Telus converts email to Gmail, and customers are not impressed

Beginning in August last year, and for some customers stretching into this year, communications giant Telus suffered a rather embarrassing outage to one of its core services. Well, let’s just say it was considered a core service at the time.

Fast forward to June of this year, when the company suggested in a note to users of its webmail service that it was throwing in the proverbial towel and preparing to offload it to Google. Essentially Telus is finished with email as a service for its internet customers and has begun the process of migration to Google’s popular Gmail.

For a communications company, Telus has done a particularly poor job of keeping its customers informed during service outages. Notably, Telus CEO Darren Entwistle never did issue a comment or public apology for last year’s extended email outage, though it affected customers across B.C. and Alberta.

Some customers were offered wildly varying compensation of sorts, ranging from $10 movie rental coupons to, according to a tweet from an outspoken user, flowers and a “sorry” note from Entwistle. The bottom line, however, is that some never did recover all their historic emails, or full functionality of their email.

Telus never did offer an explanation for the service outage, but in piecing together some of the news releases at the time, it seems that a server patch or upgrade went awry, and that there was no viable backup.

In its June email, with the subject line “Your TELUS email is changing for the better,” the company promised ,“You’ll love your new TELUS email experience,” adding, “you’ll be getting all the security and reliability of having your TELUS email powered by Google.”

Knowing full well that promises regarding restoration of email service last year didn’t pan out in many cases, the company tried this line: “To ensure a seamless experience, you need to schedule your transition. Don’t worry, it only takes a couple of minutes.”

Hmm … within days, stories began appearing on social media about transitions gone sideways. A forum maintained on the company’s own servers is full of tales of woe. Here’s just one of the milder entries (with minor grammatical fixes).

[July] “OMG it’s been the day from hell with this migration. I have been an Outlook user for years. Set up my new gmail with my existing Telus email. No contacts came over and no saved folder emails. I held on chat for over an hour to be told I had to speak to technical support. No transfer went through or no estimated time frame. Must say I’m not impressed!”

BC Catholic contributor Terry O’Neill was not at all happy to read that the Telus service was changing. “Instructions were not clear and led me to a roadblock. I ended up going round and round in circles trying to find help.” He reports that he eventually found a live contact, who spent four hours transferring data so he could continue using his preferred Outlook interface.

O’Neill goes on to note: “It seems ridiculous that I had to go through the transition at all. I have no idea about the scope of Telus’ internal problems, but I am surprised that the company couldn’t solve its problems internally and save its customers all the hassle.”

He further said he would not recommend Telus for mail service going forward, based, in his words, “on my belief that one can’t really trust Telus with technical issues.”

Back to the Telus forum for a moment. This from “Unhappycamper1” in July: “I did not receive any notice but both my hubby and my emails stopped working on all our devices June 30th. On a chat with Telus right now and they can’t even find our email addresses! So frustrating!!”

Here’s another one, from “Sprocket,” posted mid-August, that also raises serious privacy concerns. “Telus has really screwed up on this one. None of my contacts have migrated but I now have a list of 1,064 contacts that belong to someone else. None of my folders migrated over so I have no idea where my saved emails are. I have tried following the instructions to revert back to Outlook without success.”

It seems that Telus learned little from last year’s email troubles. Customers dealing with the migration to the Google service are not being kept adequately informed, and instructions, such as they are, do not seem to have been properly tested.

B.C. Catholic reader Eric Whalley was one of the users to face the email migration early on. He realized that key steps were missing from the company guide and eventually phoned Telus support personnel to have the missing content added so that others might get through the process unscathed.

In its note about the pending migration of email accounts, the company, perhaps indirectly acknowledging the various bungles of the past 12 months, promises customers will “enjoy peace of mind with upgraded reliability and security.”

As for O’Neill, he reports that all his data did indeed migrate properly, and that the functionality in his preferred Outlook interface has remained the same.

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