friend, where I would have got some form of satisfaction. They’re robots, nothing short of it. Well, they act as if they are.
Eir (formerly Eircom) is by far one of the worst companies I have had to deal with during my entire life, up there with Ryan Air.
I am no longer a customer and haven’t been in more than 10 years but I remember the time they routinely disconnected landlines if you were 1 week late paying your bill so that they could pocket an outrageous €100 reconnection fee, knowing full well you have no options but to cough up the cash (there were no mobile competition in those days!).
They also used to have a monopoly on landline internet connections in the early days of the internet and therefore charged customers outrageous prices while providing extremely poor services.
Eircom is not a legitimate business, it’s a racketeering cartel and the only way to deal with these is to boycott them altogether!
After 1st July do I still have access to my eir account to facilitate transfer of my mails to my newly set up gmail account.
I fully agree that Eir has the worst customer service section. They are not in the slightest way interested in resolving any issue. For that reason I discontinued their phone and internet service a year ago and replaced it with a better and cheaper service
I understand you have until 15th July 2020 next to import emails from Eir, after that you will have 60 days to read only, before they get deleated. But management & personnel at Eir constantly fail to communicate to their customers so best to transfer ASAP.
Carolan Lennon (CEO) and David McRedmond (Non-Executive Chairman) are not even aware of their staff’s inability to perform. They hold their corporate positions in name only. Recording for training purposes is a joke.