End of Life Service Notification - Email Services

Action Required before 11/04/2018

This is an important notice that will affect your email services as part of shared hosting, action must now be taken to ensure continuity of service.

Email services within shared hosting.

IC has been warning of these services becoming obsolete and unsupportable for the last 4 years and issued numerous notices to that effect.  It should not come as any shock that we have reached the point where we feel that email part of this service can no longer be supported.  We have major concerns in terms of availability of patches and updates for this outdated technology and are confident that this service will not be acceptable in a post GDPR world, please keep in mind that GDPR carries a fine of up to 4% of global turnover or €20 Million whichever is the greater.  We have been undertaking a soft removal of these services for the last 4 years, in fact we issued a notice that we would no longer support this product in 2014, however with the impending GDPR regulations we have taken the decision that we now need a firm end date for these services. 

Email is now vital to most businesses and with the sheer explosion of mobile devices and systems the traditional email systems are no longer appropriate, they were designed as simple user (one device) single mailbox stores where you collected your email and it was removed from the server.

Now each user has multiple devices which are cloud oriented and they are leaving copies of emails on the server and collecting / checking every minute so we are seeing an unprecedented number of issues including:

• Mailbox Locked (you keep getting asked to re-enter username / password)
• Emails vanishing (one device has collected an email but it is not available on another)
• Mailbox full (as it was a ‘temporary’ store they are not designed for more than 30MB)
• Duplicate email / deletion issues (you have to delete read emails from multiple devices or duplicate replies by accident)
• Blacklisting of emails (you get your emails junked)

What is happening?

The email part of the old shared hosting packages will cease on the 11th of April after this you will not be able to send and receive emails or access your mailbox.  Your data will be retained until 11^th May at which point all email data will be deleted.  You will need to have an alternative in place by that point. 

Our recommended migration plan is to continue to host your website on the Internet Central shared hosting platform but move your email services to our alternative solution Exchange Online.  The majority of our customers have already made the afore mentioned move and have seen a vast improvement in the service they receive.  There is likely to be a cost implication involved in this however our primary concern is to minimise any risk our customers may have in a post GDPR world and a responsible service provider we feel it is our role to assist our customers in minimising their risk.  This move will give an increased level of service in terms of spam filtering, compatibility with mobile devices and accessing mail on multiple devices. 

We recommend moving to Exchange Online for which we are a partner and can continue to support you, but of course you are free to move to any supplier of your choice.

What do I need to do?

Members of our Commercial and Technical teams will be in touch to discuss this with you and assist in your migration.  Our technical team will be on hand to offer telephone support and we have produced a series of online guides to assist in the set up of your new email services. 

Further Information

Later in the year we will be replacing the shared hosing servers for new and supportable ones. The new servers will still not support email servers, but we are able to upgrade the packages and keep the servers up to date which is impossible with the current ones.