Plusnet Puts Troubled Email Service “Under Review”

Plusnet’s email service, back online after a week-long outage earlier this month, is now under review by the broadband provider, with some customers told it will shutter in 2022.

The disruption began on 10 November, when some customers found themselves unable to log into their Plusnet email. Access issues continued and customers who were able to log in faced delays sending and receiving emails and disappearing messages. This resulted in a flood of complaints to Plusnet and on social media.

The issue also affected customers on Plusnet’s managed services including John Lewis Broadband and Waitrose Broadband.

Plusnet seemed to finally resolve the issue by 17 November and attributed the lengthy outage to an unspecified “technical issue.”

A spokesperson for the BT-owned ISP said: “Plusnet email services have now been restored and customers should be able to send and receive emails as normal. We’re sorry this has taken longer than expected to fix and for the inconvenience caused.” 

However, the troubled email service may be slated for closure. Customers on Plusnet’s community forum have been reporting the provider told them the email service will close entirely in 2022. 

Customer “Clangrant" wrote: “My source within Plusnet advises that senior management have indicated that the email service will be discontined [sic] completely in the next 12 months. And that is not just the web based service, it's everything.”

User “timanddebby” wrote: “When I had an email problem about a month ago technical support told me that Plusnet was discontinuing all their email services as it was not a profitable side of the business. We will all have to find new email accounts with other suppliers. This will happen around March 2022. We will be warned about a month in advance and they will bounce our emails to our new chosen email address for a short while.”

Plusnet staff regularly post on the community forum but haven’t denied these reports. In fact, the company confirmed to ISPreview that it’s reviewing the email service.

“We’re reviewing the future of the Plusnet email service, however at this stage a decision has not been made. If we make any changes our customers will be the first to know,” a spokesperson said.

We usually advise customers to use an email service that isn’t provided by their ISP, such as Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook, and others. It makes it easier to switch to a different broadband provider for better prices and speeds. In fact, in repeated surveys, broadband users state concerns about their ISP-provided email is one of the reasons they don’t seek out a better deal.

In a 2019 survey of 8,000 broadband customers by Which?, 37% of those who haven’t moved to a new provider in years or ever said they were concerned about losing their email service.

Meanwhile, Plusnet seems to be scrutinising their offerings recently to keep up with the way customers are using the internet recently. Their YouView TV service closed for good on 1 November, with Plusnet saying it was “simplifying its product range.”

Spring reports suggested Plusnet would also launch full-fibre tariffs in the second half of this year, although they haven’t materialised yet.