Question:
am an unfortunate user of Eir’s email service. As you are aware, before Christmas they lost lots of ‘sent’ and ‘received’ emails from many of their customers. I have emailed and asked them if they had found any of the lost data and what are they offering in terms of compensation. I have received no reply. Eir charge for their email service. I’d be very grateful if you could provide any update.
— Kevin O’Hanlon
Answer:
I got on to Eir about this and the company gave me the following statement.
“In late 2022, during an IT upgrade where Eir webmail data was being moved to a new server, an issue occurred. This caused emails greater than 45 days old to be deleted and these could not be recovered. Approximately 4pc of service users were impacted. An investigation was immediately launched, the root cause was identified and measures were put in place to ensure the issue will not happen again. Eir apologised to those affected and provided free service for six months to those customers.”
The company added that a dedicated customer care email address is available at eirwebmailsupport-gp@eir.ie.
It’s worth saying that if you’ve been paying for an Eir email address just because you’re afraid of losing your contacts and old emails, or are simply putting off the process because you’re not that tech-savvy, it’s relatively straightforward.
Gmail is probably the simplest option.
You can ‘import’ your eircom.net account’s content into Gmail. Just sign in to your Gmail account (or create one for free) and then go to ‘settings’ and then ‘accounts and import’ and follow the instructions.
Do bear in mind, though, that you can’t keep your eircom.net email address; once you stop paying Eir, your Eir email address and everything associated with it will be deleted. So if you want to stop paying for that, you will then have to inform all your contacts that your email address has changed.
Recommendation: Contact Eir’s customer service email address; consider importing your Eir email account content to another email address
Email your questions to aweckler@independent.ie