The mail service was never brilliant, but it improved a little when spam filtering was adding. My biggest grouse was that it “dropped’ an alias I was using for virtually all my email then wouldn’t let me re-instate it, saying it was already in use. Of course, tech support never helped resolve this and I have just accepted I have lost a lot of email.

The web hosting side had some nifty features to start with, but they were specific to the site and effectively caused lock-in unless you wanted to rebuild your site. These features were never added to, however, and Pipex Dial looks like it did over 10 years ago… except the documentation seems to have disappeared. In the meantime the world has moved on and it is clear that Pipex Dial is effectively a defunct service, withering away until nobody is left to use it, charging people at two or three times the going rate for hosts that offer far better capabilities.

Through the saga of changing names and owners such as Uunet, Worldcom, Nidram, Tiscali, Opal, Talk Talk, Opal Business etc customer service has deteriorated. It reached a nadir when I had no disimilar experiences to Kieren. They screwed up a credit card payment and then told me when I got to speak to someone that they couldn’t accept any of my credit cards! Imagine a compny that doesn’t want to take money off you! Sounds too good to be true… well it was. I was told that my account would be deleted unless I paid up, so I transferred the balance of my account by bank transfer to the account they told me to post it to. Despite proving that I had the money transferred across, Nildram (who seemed to be taking payments for Pipex Dial at the time) had “lost” the payment details. I pursued my payment for a few weeks and then, despite the account being in dispute, found that the URL that had pointed to my Dialspace now pointed to an error message. My account had been suspended! Finally I was told (by Opal by now) they COULD accept my credit card and would re-instate my site within two hours. I promptly but reluctantly paid up AGAIN, but two days later my site was down. Some oik then triumphantly told me that it was deleted permanently and couldn’t be re-instated, but I couldn’t have my money back. I found however that the site was still up if i navigated via Dialspace (http://dialspace.dial.pipex.com/town/square/ac567/), although i was also told that this would disappear too and there was nothing anyone could do about it. it’s still there, and the email still seems to work, so we’ll see but the site is crippled without my regular domain name pointing to it.

Oh well, time to find a decent host and put the losses down to experience, but still I wait for them to transfer the IPS tag to my new provider. And still my web site is down, for the sixth week running!

Pipex used to be a household brand, what the hell went wrong! Their customer services is split between four or five companies and none of them talk to each other! So everytime you call, you get someone else who knows NOTHING. Then, on top of that every person I’ve spoken to has been abrupt, rude, promised things that were never done (even as far as sending me an email prooving they did something they were supposed to do which then DIDN’T HAPPEN!) Thank you andrew.cook@nildram.net.

On top of THAT I got a letter demanding £275 pounds for cancellation of a service that was supposed to never have been made active (having cancelled during the 10 days cooling off period as I was worried very early on of their so called “service.”)

If I were you, and you were thinking of Talk Talk, Pipex, Opal, Nildram or whatever other company name they want to go under – can I give you one piece of priceless advice?

DON’T DO IT!

You will SERIOUSLY regret picking up the phone.

I’ve also read a number of posts now, saying their service (as in connection service) is appaulingly slow too.

PIPEX/OPAL – SORT YOUR CUSTOMER SERVICES OUT!!!!!

But while here, I had Pipex threatening me for a year for about the same sum even though I could prove I had informed them I had shifted supplier.

I sent back an email and then a letter explaining. And I sent a second one when I received another threatening letter. After that, I just ignored them and it stopped some time later.

Kieren