OPINION
- I am republishing this article because Xtra’s actions are costing us memberships
Readers of the BFD who have signed up for our FREE newsletter with an Xtra e-mail address have been contacting us for months now because Xtra keeps blocking and bouncing our e-mails to them.
We have tried repeatedly to get them to stop blocking and bouncing our e-mails but nothing has changed.
One of our readers personally contacted Xtra asking them to fix it and they asked for our input. We gave it yet again (we have been doing this dance with them for months) but still, nothing changed.
We have provided all the information to Xtra separately, several times. For two months it worked, but now we are back to square one.
This issue with Xtra is not just an annoyance for our readers: it has hurt the BFD.
Let me explain:
Basically, they bounce the emails, then we get a bad score; our email provider says we have too many bounces so we are penalised as we then get branded as spammers. Because of this, we cannot risk sending our newsletter to Xtra email addresses anymore.
Quite frankly we are sick of them.
Xtra is a legacy product from the days of Telecom, before they renamed themselves Spark. The Xtra brand is defunct but there are thousands of people with Xtra email addresses, so Spark has just let it carry on; but they appear to have zero interest in maintaining the system.
This issue has cost us memberships because some of our readers think that the FREE newsletter is part of their membership and they have cancelled in frustration.
Our FREE newsletter is available to everyone and has never been part of a membership.
If you have the misfortune of being a customer of Xtra, you can sign up to the FREE newsletter successfully if you sign up using an e-mail address that is not an Xtra one.
Please share what you have learned with other readers in the comments if you see anyone complaining about the problem. We really do not want to lose any more members because of an issue that is completely out of our control.
Thanks for nothing Xtra. All you provide is an Xtra large headache for both the BFD and those of our readers who have the bad luck of being your customers.