not receiving some incoming blueyonder emails

[davidbalerno]

My blueyonder email address seems to be working OK generally but emails from 2 companies recently have not got through. In both cases they were replies to my email enquiry to them. I checked my spam folder but no trace. I have checked filter rules too. I asked them via other means - twitter/ phone - to resend and they did more than once. When I provided my alternative gmail address the emails came through. Is there something I can check to see why these random emails are not arriving please?

[Steven_L · Accepted solution]

Hey davidbalerno,

Welcome back to the community and thanks for taking the time to post.
I’m sorry to hear of the issues that you’re having with your Blueyonder account at the moment, is this happening on webmail and emails clients or just one of them?

Do you know if the party that are sending the email are getting error messages bounce back or if you could find out if they are, when the email is sent over to us? This maybe able to help use determine the cause of the issues as an error message would advise, what the issues are.

Kind Regards,

Steven_L

[davidbalerno]

Hi  @Steven_L,

This happened on webmail on PC,android tablet and phone and Windows 10 Mail on PC, no trace of replies anywhere. One sender was unaware I had not received the email and tried again with no error message at their end. The other is the ITVX site which generates automatic emails to verify new accounts, I tweeted that I was not receiving the email and they asked me to try again without success - when I changed my ITVX account to a gmail address it worked straight away.

Kind regards

David

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[Andrew-G]

I've noticed exactly the same problem, but recognising that VM deemed the email service as a "non-core service" last year it seemed pointless trying to resolve the matter with VM, and I've been progressively moving to alternatives - Free Outlook accounts mainly for sales & marketing stuff, and custom domain paid email accounts with Ionos for serious and personal email.

VM are not permitting new customers to have ISP email, so that the number of customers continuing to use VM/BY/NTL email addresses is steadily dwindling.  I have good reason to believe this number was well below 100k users out of 5m customers.   And dwindling faster as they slowly catchup with closing email addresses that are not linked to live email accounts.  Which means that the email service costs are spread across a declining number of customers and the cost per account rises, so eventually (and perhaps not that far away) VM will close the email service for existing customers.  VM say "no current plans", but it is simple logic about numbers and cost - VM's email services are on Death Row even for existing paying customers.  They'll probably have to allow customers in a fixed term to leave without penalty, but as new customers haven't been able to sign up for a good while now, and the legacy users are declining, it's only a matter of time until the potential customer losses are sufficiently low that they will pull the plug.

So you might have got a year to two's grace, but that's all.  Far better to sort out an alternative.  Free services (gmail, Outlook) are good - until either Google or Microsoft decide that the returns no longer outweigh the cost.  If you use a paid Office subscription, it's probable that the email is more secure and more durable than the gmail offer.  The alternatives are paid services, where at least somebody is making money from email, and so long as they continue to do so, they'll maintain the service.  People think internet stuff is or should be free, unfortunately there's a cost to everything, and unless you are paying, you have no say and may even be the product yourself (as with gmail).  Paid email providers are typically around £2-3 a month for 1-5 email addresses, or you could do what I did, buying a domain* name that includes one or more email addresses (from as little as a tenner a year with a single email address, eg with Ionos).  For that tenner I've setup my own dot com domain that's reasonably customised, so if my name were Alan B Snodgrass, my email would be alan@absnodgrass.com (note, random domain I've checked it doesn't exist).  In my case it's a domain without a website, although if you wanted a website at your domain it's an option.  All the obvious domains of purely surname.com have long since gone, but if you've got a couple of initials to put on the front in the way I've done there's an excellent chance that the domain is available either as a dot com or a dot co dot uk.  That's a whole lot more memorable than being asnodgrass945678903@gmail.com  or something more random still like badgersbottomsussex@gmail.com   Of course, if your name is Dave Smith then it's time to change your name by deed poll...... 

* If not familiar with the term, a domain is anything like virginmedia.com outlook.com smith.co.uk.  For third party email servers, the supplier chooses that.  If you buy your own domain and email, you choose it, subject to the domain not already being taken.

[Andrew-G]

Me: They'll probably have to allow customers in a fixed term to leave without penalty, 

Of course, I'm wrong on that, all they've got to do is wait 18 months from June 2022 when they decided that the email service was a "non-core service" (meaning around December of this year), and then all customers are either on a new contract and thus accept VM's commercial terms and T&C that no longer include email, or they're not in any fixed contract and can leave at a months notice if they don't like it.  Then VM can cancel the email outsource contract, that I'd guess costs them around £2 million a year.  As they're not reducing customer prices in respect of that, it is £2m that goes straight through to operating profit, and you can see why VM might think this is such a fantastic idea.  Whilst £2m a year might seem small beer for a multi-billion pound company, accounts show VM's operating profits are around 10% of turnover, and average revenue per user of £50 a month, if we assume new customer margins are one third of average margins due to the heavy discounts, £2m a year is equivalent to signing up an extra 100,000 new customers.  There's a good chance that new customers actually a small net loss during their first 18 month contract, and in that case £2m a year is equivalent to retaining an additional 33,000 customers a year at average margins.  Since the VM side of VMO2 seems to my thinking structurally unprofitable, any gains no matter how small are worth taking.

Maybe I'm wrong, but anybody dependant upon long standing VM, Blueyonder or NTL email addresses would be well advised to start planning on the basis that the company could pull the plug at the end of this year.

[ALF28]

I agree it is wise to have alternative emails as the VM email is no longer offered to new customers and may be eventually be retired.

I have had similar issues with emails not being delivered to my VM email in the past, usually due to spam blacklisting.

I use gmail.com and outlook.com mainly since 2016 which are very good and a few other free emails  such as yahoo.com, aol.com, mail.com, and  protonmail.com, but I still do use my VM primary ntlworld.com email which is attached to my account.

Also one advantage is the free drive storage  available, 5gb on outlook, 15gb on gmail and 1gb on proton mail, but you have to use it, as they can expire after 1 or 2 years if not used but the storage is small, unless you go for a paid option.

I usually use my own name plus a number for my email address, but have had problems on 4 occasions where people with the same name have used my email to purchase goods, so if you have a name that is commonly used, it may be wise to add some extra characters to make it different.

Also most emails now have two factor authentication which is more secure.

For personal use, the free emails are good, but professional paid for email services are available for business etc using hosted servers.

Some free emails have reduced some facilities such as  storage, forwarding, alias emails, number of folders etc,unless you pay a monthly fee so can be a limited service.

Support for free emails is usually poor, or non existing  and some charge for support or insist on a subscription to get support, but most do have recovery options.