Letter re charging for bills

[Winston196328]

I received a letter telling me you could not deliver my billing emails. Well. I have been receiving them directly into my inbox, the last one on March 6th. There is no problem from my end with receip[t. The address is correct. Your notification system is wrong. Please tell me why you think I am not getting the emails. I have just tried to attach the email to show you!!

Please confirm to me that you can send emails to me. I will immediately demand a refund if failures of your system result in you charging me more.

[Gondola]

I do accept that you've told us you got the eBill Notification. So do TalkTalk. As Ady has already confirmed that if next month you were to be put on paper billing and charged then that charge would be refunded. But next month probably the billing system won't get a delivery bounceback and will operate as normal, just as it does for the 4 million other billing notifications that go out without a problem each month. So nobody will need to do anything.

Anyway, I've spent time explaining to you and giving you the very simple workaround to prevent going to paper billing should that happen.But it probably won't happen anyway.

Some people will say that you should only be put onto paper billing in response to a hard fail bounceback. But it's a fact that even soft fail bouncebacks, such as the one we're talking about with you, can result in a dropped delivery. So all I'm saying is that there is no perfect way to realistically achieve your expectation in an automated way with no extra work on the part of all 4 million customers each month.

So, see what happens next month.

[Winston196328]

So basically you are suggesting changing billing process based on a ‘potential’ delivery problem, not an actual. As a customer I am telling you there is no problem, but you can’t accept that.

As I have said, there seem so many issues with this process from your end that you should suspend any further actions from ‘bounce backs’ until you have a reliable method that tells you for sure if something has been delivered or not.

[Gondola]

Email is always treated as a best efforts service. TalkTalk knows when an eBill notification is sent but also that there's never a guarantee of delivery. So, TalkTalk uses the bounceback as an indicator of a potential delivery problem.

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Winston196328 wrote: ...How come your billing system doesn’t know a delivery was made?

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There is no delivery receipt requested. Not all mail systems support delivery notifications so this is not an assurance of delivery or non-delivery anyway. No way of knowing that you opened the email or just treated it as junk mail.

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Winston196328 wrote:...Given current issues with Royal Mail, how will you know a paper bill has been delivered?

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There is no delivery receipt requested. No way of knowing that you opened the letter either or just treated it as junk mail along with other junk mail delivered by Royal Mail.

The TalkTalk billing system is sending out eBill notifications and noting if there's a bounceback indicating a delivery issue. For example, if the delivery mailbox is full to overflowing or service is suspended. If the TalkTalk billing system is sending out paper billing it would note if there's a bill returned by Royal Mail as undeliverable. For example, if the delivery mailbox is full to overflowing or access to the property was blocked.

[Arne-TalkTalk]

Its already been reported and is a known issue that flares up occasionally.

[Winston196328]

Any what are talktalk doing to fix the problem from your end?

How come your billing system doesn’t know a delivery was made?

Given current issues with Royal Mail, how will you know a paper bill has been delivered?

[Gondola]

A bounceback error may not happen again.  TalkTalk are just advising that there was a bounceback and in this case it looks like it was a delayed delivery bounceback i.e. delivery didn't happen as expected but because incoming TalkTalk Mail is buffered or may be sent for scanning the delivery did happen eventually although the billing system doesn't know that.

Hopefully, the next billing notification will get delivered normally. But if not then just change the MyAccount login to use a non-TalkTalk email address to stay on eBill notifications.

[Winston196328]

1). This is the first notification, but it threatens to move to paper bills and charge if it happens again.

2). Why does your own email address (Talktalk.net) fail as far as you are concerned? It goes straight into my inbox, if you send a test message to the email in my profie from yourbill@billing.talktalk.co.uk I will send you a screenshot to show that!!

[Arne-TalkTalk]

Do you have another non TalkTalk address that you can temporarily use?

[Gondola]

Is this the first notification of a delivery fail or the second? eBill notifications.

[Winston196328]

Talktalk.net

[Gondola]

What's the email domain - the bit after the @ symbol in the email address that's used as your MyAccount login?