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TOURISM IRELAND HAS said that it will not be providing an email service for users of the @ireland.com domain who will see their accounts shutdown within weeks after the Irish Times sold the domain for around €495,000.
Some @ireland.com email users have responded angrily to yesterday’s news that their email service will be discontinued from 7 November when users will no longer be able to send or receive messages while emails sent to their @ireland.com address will bounce back.
The 15,000 people who still use @ireland.com accounts will have until 7 December to transfer any data saved on their account to a new email host but some, who have been using the service for over a decade and initially paid for it, have expressed their unhappiness with the move.
The Irish Times has said that the service was losing money and has apologised for the inconvenience the move will cause.
Businesswoman Siobhan King-Hughes told TheJournal.ie: ”I’ve had this account for more than 10 years. Now I get three weeks notice that my email address is gone. No opportunity to protest, no reasonable time frame for change.
“It feels like we’re having the rug pulled out from under us,” she added. “I think it’s very unfair. They haven’t even given the option to people to pay for it. I’d have been happy to pay for it.”
Tourism Ireland, which is mostly funded by the State, acquired the domain in a deal worth around €495,000 which was announced yesterday.
Another @ireland.com account holder, Keith Gavin, described the decision as “disgraceful” and in an email to the customer service team handling the matter, said:
Not only will I now have to go through the tortuous process of having to inform everyone of a change of email address, but I will also need to get all my corporate literature, business cards, brochures, etc. revised, which will be a very expensive exercise and a cost I could do without in the current economic climate.
Another user, Liam Ireland, said that the Irish Times should compensate users: “Its a major nuisance for me. I believe The Irish Times should be paying compensation to owners who paid and supported them over the years, and are now faced with hours of work.”
Tourism Ireland said that it had acquired the domain “because the ease of recognition and memorability” of the domain. It said that the responsibility for the email address service lay with the Irish Times.
A statement said: “Regarding the @ireland.com email address service, this is the responsibility of The Irish Times. Tourism Ireland has bought the domain name, Ireland.com, as part of our remit is to promote the island of Ireland around the world; we are not an email service provider.”
The Irish Times did not immediately respond to a request for comment but its Head of Online, John O’Shea, told Siliconrepublic.com that that the email service “was no longer our core business” and had been outsourced to a third party.
He said that the outsourcing of the service was costly and was losing the newspaper money as a result.
In a statement on ireland.com, which includes links to an FAQ and guide to transferring data, O’Shea says: “We would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused to our valued customers.”
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Christ, Irish people like to moan! Just change your address!
If email was SO important to your business, you should have invested accordingly in it with your own domain.
First world problem?
Mad isn’t.
Ironically, T&C of ireland.com email clearly forbid commercial use…
Well said!
Daniel Dudek Corrigan, does that mean the Irish Times can claim off of the fools that used an ireland.com e-mail address for business use :)
That might just upset that user above who wants to get compensation from the Irish Times.
You’d think business users of all people would read Terms & Conditions for services they sign up to,
Now that would be funny :)
Ciaran,
indeed creating a new email account is easy but you miss a few points.
Email addresses are the main user id for a vast number of day to day service. yet not all will allow you to amend your account. I know I have been trying to change some today.
some are these service are vital civic services.
the Irish times should have given a minimum loud 3 months notice. I paid for the service for many years when it was subscription based.
imagine eircom selling up (again) and telling customers their phone number would cease in 4 weeks. Fair?
I’m sure but I have very little pity for any business using @Ireland.com for their e-mail address,.
First off the service was overpriced at i believe around 30e a year which frankly is insane,
Second off joe_90@ireland.com does not look professional in anyway, you can buy your own .com domain for around 9e a year these days so you can have info@companyname.com instead…..its about a professional image.
I’ve had my own domain since 1998 and i’ve changed e-mail providers five times since then, I’m with gmail.com now but I still use my own domain.
Anyone that thinks an e-mail provider lasts for life is frankly an idiot.
Seriously guys, grow a set… welcome to the real world where G mail is king and purchasing your own domain for work. Also its a simple task to select all records in your address book and send them a nice email, stating that you will not be using your @ireland.com email address. My mind is also blown at the fact that people want to purchase an email address… Why guys we are in 2012 not 1996
Is this a story from the onion?
Only thing I can’t get my head around is how on earth 15K people are still prepared to pay 30 Euro a year for an email address?!? WTF?!?!??
Get your facts right.
It has been free for about 5 yrs.
Get over it IMHO. you are getting a free service which someone (tourism Ireland in this case) are paying for.
you have no right to protest nor have you any grounds for complaining.
changing emails is extremely easy.
If you mean the email service was free then I think you are incorrect. It may have been originally but, from what I remember, there has been an annual cost in recent years.
It might be easy for some people but not for everyone. If Gmail suddenly shut down I’m sure most users wouldn’t just shrug and think “ah well that’s mildly irritating” and move on.
There is also the issue of all the information that people will lose as a result of emails sent and received being deleted. Unless of course you forwarded them all to your new account, which is, of course, “easy”.
I’m sure an auto forward facility could be set up in collusion with the the third party provider and tourism Ireland. I doubt subscribers would have to pay much for it either.
Why should Tourism Ireland go through the time and expense of this though?
Also, they are likely to use the Ireland.com domain for their own needs so having 15k extra users still active using the domain would be very confusing for the brand.
I said it could be done, for a limited a period to keep these people happy, rather than them have a 3 week cut off period.
It’s technically possible. Whether it’s desireable or not is another matter.
It could be done alright but its of no benefit to Tourism Ireland, why would they care about pissed off Irish times customers? Its nothing to do with Tourism Ireland :)
They might want to be nice to people.
It has happened.
Ireland.com was designed for private use only…. Not Commercial.. Its in it’s terms and conditions. I have pity for any private user BUT any business that used it as a marketing tool is liable for illegally using the address in the first place.
It’s not illegal, it’s frowned upon
Oh no! The free thing I don’t pay for is going away! I will have to use one of the other bazillion free email services from now on! ;)
Nearly €0.5 million for Ireland.com Nice profit for the seller. Bad deal for the buyer (The taxpayer).
Perhaps so, but I’d rather the domain is owned by the Irish Taxpayer then some company in another country, Ireland.com is the perfect domain for Irish Tourism and it really should have been used by them since the 1990′s.
Actually €0.5m is decent for a premium domain like Ireland.com.
Is it just me that thinks that a state funded body spending half a mil on a domain name at this time is a disgrace??
No.
I just went through an entire email change due to business closure – its not rocket science & its not difficult! The time people took to voice their “outrage” at the domain closure, they would have all their contacts notified and wouldn’t notice.
You will find that someone maybe rushed in and got bob@ireland.com and what with their belief of self entitlement are flapping about over it – grow up.
I agree it’s very easy change, but I’m going to have to do it for my 70+ year old parents who are completely computer literate and I won’t be home in the next 3 weeks. A pain but it’ll be done…
Really!?! Your computer illiterate 70+ Grandparents who happen to have ireland.com e-mail addresses they frequently use!?!? Spoof much!?!
I didn’t say grandparents, I said parents (you must have English literacy issues yourself). Some people just turn on a browser and have ireland.com as homepage with username and password ready. Does that really surprise you so much? Do they use it regularly.. Now and again when photos etc are sent to them. This is an inconvenience and could have been handled better.
Apologies Brian, I only read your moany-hole comment the once & took it as ‘grandparents’! Surely not a cause to question my standards of English literacy! As for homepage, passwords etc…You’re to be commended on your inventiveness!
In the 90′s i had 3 @ireland.com email addresses, my first name, my initials and my full name. When they started charging I just gave them up. (yes i’ve a common first and last name) I can remember at that time how annoyed i was to lose them so I can understand why people are annoyed. In fact i’d imagine if I even kept one of them and was paying for it I’d be more annoyed. Email addresses are usually your login for lots of other things, so they dont just lose their address. I my self think its a stupid move getting rid of the email. Tourism Ireland could have sent ads to these email address owners every day on top of charging for the address in the first place. Doesn’t make sense to me to be honest.
As one of the people quoted as complaining about this development in the original article above; and having now read all of the subsequent comments, I would like to make the following points:
- Irish Times promoted and marketed the ireland.com service as a high-profile, easily recognised and easy to remember domain for users and were fully aware customers were using it for commercial purposes; their defence of adherence to terms and conditions at time of signup is bogus in my opinion.
- They have now sold the domain to Tourism Ireland (who have used half a million of very scarce taxpayers euros to acquire it) and their provision of a mere 3 weeks notice for total cessation of the service, without any automated forwarding facility, is a completely unsatisfactory way to deal with customers in this day and age.
- I have my own domain name and website for my business and can easily transfer to existing addresses on same, but have continued to use the ireland.com address which I set up in the late ’90s for the obvious reason that it was easy-to-remember and user-friendly; i.e. the main selling point when it was originally established by the IT.
- I, and every other ireland.com subscriber, now have to notify all of our contacts of a change of email address which, in of itself, is a mere irritant- however, the other implications of this development are more serious and problematic- i.e. all printed materials- business cards, brochures, van graphics etc.- are now defunct; listings in directories, websites, etc. throughout the world now obsolete, and subscriptions and automated contact from organisations such as the Revenue, banks, NCT reminders, etc. etc. will no longer work when the service is discontinued and it will be ireland.com subscribers’ responsibility and arduous task to identify and notify all such service providers of this change. Thankfully I do not sell any products online but any ireland.com users who take orders automatically via their email address will be even more adversely affected.
- I am NOT saying that there should be any form of compensation for ireland.com customers but surely a bit more than 3 weeks notice and, more importantly, the simple provision of an automated mail forwarding facility for a reasonable period of time following cessation of the service is not too much to ask for as a basic level of customer service?
” the simple provision of an automated mail forwarding facility for a reasonable period of time following cessation of the service is not too much to ask for as a basic level of customer service?”
it is clearly too much to ask for from the Old Lady of Dame/Tara Street – The paper of record doesn’t give a tuppeny f**k – they need to pay for their 50 million purchase of myhome.ie and their Celtic Tiger office
No just no – why do you think you are entitled to a mail forwarding service from a state body thats bought over a private domain? Okay more than three weeks notice would be nice, but its a positive that they give this at all, why so negative?
I can’t help but to ask why Tourism Ireland should be responsible for your poor decision making in marketing your company with an @Ireland email? So your points about marketing literature come across as feeling sorry for yourself.
You seem like a reasonable man, but you’re wrong on this one.
If your email address printed on your business card was @ireland.com you have issues, a domain is 7 euro a year ffs
Ireland.info might have been a more appropriate purchase for Tourism Ireland, not Ireland.com
Does this mean the iol.ie accounts are also effected?
Why? They’re part of BT
It’s not the end of the world, granted.
But the Irish Times have been very sloppy about how they handled this.
When they introduced the service it was free and a very good set up. There were very little problems with spam as it was off the radar of the spammers. Then they introduced a charge which was a little unheard of but people paid it. The attraction of it was you could easily get your name or a workable variant. Gmail is a great service but if you have a fairly common name and haven’t got your account by now then you are looking at an address like joebloggs357. Not ideal.
So the Ireland.com email was a good choice especially when it went free again. Now this. Not very well handled. They saw a chance to make money and that’s it.i can’t blame them but I’m disappointed. Still, nobody died.
The new TV ad for the Irish Times says that it all starts with a WHY ? Well, now we know why and what they mean when they say this.
If Tourism Ireland had the foresight, they would sustain and creatively develop the Ireland.com email into one which attracted both existing & significant numbers of new users to the TI site. Aside from the thousands of local users which could be built upon consider the diaspora market alone.
What this sorry story indicates is a pointed lack of initiative & imagination from Tourism Ireland to develop the Ireland.com email as an effective community-building tool.
It is not too late for Tourism Ireland to wake up to the opportunity it is passing up..!
Hopefully, the email system will be restored and made available to anyone in the World with an interest in Ireland and channel targeted marketing/promotion of Ireland to users. Consider, if every visitor to Ireland could set up their Ireland.com email, it can be spun as a statement of there Irish connection then channel promotions based on their demographics through the email portal.
People should be compensated for ‘hours of work’ FFS seriously get a grip and just autoforward till the 7th Dec.
actually, get your facts right. email send and receive ceases Nov 7th.
#firstworldproblems
there is a huge snob factor in having an Ireland.com address, it tells people what paper you read and the Jo.d if company you keep
Just to clarify- I have not relied on ireland.com to market my business; it has just been a very convenient, easy to use and memorable email address for contacts that I’ve been using from day 1 over 10 years ago- I totally accept that it is simply a commercial decision by the Irish Times to sell the domain, which is obviously their prerogative (although I would question the use of public funds by Tourism Ireland to acquire it); my main gripe is that they announced it with only 3 weeks notice to customers and no facility to assist in transition to an alternative, e.g. a mail forwarding service- as a businessman myself I would equate this to a situation if I decided to sell or close my company and basically told all of my existing customers to f&%k off- it’s just a disgraceful way to treat long-standing subscribers in my humble opinion…
I can’t believe that Tourism Ireland doesn’t see the merit in using the email addresses. Charge for existing users to be allowed continue pending revamping of the platform, then get notable US celebraties to endorse it and market the name in the US as a link to Ireland (free). Sell advertising etc off the back of that, and luxuriate in the knowledge that you are putting “Ireland” in the minds of millions of people.
FFS are these people not meant to be marketeers?
This is a disgrace, the contributors to the article are correct and the service should have been transferred as an ongoing concern with the new owners responsible for management of the email service. Surely someone will challenge this legally?
Well this is the risk of having email in somebody’s else domain. If you are any serious business or even some professional individual why don’t you get your own domain name and hosting. All email and website and domain together for relatively small annual fee usually. And you’ll never lose it. Maybe this incident is a good time for those ireland.com users who complain most to do so?
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