Eir deletes customers' emails

BrianD3

4% of customers, all of whom will have been paying a tenner a month for their email address, have had all their emails older than 45 days pemanently deleted due to IT issues.

What a bunch of gobsh1tes Eir are.

I had an eircom email address dating back to 1999 and at the time they started charging for email a few years ago I considered subscribing. It was a fiver a month at the time but IIRC there were IT issues when trying to subscribe so I left it, glad I did now.

https://www.thejournal.ie/eircom-eir-emails-deleted-5952029-Dec2022/

FishOnABike

Where are the backups?

10-10-20

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120019606#Comment_120019606

The Eir attitude to backups is that the backups are in the sent items folder. 😣

Ultimanemo

Eir not fair

Floppybits

If Eir didn't own the network they would cease to exist. I never seen a company run as bad as Eir. Actually had a salesman call to the door the other day to try and sell me broadband, I said to him are you having a laugh, he said "No seriously, the company has had a change of management and that all that has gone on in the past has now changed". I laughed and said not a hope that I would ever sign up to any packages from Eir.

amdublin

Who pays for email???

TheValeyard

You'd think at this stage the whole country would know what a shower of incompetent cretins Eir is run by. Why would anyone be using an email address by them????

unkel

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120019914#Comment_120019914

Because many people will have had the same email address for 20+ years, often a business email address and they don't want to change it. Agree with you though, the eir email servers have been a shambles for a very long time. I have tried convince many of my customers to just dump it and create a new gmail account and let all their contacts know. Painful, but most people did what I suggested thankfully.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120019902#Comment_120019902

The majority

amdublin

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120020001#Comment_120020001

Whaaatt???

Personal at home email?? No way

Patrick2010

I have free gmail and hotmail accounts.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120020001#Comment_120020001

I'm sceptical of this claim. I don't know anyone that pays for email. (Outside of organisations of course).

Furze99

Telecom Eireann/ Eircom/ Eir (whatever) would be long gone - if they didn't own the physical infrastructure of poles and telephone lines up and down the country. This might too not have saved them given the adoption of mobile services but didn't they go and get a sweet deal to use these poles to route the infamous National Broadband plan. Poles that in many rural areas were/are rotting in ditches, lines overgrown by branches etc. I sometimes wonder just how they got this rescuing deal when the likes of ESB poles are far better maintained.

Hyperbollix

Had an eircom email a/c since the early 2000s. Was only a burner to use when signing up for things or anything I didn't want my real account connected to.

Was always a joke. Looked like it was coded by transition years. Conked out at 1am every night for an hour as I remember. You'd want to be mad to be using those eegits for anything, even email.

newmember2

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120020001#Comment_120020001

Where exactly is Mungret so I can be sure never to go there.

FishOnABike

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120023578#Comment_120023578

https://www.logainm.ie/en/1583

The Continental Op

Is it really news worthy any more when an incompetent company does something incompetent?

B.A._Baracus

Everyone is winging it folks. That's life. Obviously during the database migration it wasn't the plan to delete these emails but stuff happens. We all pretend to be professionals and know it all but this is just the reality.

Donald Trump

Surely there were periodic tape backups made? Never mind replication or redundancy or failover machines. No BC at all?

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120022720#Comment_120022720

Who mentioned a restriction to personal consumer emails???

The Continental Op

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120023850#Comment_120023850

Eircom are milking customers, you don't expect a company like that to be paying out money for backups, redundancy or failover?

Donald Trump

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120023921#Comment_120023921

Tape backups are relatively cheap. Surely even a monthly snapshot wouldn't have been out of the question for them

10-10-20

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120023927#Comment_120023927

Accountants are running the place, not techies - for gods sake! Do you think they have a row in their opex spreadsheet for "backup media" while the data appeared to be perfectly happy where it was? Actually... in the same negative vein - this could even be viewed as yet another justification to delete the humans from the workforce - "To Err is Human".

Hotblack Desiato

"To Eir to err is human" surely.

ger664

If email is important to you don't expect your provider to back it up.

Download and save it if you cant live without it.

This applies to paid services like 365 and Google workspace

There is a perception that your email in the cloud is backed up

Its not

Jim2007

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120023959#Comment_120023959

If the accountants were running the place there would be back ups and the would have been tested because they are a risk averse conservative bunch. Familiarity breeds contempt and IT are usually to blame. Worst case I came across was a set of operating instructions were the last step included a screen capture with the instructions that the OP could enter Y and remove the tap. The message in the screen capture actually said was that the process had failed! They had no backups beyond the previous couple of nights, but they did have five years worth of blank tapes and disks stored off site.

Now this should have been caught during disaster recovery simulations which were run every quarter except that the step where they were supposed to check what should be on the tapes was not carried out - the comment in the margin stated it was not necessary as the tape decks work, initialed by the head of risk management!

I never trust backups until I test them. Everywhere I go I create a dummy file full of rubbish, wait 24 or 48 hours then delete it and ask for it to be restored. It’s amazing how often this simple user accident can’t be restored.

65535

Eircom - self styled as EIR are a company registered in the Channel Islands - if anyone thinks that they have any interest in Ireland they need a wake up call - surely this is it.

Dealing with them on a company level is very frustrating because

1. EIR never apologise - even when they are wrong (which is always)
2. EIR always pass the buck - get young trainees to ring the company and say things like 'That's a PRA issue' when they mean 'That's a PBX issue'

Currently they are 'upgrading' to Huawei and DO NOT inform customers of when these upgrades happen - therefore if when problems happen as a result look at number 2 above.

My advice to anyone - leave EIR - run from EIR as fast as you possibly can -

witchgirl26

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120024172#Comment_120024172

Just to say definitely this! I'm in accounting/internal audit sector & it's a standard set of questions for IT management that is usually done annually:

1. Do you do backups?
2. Have you checked that backups work?
3. Can I see the log? Why does this one say "Failed"? Was it redone?
4. Do you do disaster recovery checks?
5. How often?
6. Show me the results.

It's a pretty basic thing to cover from that perspective.

I feel for all the small businesses who had decided to keep paying Eir so they wouldn't have to change their email address & update all their contacts of the same. I mean some of these could have been operating with that address for the past 20 years. While it was only 4% affected by this, I think it will cost them a lot more in other business as it's not seen as safe anymore.

astrofool

Eir have been wanting out of running emails for a while now (I doubt the sub covers the running cost for the few that remain), machiavellian me would say this was allowed to happen, but it's more likely just budget cuts and lack of process (even tape backup systems can be expensive to run and maintain).

The Continental Op

If anyone didn't read the article the OP quoted this is worth noting

In February 2020, Eir told its customers who used the eircom.net email service that they would face a monthly charge to continue using it from the end of March.

The €5.99 monthly charge would be used “be used to invest in the maintenance and improvement of the service going forward,” the spokesperson said at the time.

Talk about bullshit and lies, don't believe this was an upgrade more likely a migration due to numbers dropping off to allow the decommissioning of servers (so the accountants can save money) and if Eir say it was 4% then it was probably a lot more.

Hotblack Desiato

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120024579#Comment_120024579

haha really? I get a much better service off Blacknight than I ever did off eircom, and it's €20 a year including my own domain name. Anyone who decided to stay with eircom for personal use was foolish enough but for business...

AndrewJRenko

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120019975#Comment_120019975

Are you sure that you're qualified to give advice like that? How are your customers complying with GDPR on Gmail accounts?

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120022391#Comment_120022391

Nice to meet you. Now you've met one person.

I'm not paying Eir of course. I'm paying a professional, secure provider with strong encryption.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120019902#Comment_120019902

Anyone who doesn't want the content of their emails harvested for advertising purposes, or accessible to the US government or other governments.

If you're not paying, you're the product.