Two days after I posted about catch all forwarding, and I’ve just received two identical emails from UK2.
Here’s a snippet from the email…
Catch All Forwarding is an e-mail service provided on most UK2 Domains. This has been a standard part of our service for many years and can be very useful, but more recently has been abused by spammers. What Catch All Forwarding means is that all messages sent to any variant of e-mail address at your Domain Name (i.e. anything that precedes your Domain Name such as sales@yourdomain, example@yourdomain, blahblahblah@yourdomain) are delivered to an alternative email address. If you are actively using Catch All Forwarding this will be an e-mail address that you chose, or if you are passively using Catch All Forwarding this will be trashcan@uk2.net.
The new price for Catch All Forwarding is £4.99 per month and is already a chargeable option for new Domain customers. However, as an existing customer we are giving you a month of service for free while you decide on the best way for you to manage your e-mail. On Saturday 12th May 2007 the charging becomes applicable for existing customers.
If you would like to keep Catch All Forwarding:
If you’re happy to continue using Catch All Forwarding as a paid for service, you don’t need to do anything and our auto renewal system will start to bill you £4.99 per month for Catch All Forwarding. The first payment will be requested 7 days before the renewal date which is Saturday 5th May 2007.
And it then goes on to say…
If you have any queries or require further information, please do not hesitate to contact our Support Team. You can call us on 0905 168 0086 between 9.00am and 5.00pm, Monday to Friday (calls charged at 50p per minute) or you can submit a ticket at all times via our online support system located at http://www.uk2.net/support.
How many people do you think are going to read that? Not everyone is subscribed to their mailing list, so I can only assume they’re going to get an awful lot of angry customers calling them at 50p per minute over the next few weeks as credit and debit card bills drop on the doormat…
Tsk, tsk.
If it’s causing them a problem and they need to charge for catch all forwarding, wouldn’t it be more convenient for their customers to just turn off catch all forwarding like other domain hosts do?
And then if their customers actually *use* catch all forwarding, they can opt in to pay it?
