Hi everyone,

TL;DR: My email was down for a week while I migrated to a new provider.

I've been using valuehost.ca to host groupbcl.ca's mail for over a decade now. On June 3 they sent me an invoice for service renewal just 3 days before expiration. The only payment option was credit card via PayPal.

When I attempted to pay, PayPal demanded a mobile phone number in addition to billing address information, which in my opinion is unnecessary for a simple credit card transaction. As far as I'm concerned, a mobile number is the 2020s version of the SIN/SSN: a unique identifier that can be used to link disparate accounts together. I simply do not trust PayPal to use that information solely for the purposes of this one transaction.

I opened a support ticket on June 6 requesting alternate payment methods. There was no response for over 40 hours, despite a follow-up I posted nearly 34 hours later.

On June 8 my account was suspended for non-payment, despite a ticket being open on this matter with their billing department for a day and a half. (The only thing to Valuehost's credit in this entire affair was they waited two days past the invoice due date before suspending my account.) That cut off my groupbcl.ca email address, which I've been using for over 20 years for most of my email correspondence.

I updated the ticket 7 hours after my follow-up, requesting to be billed only for the domain renewal and not the hosting package. They replied 2 hours later stating that my domain is not registered with then (which was true) and had marked my hosting as cancelled. This was the only time they made any sort of comment on the ticket.

Seven hours later I replied to the ticket, noting my email was now down and requesting options to get it going again. They never responded to that note.

Late in the day on June 10 I sent a letter of complaint to the only other contact Valuehost has on their site, hoping that would get someone's attention. They never replied; not even a pro forma message indicating they received my email.

By the evening of June 12 I had given up on Valuehost and signed up for mail hosting with HostPapa, who accepted my credit card without any problems. I had to provide them with a phone number, but because they're in Canada they're subject to PIPEDA. After updating my MX record, I spent a fair bit of time getting the HostPapa account to show test messages I sent them from my ISP's email.

I had problems getting KMail talking to HostPapa. Their documentation for Thunderbird says to use port 995 (pop3s) with TLS for receiving and 465 (smtps) for sending, but when I duplicated the settings in KMail it failed on both. Eventually I configured KMail to connect to port 25 using STARTTLS for receiving and to localhost for sending, both of which worked. I then configured my postfix server to relay outbound mail via HostPapa's mail server.

On June 13 I updated the ticket at Valuehost to say I had migrated to a different provider, and closed it.

Unsurprisingly, I'm very disappointed in Valuehost's almost complete lack of action to my ticket and will no longer do business with them.

Brian