ireland.com e-mail service withdrawn??

b20uvkft6m5xwg

Are ireland.com phasing out its free service

Not that I'm a user,
But its a good address to have in your e-mail for the avg. user

Here's what the site said...

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">
ireland.com is currently upgrading and improving its services in ways which will become apparent over the coming months. As part of the upgrade, ireland.com's e-mail service will be replaced by a premier, subscription-based service.
Further to recent research the new service will offer a significantly enhanced range of services including increased storage space, calendar facilities, instant notification alerts, instant messaging and a number of other functions. All existing users will be given one month's free access to our premier service.

Existing customers will receive ample notification and instruction to facilitate a smooth transition. We appreciate your understanding and will be publishing further information in due course.

If you have any queries do not hesitate to contact:
services@irish-times.com


</font>

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80p.
SAVE CHIP !!

[This message has been edited by 80project.com (edited 04-09-2001).]

[This message has been edited by 80project.com (edited 04-09-2001).]

seamus

Most Web-Based mail will end up going this way I reckon. Did anyone have a celtic.com email account? they all did the same, addresses like wicklow.net, dublin.net etc. The pundits have realised that web advertising is definitely not as profitable over here as it is in the US, and have to start charging for their services. Pretty soon, the only free ones left will be Hotmail and Yahoo Mail.

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"I don't think anything I've ever done is wrong" - Dr. Homer Simpson

java

Anybody know how much they will charge? Wonder if there will be much interest in paying for a web based email service when there are so many free ones available. Of course "ireland.com" is a cool address. Why is everything on the web becoming so money-grabbing Sad state of affairs.

dahamsta

[Note: I don't have an Ireland.com email address, it doesn't matter a damn to me either way.]

I have great respect for the people behind Ireland.com, they were the first to market with a good Irish portal, and they deserved all the awards they won.

Right, that's got the niceties out of the way (although I do genuinely respect them)...

That said, I think they might be losing the plot a little recently. The site has stagnated - it's crying out for a redesign and /slight/ reorganisation - and they're pushing the envelope by making this jump to ASP (Application Service Provider (hate that term)) so suddenly. Even Salon weren't so silly as to move a whole service - their content - to a paid structure all at once, and Salon is in trouble.

I can understand them needing to create new revenue streams (urgh, I said it meself!) - banners ads aren't worth diddley these days - but this isn't the way to go about it. They should be looking more into sponsorship (different from advertising), and if it's /really/ necessary to introduce a fee for services, they should have gone for the Salon/Yahoo! model, i.e. added services. (Salon didn't work, IMHO, because to all intents and purposes they /took services away/.)

This could kill Ireland.com IMHO, or at least hamstring it badly. I really think they need to go back to the drawing board here.

adam

PS. If DeVore is reading this, I would seriously suggest considering the "area sponsorship" model for Boards.ie, in the style of The Register. Lose the banner ads - they suck anyway - and invite people to become sponsors of complete boards. That's the model I'll be going for on foot.ie if I ever get the finger out and start putting it together anyway.

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ieWebs - Foot.ie

Samson

I agree with dahamsta.
I expect people will leave the ireland.com service in droves.

b20uvkft6m5xwg

The obvious strength of ireland.com (apart from the domain name itself), is the fact that there is such a huge base of users.

[Now me thinking logically here]
If you cut this user base, you will reduce ppl visiting other areas of your site & thus a reduction in ppl using other ireland.com services.

The user base is its strength in attracting sponsorship & advertising. Wot are they goin to do now when they approach prospective sources of revenue...
"We've cut our user base by 75% in the last 3 months"

HELLOOO!!

SUBSCRIPTION SERVICES DONT WORK....
Unless its so totally unique its worth paying for...for instance www.law.com have case notes etc. you simply cannot get anywhere else, but free e-mail & cool @domainnames are a dime a dozen;)


Ireland.com You've been warned
(the words "foot" & "shooting yourself in the" spring to mind;))

jmcc

Originally posted by java
Anybody know how much they will charge? Wonder if there will be much interest in paying for a web based email service when there are so many free ones available. Of course "ireland.com" is a cool address. Why is everything on the web becoming so money-grabbing.

The simple reason for ireland.com charging is that they are really losing a lot of money on the ireland.com portal. The cost of providing free e-mail services is too high. There was a time when free e-mail was supposed to be the way to make a site sticky but the IT went and screwed that up by not making the login section part of each page/the main page.

I respect the Irish Times for what the achieved with ireland.com though I consider some of their 'technology journalists' to be complete idiots and completely lacking any indepth knowledge of technology. The management seem to have made some serious mistakes and one of them, in my opinion, was their new chief operating officer. What they are going through now is largely a crisis of their own making - they have to make money fast.

The main product of the Irish Times is its newspaper. That is what a lot of people go to the site for. The free e-mail is of secondary concern. Somewhere in the last few years, the Irish Times lost sight of the fact that it was a newspaper and it tried to get into specialist fields. The portal ireland.com launched various subsites (www.ireland.com/technology /business etc) with the hope of getting readers. The technology subsite was idiotic in content and used cannibalised and out of date content from two of the lesser computer magazines in Ireland. Then it padded out the content with the ramblings of clueless technology journalists. Unfortunately for them, such sh1te does not cut it on the web. With a newspaper, the punter has already bought the newspaper that he is reading - the company gets their cut. With the web, there is nothing stopping someone zipping off to news.com or theregister.co.uk or that irishtechnologynews.com site rather than staying on ireland.com. A newspaper is not a specialist publication. It is there to provide news. The IT was trying to compete with everyone and not doing a good job of it. It is not so much a failure of strategy as not having any strategy in the first place.

I am not sure about subscription services not working. In some cases they will. Perhaps the IT should have made some areas of the newspaper pay. If they posted as they went to press, that could be a premium service worth paying for. Making their archive pay would be another good move.

However the free services were really just a tactic for building traffic. Again this was the old thinking - build traffic and everything will follow. The problem is that that traffic comes at a price. For the IT that price is too high.

Having a huge userbase is good but for a business, if that userbase is not making money, it is a liability. At the end of the day, businesses have to make money to survive. The free e-mail service was perhaps the easiest target but it was very poorly handled.

Regards...jmcc

Pablo

it sucks i guess to a certain extent , but think how much email is worth to you ..... then decide to either leave ireland.com or not

LoLth

well, I'll be using it. I sort of have to and I have that address on my CV and it's a lot of bother to go changing it.

If the quality increases I'm all on for it.

at the moment:
3 mb space, not bad. - If I'm paying I would expect a lot more

if you spend too long or write too much writing an email it hoofs you out to the start screen without warning when you click on send. Not good if you've just spent ages draughting a letter!
I've gotten into the habit of copying everything I type to clip board before I hit send, or at typing it in word and then logging into email to copy it over.

Login doesn't always work, you get the login page in multiple frames. Looks crappy. And gets annoying as you are considered as logged in so, when you do get to your mailbox, if ever, you aren't told of the new emails 'cause the system doesn't consider them to be "new" anymore.

b20uvkft6m5xwg

I hadn't used my a/c for about a year, but when I checked when I heard the news, they still have the same crappy login- which is so unnessecary- why not take you straight to your inbox?? If I was (so-inclined as) to pay for the service that would definitley have to change.

As for the storage space- 3mb is nothing these days w/ most big co.'s sending HTML e-mails-
For instance www.eurosport.com give you 20 mb & 5 mb for attachments- all for free!! (Thats more the pop3 I'm using)

It;ll be difficult as well for ppl who have committed signage & other expenditure- I just saw some electritians van today w/ and @ireland.com on the side:( Even though its a coulpe of months notice they're giving it still will cause some upheaveal!

java

It would be even better if they published their intended prices now to give people enough time to make alternative arrangements if the price is too high.

Trojan

Sucks a bit alright, unfortunate to happen.

As lolth said, it's going to have to improve a hell of a lot if they start charging for it: e.g. treble the storage, spruce up the interface, stop selling the address list to spammers (I had an inactive a/c from whenever it opened, never used it for anything on the web, got 60 or 70 spams over the couple of years it was unchecked...)

That said, Yahoo have maintained rocketmail addresses to this day after they bought the rm webmail system (didnt want to develop a new one from scratch), so there is a precedent for freemail companies to maintain their old domain addresses...

Anyways, sign up for that europort address, sounds cool, 20 megs

Or, register your own domain, get adsl, and host your own mail server, that way you'll never run out of space and are always on (until you get rooted )

Al.

DeVore

I dunno...

Ireland.com going paid-for is bad alright.

I thought a lot about sponsoring certain sections but the problem is that SOME boards will be jumped on (like Games and Tech) but other boards wont be and frankly selling that stuff takes a LOT of time and energy.

Remember we dont NEED to do that as we can just put our hands in our pockets and PAY for boards.ie to live. I mean, its not like we havent done it before

So, for us an ad deal that ensures we get a good chunk of the cash while doing NO work is better then a deal where we get all the cash and have to hire a sales guy for some of the year.

Ironically, just as Ireland.com goes pay-for-mail... I think we're going to be able to offer Boards.ie Mail soon (free of course).

Shhh just dont tell anyone or it'll ruin the surprise

DeV.

dahamsta

Trojan: It's actually quite possible that they didn't sell their subscriber list to spammers, as a lot of spammers these days just pull a dictionary file and send email to $everything@the.domain. You'll notice that a lot in Hotmail for example, where some spammers don't even bother hiding the blocks of guessed addies. It's also very prevalent in the IE namespace, usually by complete amateurs you can shut down in about five minutes with a quick trip to SpamCop. Unless it's Eircom of course, they appear to send abuse reports to /dev/null. (And no, this isn't another general bitch about you Eircom, you don't answer abuse reports.) Of course it's also possible that they do in fact sell the list, I'm just pointing out that it mightn't be good to jump to conclusions.

DeVore: I agree, some boards will get jumped on and some will go largely ignored, but that should be seen as an advantage, not a disadvantage. Ye're actually in a better position than most, because your community sorts out its own demographics - gamers go in gaming, hardware afficionados go in tech, web gurus and html-hackers hang around in Webmaster, etc. That's an audience you can target perfectly, and it's an audience you can measure too - tweak the vBulletin logging a little (it sucks in its current form) and you can pull up stats on who visits where, how often and what they had for breakfast.

Some might see that as an invasion of privacy - in fact they will, believe me - but as long as you're not tracking them user-by-user, it's a good thing, because you can deliver products and services they want and need, rather than crud they don't care about. Everyone wins - your advertisers actually shift some inventory, ye get paid better than average for the advertising, and your visitors get Cool Stuff!

All of that is also why it suits The Reg style so well, you don't have to go effing about with banner ads - which everyone hates or ignores anyway - you can completely brand a forum with its own colours and logos to match up with an advertiser. And it's even easier now you have vBulletin, because changing styles is like piddling in a private pond. If you don't want to lock your users into one style, get the advertiser to develop three. Develop three yourself and sell them to 'em.

As to "we're just doing it for the laugh", well that's cool, and I think everyone on boards.ie appreciates that. Hell, I'm just making suggestions, I'm not going to hold a gun (I actually wrote "bun" there by mistake, which would be odd) to your head and say "implement these ideas now or the wall gets to feel the inside of your head!"

I wouldn't like to see ye sell yerselves short though. What I've explained here is the holy grail for advertisers. They'd sell their own dear wee granny for this kind of targeted marketing. They may act all nonchalant when they're talking to you, but if you implement a sytem like the above, they'll cream themselves. And then you can hire me as a marketing consultant!

Ironically, just as Ireland.com goes pay-for-mail... I think we're going to be able to offer Boards.ie Mail soon (free of course).

Heh, betcha I'll get there before ye? All the footie fans'll be gagging for their.name@foot.ie.

adam