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[Helpneedadvice]

Well they haven't exactly offered me the new username yet  - just said on Monday that they might have to move me onto one. I'm still waiting! I chased them today, fault is still with their networks department. So much for "urgency" on their part!

They've had seventeen different members of staff responding to me on this fault to date! Can't be many left!

>> Been looking at ADSL24 - are highly rated on the DSLZone website.

Just a note
- Both sites are owned by the same person.
- Be aware of the Enta ALT

Ah OK that's interesting! Do you know of any unbiased reviews for them?
What is Enta ALT please? Tried to google it but can only find your posts mentioning it elsewhere on the web Kitz (LOL). Is this a problem with ADSl 24 then? Some sort of throttling at 2M or something?

I would certainly recommend getting an ISP-independent email account, and the sooner the better. And also consider registering your own domain with a company like 123-reg to give you total independence from lock-in. This costs next to nothing (£6.56 for two years the last time I renewed mine) and allows you to keep email addresses of the form anyone@yourdomain.co.uk however much you swap your actual email accounts about.

I just looked at the 123-reg site, Eric. £2.70/ yr for domain plus 83p per month for each email address on top of that. I need three - could be quite expensive. Also read that many non ISP email providers' antispam systems block newsletters etc. I actually already suffer from this with my current ISP providing email - they keep blocking my moneysavingexpert.com weekly emails (originator has confirmed they have been sent out each week). Get only the odd one through. Also ISP is blocking my bouncebacks from undelivered mails (presumeably treating them as spam too). Any probs with reg123 doing that?
Are you able to send email via ISP using non-ISP address as originator (for replies), or do you have to log on especially to do that? Sorry if I sound a bit dim.

Thanks for all your help guys!

[roseway]

I just looked at the 123-reg site, Eric. £2.70/ yr for domain plus 83p per month for each email address on top of that. I need three - could be quite expensive.

You don't need to buy the email addresses - those are the charges for using 123-reg's own email service. All you need is the domain, and you use the free email forwarding facility to forward your mails to the actual email service which you are using, which could be your ISP's email service or Googlemail, or any other email service. The big advantage is that you can change your actual email service whenever you want and just change the 123-reg forwarding details to suit, and none of your correspondents need to know that anything has changed - you just give them your personal domain email address and that never changes.

Enta ALT is a system which they use to avoid anyone's internet service grinding to a halt during very heavy periods. What they do is progressively slow down all the connections on a data pipe which is getting overloaded, so that everyone continues to get a usable service. The speed is never throttled below 2 Mbps, so for most normal purposes the connection is still fully usable. It only normally occurs during the latish evening peak time, for a couple of hours or so. I've been with Entanet (ADSL24) for a couple of months or so, and ALT has never impacted on my usage at all in any way I've noticed.

[Helpneedadvice]

Hi Eric - I understand how emails to my domain email can be forwarded to my ISP email but can it work the other way round? ie can I send from  myname@myISP.co.uk and have it appear as coming from (ie going out via) myname@mydomain.co.uk so that people respond to that and not the former ISP address?

Have you had any probs with legitimate post being blocked by antispamware from them or is there no antispam provided when you have your own domain?

Thanks

[roseway]

You receive the emails via your own domain, but send them using your actual email service supplier. Depending on what email client program you use, you should be able to specify a reply-to address which would be your domain email address, so that people reply to the right place.

There's no spam blocking or any other sort of intervention in the email forwarding.

[kitz]

>>> Well they haven't exactly offered me the new username yet  Undecided - just said on Monday that they might have to move me onto one

Certainly worth pushing them to pursue that.   
If it is a new domain login ... iirc it may take about 5 working days for BTw to complete the change of realm (what its called in BT speak).

[Helpneedadvice]

You receive the emails via your own domain, but send them using your actual email service supplier. Depending on what email client program you use, you should be able to specify a reply-to address which would be your domain email address, so that people reply to the right place.

Aha - just played with my account settings and tried that out with an old tesco email address from dial up days that I have that is still active! Thanks - it worked. (Not sure if tesco will delete the address one day as I no longer use dial up, but it's good as a spare and they allow forwarding).

So with companies like reg123:

Is there any file size restriction/ pathetic mailbox storage as we do send large photo files from time to time.?Don't want any full mailbox/ filesize issues. What should I be looking for in terms of decent data storage?

Can you have more than one email address running from your own domain ie no extra cost?

>>> Well they haven't exactly offered me the new username yet  - just said on Monday that they might have to move me onto one

Certainly worth pushing them to pursue that.  
If it is a new domain login ... iirc it may take about 5 working days for BTw to complete the change of realm (what its called in BT speak).

I'll chase them Monday - thanks Kitz!

[roseway]

Can you have more than one email address running from your own domain ie no extra cost?

You can have any number of separate names @yourdomain.co.uk. In the 123-reg control panel you can set up how these are handled. So you could (for example) forward mary@yourdomain.co.uk to one email service,  john@yourdomain.co.uk to another, and so on. In my case I have eric@mydomain.co.uk and a couple of other names forwarded to my GMail address, and everything else is dumped, which helps to reduce spam.

By the way, I use 123-reg as the example because I'm familiar with it, but there are several other similar services which have much the same features and prices.

[Helpneedadvice]

By the way, I use 123-reg as the example because I'm familiar with it, but there are several other similar services which have much the same features and prices.

Thanks Eric! Yes I realise there are others too. Just didn't really understand how they worked. So file/ mailbox size not an issue with these people?

I am curious why you forward stuff to a gmail address from your own email address, and not to your ISP email address instead. Is there a good reason or doesn't it matter?

[Helpneedadvice]

Sorry to have wandered O/T Kitz.. you guys have been very helpful.

[mr_chris]

I am curious why you forward stuff to a gmail address from your own email address, and not to your ISP email address instead. Is there a good reason or doesn't it matter?

Gmail provides a web interface for reading your email wherever you are, rather than downloading it to your PC, if you're out and about a lot. Another thought is that some ISP mail servers are very restrictive on the size of emails that can be received, meaning you might lose one completely if it gets forwarded and the ISP server rejects it. Gmail is much less likely to reject a large email, not sure on the upper limit but it's probably bigger than most ISP mailservers!

[roseway]

I originally stopped using my ISP's email service because I found that some incoming emails were being blocked along the way as a result of some unacceptable behaviour by another customer of that ISP - one or two sites blocked a whole group of that ISP's IP addresses. I rather take the view that nobody would dare block mail destined for GMail.

[Helpneedadvice]

Well they have now put me on a new temporary username/ profile/ package at no extra cost or tie in I am told. Employee number 18 is now on the case- 5th supervisor to date! He says they can't immediately find anything wrong with my old profile so it might be something else, so they are going to test it further. 

Now it needs to be monitored and see if this was the issue or if it was something else...

Can anyone clarify - if the variable/low throughput problem still continues, could it perhaps be a VP issue between the exchange and ISP. Would the VP remain the same even if my profile has been switched over or will this be a new VP? Sorry if i sound a bit dim...

Gmail provides a web interface for reading your email wherever you are, rather than downloading it to your PC, if you're out and about a lot. Another thought is that some ISP mail servers are very restrictive on the size of emails that can be received, meaning you might lose one completely if it gets forwarded and the ISP server rejects it. Gmail is much less likely to reject a large email, not sure on the upper limit but it's probably bigger than most ISP mailservers!

Yes this is one aspect of my ISP that i have been happy with. It allows giant file sizes, I have never had any problems. Just curious why you might forward email to Gmail for purely mobility reasons. ISPs offer webmail which can do that.

I originally stopped using my ISP's email service because I found that some incoming emails were being blocked along the way as a result of some unacceptable behaviour by another customer of that ISP - one or two sites blocked a whole group of that ISP's IP addresses. I rather take the view that nobody would dare block mail destined for GMail.

Ah , I think I am starting to see - you can only forward mail with the domain service, but not view it in a mailbox - is that right (unless you pay the 83p). Otherwise, what else does forwarding to someone like gmail add. (I can see that forwarding to an ISP mailbox means that you can download the mail to your pc, whereas Gmail, presumeably you have to log on first).

[roseway]

Ah , I think I am starting to see - you can only forward mail with the domain service, but not view it in a mailbox - is that right (unless you pay the 83p). Otherwise, what else does forwarding to someone like gmail add. (I can see that forwarding to an ISP mailbox means that you can download the mail to your pc, whereas Gmail, presumeably you have to log on first).

Yes, sorry if I didn't make that clear. The forwarding facility is just a sort of router - emails come in and are redirected somewhere else without being stored. So the emails end up in whatever mailboxes you have forwarded them to, and you access them in the same way as emails sent directly there.

[kitz]

could it perhaps be a VP issue between the exchange and ISP. Would the VP remain the same even if my profile has been switched over or will this be a new VP?

Since we last talked about VPs I noticed this "I was put on Tiscali equipment around 2 years ago by them".

Ive just had a thought... Do you by any chance know if thats tiscali LLU or tiscali datastream?
- either way the BTw status checker wont apply.

But just had a thought..  if youre on so called "tiscali datascream" - then you will still be going through the same tiscali VP. - See IPStream -v- Datastream.

May be worthwhile asking Eclipse if youre on tiscali datastream and if there could be a problem with the datastream VP 

[Helpneedadvice]

Hi Kitz - it must have been datastream as I read somewhere a while back (an ISP  avail checker I think) that there is No Tiscali LLU available at my local exchange. I only found out that I'd been moved to Tiscali as a BT engineer they called out for me back then (for multiple dropouts that I was getting at the time) told me - oops!!! ISP seemed to want to keep it quiet, but did confirm I was on Tiscali when i asked them (but said they were glad I had said it and not them cos they weren't allowed to tell people).
Anyway, they moved me back to BT equipment a month ago as I was complaining of low throughput and sync speeds (was getting 3.5M compared to 8M sync currently). My sync speed went back up as a result (plus they changed my copper pair over), but the throughput issue has become the latest problem. So it is only the last month that I've been using the BT speedtest site along with the Speedtest.net site to check the results. Prior to this they had me using a different couple of speedtest sites.