Easily UK is by far the worst provider / hoster ever – easily!

If you are with the service provider Easily UK I really feel sorry for you. I am helping somebody for 6 month now to sort stuff out with them and it is only getting worse. You are lucky if the customer support answers to your emails. If you get an answer expect generic blabla that is not helping at all. Their backend is one of the worst I have ever seen and if you are not careful all your emails are gone without any warning!

• Customer support would be the wrong word for what Easily UK provides – the provide an email address you can write to and you might get an answer.
• Horrible backend
• No safety net
• Wrong information provided within the backend

Note: I am not native English but keep this post in English as I guess not many users from Germany will use Easily UK anyways. I apologize for funny language but had to make this public. Easily UK! Worst! Service! Ever!

Worst! Company! Ever! Easily!

If you see that logo – RUN!

360° Panorama not working anymore

Easily UK wnt thorugh some changes as they were bought from a different company and from now on everything went downhill. They moved my client to a different server and suddenly the 360° didn’t work anymore. It is similar to the ones I do for example of the Suilven in Scotland.

Fatal error we got. As we had to change from Flash to HTML5 at some point anyways we did this and were hoping that it works again. But it didn’t. So we copied the 360° panorama to one of my servers and it worked flawlessly. That gives the conclusion that the mistake lies with Easily UK or with something that changed with the move to a different server.

We wrote an email to support. Well every month or so we dropped them an email on the matter and if there is any updates. Most of the times we didn’t even get an answer. The support email address of Easily UK probably points directly to /dev/null. You will get an email that the request was received but the customer support of Easily UK simply doesn’t answer – and if a few days later. This has nothing to do with customer service.

Problem solved – after 6 months!

After a few months, a phone and the hint that we move hoster call we suddenly started to get answers. but the answers didn’t help and I had the feeling they didn’t even read the problem. For example: I sent them 2 links to the 360° panorama – one on their server one on mine and asked them friendly if they can explain why one works the other doesn’t. One answer was: It’s not an index.html file – completely useless and clueless as it had nothing to do with that. I tried it.

We also got as an answer: Your code must be wrong – ticket closed. Has Easily UK even read the request? Because exactly the same code is working somewhere else!

After 6 months they finally came up with a solution and it lied within the .htaccess file. I would never ever had guessed this because it was code amended by them. We use WordPress and the amended code was after the line # END WordPress and a plugin was not responsible for that. I never checked the file because the rest of the site was working perfectly just the 360° panorama got screwed up.

Why did you wait that long? I advised much earlier to move companies. But my client is very patient and has been with Easily UK for more than ten years. Up to the move it was all working fine. That changed dramatically!

Tracking code amended at some point from Easily UK

During my investigation trying to find the error for the 360° I stumbled across some Tracking code from WireMinds that was amended to every single page of my client. I can remember the old backend from easily and there was not such thing to activate. Furthermore it certainly doesn’t come from a plugin or something we implemented. The code starts with:

<!– WiredMinds eMetrics tracking with Enterprise Edition V5.4 START –>

Wireminds: Tracking code amended without consent!

I thought that is very interesting so I wrote to their support again. This time I asked why this is activated without consent and I must assume it is coming from Easily UK as we didn’t do anything to implement it. I wrote to support that activating a tracker without consent is a violation against the GDPR and they should deactivate is asap.

I thought I won’t get an answer anyways but something GDPR must have scared them. The next day I got an answer that it has been deactivated. If you are still with Easily UK please open your website and check your code.

You think it can’t get worse with Easily UK? How wrong you are!

Could not import emails into GMail

As their webmail backend is absolutely horrible after the move and looks like a relict from the late 90s my client decided to go for GMail. Changing the MX records was fairly easy and the new mails are coming into GMail already.

So my client asked if we can import the old mail. Knowing GMail a bit I knew that this is as easy as configuring Thunderbird. But it didn’t work. I got an error regarding the certificate. Hmmm strange – let’s double check the information given from Easily.

As we already used the main email address info@ with GMail we couldn’t import from the same email address. So we decided to old email address into old_…@<domain>.com within the Easily UK backend. Another advantage would have been that we can tag them as old.

By now we had done something we only realized later …

The shock: All emails are gone!

In the screenshot you see is the mail management. So I thought I just change the email address for the account given. How wrong I was. If you change the email name and click Save there is no further warning.

Easily UK proved no saftey net at all – emails are gone

The account is basically deleted and you start new with the email address you have just entered. No careful this action deletes all the mails and contacts … ARE YOU SURE?

No explanation on the page that changing the name leads to the loss of all your emails! Honestly: THIS IS INSANE! That has to be the worst backend I have seen.

I know from different providers that they don’t allow changing email addresses that are attached to a certain account. So have to delete and will get a proper warning. I would never have guessed that Easily UK lets you destroy a complete mail account that easily. If it is that fatal it shouldn’t even be an option!

Wrong information within the backend of Easily UK

So after phoning them about the disaseter with the email the first question was what POP3 and IMAP servers we tried. We explained we used the information given within the backend. The customer support said that this is wrong. It should be mail.easily.uk.

As you can see in the following screenshot the incoming and outgoing mail servers are decribed as mail.<domain-name>.com. Unfortunately my crystal ball is in maintenance right now so how the hell should I anyone guess this?

Easily UK provides wrong information in their backend

Explaining the situation led to: We can’t help you there – the account was renamed so your emails are gone. After insisting that a company that size must have a backup a technical ticket was raised (25.2.2019) to get the mail account restored – we said restore the 24.2.2019 – that is fine as all the new mails already go into GMail.

Fun fact: Without the proper information it’s impossible to create a backup for myself: email client -> POP3 -> all emails secure!

If anything new develops I’ll keep you updated. At the moment we are wating if they keep backups or not. They said they will respind within 24-48 hours.

Updates

Update 1: We got a first answer and it states we are advised to change the MX records back to the ones from Easily. Yeah right! That is exactly our problem, NOT! *facepalm* We answered once more and asked for a recovery of the mailbox from the date 24.02.2019.

Update 2: Technical support insisted that we change the MX records back otherwise they can’t restore the account. OK – done – their turn again. We do everything they ask now that they won’t have an excuse not to restore the mailbox from the backup.

Update 3: On 28.02.2019 emails are coming back into the mailbox of Easily and not GMail anymore. Of course – we switched the MX records back. There is still no sign of any old emails before the 26.02.2019. By now we reqiested 3 times to restore the account / inbox from date 24.02.2019.

Update 4: March 5th we finally got this answer that also closed the ticket:

Update 5: On March 21st they contacted us again with this answer: