| Summary of the changes From July 2020 a monthly fee of €5.99 will be charged to all eircom.net email account holders. Eir email users have to sign up to this new service specifically otherwise Eir will restrict and eventually delete the email account being used. After July 2020 – users who have not signed up will have no access to their eircom email. 60 days later the account containing all emails and the email address being used will be completely deleted. Users who do not want to pay the monthly fee will have to choose an alternative webmail provider and migrate all their eircom emails and contacts to this new account. Then inform all their contacts of this change of email address. There are alternate free webmail providers. Each provider offers different benefits and has different caveats. Some have more storage than others, some have less privacy than others (e.g. share your profile with marketing companies). Free email services generally have little in the way of help/support and are usually part of the marketing and advertising strategy of the webmail providers so ads will appear on your main email screen, regardless of which provider you use. Google’s Gmailsuite and Microsoft’s Outlook or Hotmail are 2 examples of free webmail providers. |
If you choose to move to an alternate email provider we can help you with email migration and configuration of your new email account.
The proposed changes that customers need to be aware of:
Eir (formally Eircom) provided free email accounts to thousands of individual users, schools and small businesses since early 2000’s. However, it seems that this free service is costing Eir money as it uses up their customer service resource! The Eir support web page explains “In order to provide a better service we will charge €5.99 from 30th July 2020.”
Eir email users will be charged €5.99 a month, from the end of July, if they want to continue using their eircom email service. Customers must contact Eir and sign up to this service if they want to continue using their eircom.net account. Any customer who doesn’t sign up to this service will have their account restricted. After 60 days their emails and eircom.net email address will be completely deleted. Customers will not be able to retrieve email or access their email address ever again after the 60 days. The support page for Eir emphasises this “…once your account is deleted your emails will be deleted. So please ensure you move all data you wish to continue to access before it is deleted.”
The €5.99 fee will be charged at the start of each calendar month. The fee must be paid by all customers of Eir, the users of their free service and the customers who are already subscribing to Eir broadband, phone, mobile or bundled products.
Customers should have received an email, from Eir, to their webmail account, containing a link that will take them to the payment option for their webmail. Customers can pay by credit card to begin with and eventually Eir hope to have a direct debit service running also.
If customers don’t wish to pay the charge they will have to open a new email account with a new email address with one of the other free webmail providers (Google gmail,, Microsoft Outlook or Hotmail, AOL.com mail) and migrate all their email and contacts that they want to keep to this new account. Then they must inform all of their contacts of the change to this new email address. On their webmail support FAQ page Eir have added the following clarification with regard to redirecting email – “Can I get my emails from Eir redirected to my new email address if I go to another provider? No, your email address will be deleted.”
We recommend that Eircom.net email users should have an alternate email account set up and all their email moved from Eir well before the July deadline in order to give time to troubleshoot any migration issues.
If you choose to move to an alternate email provider we can help you with email migration and configuration of your new email account.
If you need advice, please call 1890 219 219, our friendly staff will be delighted to help you.
