Thurles Information

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.