Host Europe stops email conversion to Microsoft 365

Web hosting provider Host Europe is making a U-turn: the conversion of all customer email mailboxes to Microsoft 365 is being stopped. The discontinuation of the Classic hosting offer announced for the end of April is being suspended. For many customers, however, this will likely come too late: they have long since turned their backs on the web hoster considering looming massive additional costs, as can be read in forum posts and on Reddit.

With the conversion to Microsoft 365, each mail account was supposed to cost just under one euro per month in the future. That sounds like little. However, when you consider that the mail accounts, for which IMAP/POP3 was previously used, were included free of charge in the packages in triple-digit numbers, many customers were caught off guard by the forced conversion. Anyone who uses many mail accounts had to either thin them out or prepare for significant additional costs that quickly exceed the monthly costs for the rest of the web hosting. Customers also expressed reservations that their emails should move to the cloud of a US provider instead of being on a European server as before.

Late U-turn

The U-turn, which was announced to customers with an email, is presented by the company as an act of customer friendliness: “Throughout this time, we have consistently focused on the customer experience, listened to customer feedback, and recognized that some products and customer environments require additional consideration,” it says. Therefore, all further hosting and email migrations will be stopped “for now” while the company evaluates the next steps.

Specifically, this means that all non-migrated products are to remain on the Classic hosting platform and the shutdown will not occur. However, those who have already switched are left out in the cold. And due to the late timing of the announcement, this is likely to be very many. Such conversions usually have a long lead time. In forums, for example, one can read about associations that had to put a lot of work into the conversion. Host Europe is offering customers who withdraw their cancellation four months of free Classic hosting. For those who have already switched or left the provider, this is likely to seem like mockery.

Many questions remain unanswered

In fact, many questions remain unanswered. These include why Host Europe only realized so late – after a year – that customers did not agree with the conversion. The generous free offer suggests that the company anticipated a large wave of cancellations. And it also remains unclear how the note about the temporary nature of the migration stop is to be understood. Currently, it must be assumed that the stop has only bought time. In addition, the company does not seem to intend to return to the classic mail server. A query from heise online has so far remained unanswered.

(mki)