Pipex E-Mail Settings
Are you a Pipex customer? Having trouble accessing your e-mail using Outlook Express or similar? Here’s why.
They’ve recently been performing “maintenance” on their mail servers to improve the web mail aspect of it. Apparently it’s been going on throughout the 21st to 24th October. While doing so, and without directly notifying their customers, they’ve changed the settings for the POP3 mail accounts.
Their Service Status information, time-stamped 09:00 24/10/2008, states:
Due to a recent change on the mail server platform, customers may be unable to access their mail, it is now required to make an amendment to the format of your username, please replace the % sign with an @ sign when logging on to mail. e.g. If you are currently using — username%dsl.pipex.com or username%dial.pipex.com Please replace it with — username@dsl.pipex.com or username@dial.pipex.com.
So now you know. It worked for me this morning, though the mail server is currently much slower than it used to be.
Why they couldn’t notify their “valued” customers directly, by e-mail, that they were going to carry out this maintenance prior to actually doing it, is beyond me — another symptom of a company whose left hand doesn’t know what its right hand is doing?
My mail’s been flakey for more than the three days of the scheduled maintenance operation — while some mail’s been arriving, I’m now realising that e-mails other people have sent me never arrived here (they tell me their messages have been bouncing for over a week), and for all I know some of the e-mails I’ve been sending out have never reached their destinations either.
A sad and frustrating state of affairs.
Peter A says:
October 25th, 2008
9:18 am
This echoes problems that friends who use dial Pipex have been having.
Also it is almost impossible to communicate with them. They always cite the Data Protection Act and will not even discuss the weather without full account details and mother’s maiden name — always asking for broadband details from people who don’t have that account. As a non-customer I had to fight past all that to report a bad link (to network status, ironically) on their website — and then they didn’t fix it.
For a communications company they seem to have become very poor at comms!
Somerset Bob says:
October 25th, 2008
4:54 pm
Indeed, Peter — it seems most companies in the communications business are dreadful at communicating with their customers!
Thanks for popping in. I hope you managed to help solve your friends’ problem.
Brian says:
November 9th, 2008
11:13 pm
…lol, just read this post. I have been having same diffs with emails. Sometimes I get mail, mostly I don’t. At least over the last two weeks that is…
I also made a complaint that my account details online were not showing correctly, that was a year ago and I’m still waiting on a reply. I also asked for my account to be changed to MAX since I was already paying £19/month ?? for MIDI, they didn’t even tell me they had new tarrifs!! Morons! .. And they are charging me for whatever reason, £10 per 3GB additional download usage allowance. …What!!???
I told them to sort the problems out or OFTEL would be getting a call from me.
That was three days ago, again .. still waiting to hear from Pipex …
By the way, Pipex hasn’t been Pipex for some time now, Tiscali now own Pipex but kept the “brand name” …. lol. Might explain a lot…eh?
Somerset Bob says:
November 10th, 2008
11:18 am
Hi Brian — thanks for your comment. Yes, they didn’t tell me about their more recent packages when I was still on a basic 1Mbit connection and paying £39.99! It was only by chance I found it when visiting their web site, looking for something else.
Many customers complain that things have gone downhill since Tiscali took over. It’s a shame.
Alan says:
January 15th, 2009
5:38 pm
Have you experienced any problems with Pipex whilst sending mail from a mobile connection? Mine works fine on my network but when I use a 3G mobile connection I am unable to send it. It was working fine before the maintenance work. I have yet to find anyone who has the answer.
Somerset Bob says:
January 26th, 2009
7:35 am
Hi Alan –
no, I’ve no experience of using Pipex on a 3G mobile — or any mobile, come to that. Sorry.
Mark says:
May 31st, 2010
12:29 pm
I experienced terrible service at the hands of Pipex, so set up http://www.pipexproblems.co.uk in response.
There are a couple of Pipex employees that keep an eye on the forum posts and help out where they can – hopefully you or others could get some support here?