E-mail problem bounced around

SOUNDING OFF: Ripped off? Stunned by good value? Write, blog or text your experience to us

A reader whose phone and internet service is with BT got in touch to see if we could help him resolve a difficult situation. He says that he has received good service for the past three or four years but about two weeks ago his PC crashed and he had it repaired, only to find his incoming mail with Outlook Express not working. Outgoing mail was no problem.

“As I am with BT, I made contact with them. They were most helpful, but could not solve the problem and advised me ‘only Eircom can deal with an incoming mail server’.”

So he made contact with Eircom – “not easy on the phone” – only to be told they could not help as he paid his bill to BT so it was their problem.

“Back to BT, only to be told Eircom had control of the line and they should have been more helpful. Back to Eircom to be met with the same response. A lot of time wasted! I faced an absolute stone wall with Eircom. I don’t think this is fair – if they have control, they could have been more helpful. The question is: do they control the line?”

He says that “BT were most helpful, going through the settings with me, but to no avail. They ended up telling me there was absolutely nothing they could do for me and they were very sorry for the predicament I was in, but that was it.”

At present, he can send e-mails and can read e-mails through an online provider, but he finds it most unsatisfactory.

“I am wondering if anyone else out there has come across the same problem. There must be someone. You may be able to help – I would be most grateful. As an old-age pensioner I could do without the hassle.”

A BT Ireland spokeswoman said that when a customer has different providers for their e-mail and for their internet connection, then they have to have different settings for their outgoing and incoming server addresses. The e-mail provider – in this case Eircom – provides the incoming server address, and the outgoing is provided by the internet connection provider, BT Ireland. The spokeswoman said that its staff had contacted our reader last week to look at his different settings and, although it was outside their responsibility, had managed to get his e-mail up and running again.

Roll it again

Last week and we carried an item about the rising cost of Cadbury Family Mini-Rolls. A reader pointed out that “for an age now” they cost €4.79 for 12 but, last month, after ordering the product from the Tesco website, she was not best pleased to see a 10-pack arrive in its place. We contacted Cadbury to find out more about the price rise. A spokeswoman said that, as the product was made by Premier Foods, it was not in a position to comment on the pricing – something we found a little peculiar as the product carried the Cadbury brand so prominently.

We then tried to contact Premier Foods but without success. On Monday, after the piece appeared, that company got in touch. A spokeswoman confirmed that there was a pack format change to Cadbury Mini-Rolls from a 12-pack to a new 10-pack.

“As a result of this change, we amended our prices accordingly to account for the reduced number in each pack. The price charged to our customers was reduced by 16.7 per cent. We cannot comment on specific retail prices in stores and suggest that the store in question is contacted directly,” the statement concluded.

We checked the Tesco website last week and it was still selling the mini-rolls for €4.79, making it look as if the company had simply declined to pass on the 16.7 per cent price reduction from Premier Foods. This percentage decrease might not be a huge amount of money – no more than 60 cent on a packet – but, as an ad for a well-known supermarket chain says, every little helps. So we contacted Tesco to find out why it had not passed on the decrease.

A Tesco spokesman said it was against company policy to comment publicly on its relationship with its suppliers, but did say that that the price of the mini-rolls had fallen to €4.31 last Friday.