Email account after termination of broadband service

[#1]

Hi,

A friend of mine who has a plusnet broadband contract, and also has a plusnet email account, is shortly moving house and has been told by plusnet that they can’t offer her a broadband service at her new address. Can anyone tell me what options are available to her to ensure she retains access to all her existing emails when she migrates to a new broadband provider?

I found a 4 year old post on this forum saying “If the purpose of doing all of this is associated with migrating a broadband service away from Plusnet, then it is IMPERATIVE that the user advises Plusnet that they wish to RETAIN the account as an EMAIL ONLY account.  Failure to do so will result in the email service (and all of the associated email addresses) being terminated.”…

https://community.plus.net/t5/Email/Email-Forwarding-is-it-possible/m-p/1748801#M31416
Can anyone tell me if this option still exists? If so then that would be ideal for her.

If this is not possible then what can she do? She can create a new email account but is there any way of bulk migrating/forwarding/importing all her emails to it? Surely there has to be an easier option than forwarding them manually?

Thanks

[#2]

@Felix64   EMAIL ONLY accounts  are no longer  available they were stopped sometime ago, maybe a year or two. 

When the broadband account closes the email account all emails on the Plusnet server which they are if using IMAP will be lost.

The emails must be moved to another email account, I can't offer any advice on bulk migration etc, but I'm sure there are ways to do this. You could try searching in this forum board, there may be some information about shifting mail from the Plusnet servers. You certainly don't want be forwarding them manually.🙄

[#3]

If you are using a PC/laptop, you could install an email client (such as Mozilla Thunderbird). Set it up to use your Plusnet email account(s),  and download the emails to the client   Thunderbird has a section called Local Folders (bottom of the email accounts list on the left) and you can drag and drop any emails / folders from the active accounts to those Local Folders. That is what I did before leaving Plusnet to retain the few PN emails I wanted to retain. 

The Local Folders are exactly that, they sit on your PC and are unaffected by whatever happens on the email accounts.

[#4]

If this is not possible then what can she do? She can create a new email account but is there any way of bulk migrating/forwarding/importing all her emails to it? Surely there has to be an easier option than forwarding them manually?

@Felix64  i use Imapsync https://imapsync.lamiral.info/  to transfer IMAP mailboxes in bulk. There's a free online option for basic on-off transfers https://imapsync.lamiral.info/X/ . If you have a linux system then the software is freely available.

[#5]

@Felix64 

Does she use the naked @account.plus.com email address, or (hopefully) does she have a hosted domain name and use @her-domain.co.uk?

If the latter, then the domain name could be moved to a different hosting provider ... which keeps the email addresses 'live' ... though the existing email needs to be dealt with as described above.

[#6]

I’m afraid she uses an @account.plus.com address so looks like she’ll just have to use a new address, and will explore options for importing emails into the new account. Pretty lousy that plusnet’s idea of “progress” is to take away services that used to be available to customers!

Thanks for the help though.

[#7]

At the risk of asking a dumb question, when her email account is terminated, which presumably is instantaneous with termination of her broadband account, is there no way of forwarding or redirecting new emails to her new account? Is there nothing she can do to prevent all these emails just being returned to sender with no way of telling the sender her new address?

[#8]

No!

When the account is terminated the domain accountname.plus.com will no longer be routable, so email will not get to the point of being sent, to then be redirected / forwarded / advised.

The only way to tell the sender of the new address is for her to change her contact details with the senders.

[#9]

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@Felix64 wrote:

I’m afraid she uses an @account.plus.com address so looks like she’ll just have to use a new address, and will explore options for importing emails into the new account. Pretty lousy that plusnet’s idea of “progress” is to take away services that used to be available to customers!

Thanks for the help though.

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PlusNet have been positioning as a low cost basic broadband provider as part of the BT Group for some time now. Very few, if any, add ons are now offered and those that users still have are legacy products. They go when the account goes - end of story.

Your friend needs to urgently sort out a new e-mail address, notify as many people as possible and then secure her PN e-mails by downoading them to a e-mail client. This is time critical - the account goes when she moves.

Brian

[#10]

Just to say - as has been mentioned previously on here - the Plusnet RoundCube webmail system already has an inbuilt facility to download selected messages, or complete individual mailboxes. The formats supported are the usual 'Mbox' format as well as 'Maildir'.

Open the named mailbox you want to download, then:

Select 'All' messages

Click on  'More Actions' (gear wheel on icon bar)

Select 'Download' from menu

Select format: "Mbox format (zip)" (or "Maildir format (zip)")

Mbox format downloads entire mailbox to one file: INBOX.<Mailbox Name>.zip