Forum Discussion
psl
TELUS Team Member
TELUS Team MemberGmail Migration - New Support Content
Hey everyone, as many of you have noticed, since last year, we’ve been migrating customers to the new TELUS email powered by Google. Providing new benefits, such as:
Triple your current storage s...
For what it's worth, I think that this TELUS migration to TELUS e-mail by Google has been VERY POORLY executed. The comments about "not perfect" are far, far from the truth.
Let's look at some things TELUS could have done better:
1) Third party programs - MANY people use this (i.e. Mail app on Windows, Outlook and others). TELUS should have been WAY MORE PREPARED to provide support on these. A 'change' in how e-mail is hosted should not be an excuse for not providing support.
2) Poor instructions - my migration was today and it went poorly. I'm somewhat computer savvy (I've built machines and set up new machines for others - predominantly seniors). I did EXACTLY what the instructions said and Outlook wouldn't work. I was on a tech service call for 45 minutes today with TELUS. They were very helpful - all that changed was the order of ONE STEP - that wasn't clear in the instructions.
3) How about some transparency and communication with customers? This is becoming an achilles heel for TELUS. TELL PEOPLE what is going to happen. Yes your e-mail should be migrated over but it will be completed reordered (the original dates aren't necessarily preserved). This was the same with PureFibre - very limited mention on the need for new cabling to be installed into the house. I knew this and spent three hours doing fishing myself beforehand. This saved the technicians time and holes in my house.
4) Recognize the limitations some folks have with technology - I've heard MANY seniors say that they have had to get external help from computer specialists or their children to help with this transition.
TELUS needs to spend a LOT more time up front planning changes so that the impacts on customers are mitigated. What should have happened is that the "upgraded" e-mail settings should have been made so that they were discoverable by a wizard.
Calling this "upgrade" as "not perfect" is really minimizing the difficulties that were encountered. TELUS really needs to up it's game in planning changes so that there isn't all this misery.
I agree. This transition was done very poorly. No help. No documentation that works.
If I wanted google, I would have gotten a gmail account.
This transition was 100 times worse that the email outage in the fall of 2019!! It has taken me approximately 6 months to clean up the mess that the transition caused to my emails.
My advice - don't transition until you absolutely have to!!
I wasted more time today than I care to admit, trying to figure out why one email account could be switched over quickly and successfully earlier this week in my 3rd party desktop client (Thunderbird) while another email account that migrated today kept failing, despite identical incoming and outgoing server settings as per the Telus migration instructions.
In the hope of saving other users of 3rd party email programs some of my frustration, I want to flag a critical setting in Google Mail. You have to explicitly tell Google to grant access to your Mail account for "Less Secure Applications." From the Telus migration instructions:
- Open your email account in a browser by visiting mail.google.com/a/telus.net
- Go to the 9 dot menu and select Account
- Select Security on the left-hand side
- Scroll down to “Less secure app access” and select Turn on access
- Toggle “Allow less secure apps switch” to On
You have now enabled Less secure application access for your account. If you no longer require this enabled in the future, please use the steps above to change the setting to Off. Source: https://www.telus.com/en/ab/support/article/telus-email-as-alternative-application
Hope this helps fellow do-it-yourselfers. It seems disappointing that Telus is handing over email administration to Google given its reputation in different contexts, but maybe everything will come up roses.
