Telus email accounts

[VernH]

When I agreed to Telus home services I considered the fact I am currently running five Telus mobility accounts and home security, so Telus home internet, fibre optics, and television seemed like a logical choice. One specific question I did have was the ability to set up five separate email accounts, so members of my household could manage their own accounts and their own identities. I specifically asked the sales representative if that was the case, to which he replied "Yes. You can set up 10 separate accounts." So Telus installed their modem and TV boxes. I specifically maintained internet with the old subscriber for email addresses only to make sure the Telus system was suitable. To be honest, the Google management of email never really sat well with me.

Regardless, when I started to set up the five different users, I discovered this wasn't an easy process. After a total of 11-hrs fiddling around with Telus Chat (45-min) and voice communication, I discover a supervisor would be calling me back within 24-hrs to discuss the fact five separate users with their own ID CANNOT be set up with Telus, unlike my previous email provider (Shaw). Any emails sent out under the telus.net system is associated with the main account holder's name, which is unacceptable. As it stands, I believe Telus was derelict when representing their services, and signing me up for home services under false pretenses.

I will be seeking to have this contract declared null and void due to their misrepresentation of their services.

[NFtoBC]

AFAIK, while you can have up to 10 individual email addresses, they can’t be self-managed; the account holder has to be the administrator of the account. I’m curious as to the administrative tasks each of the email recipients would be expected to undertake?

If these are family members, I’d consider something more independent, so they can take them with them if they move. Separating children’s emails from your account may not be a possibility in the future.

[zulu53]

I think he was talking about the fundamental administrator task (not all administrator tasks): that of adding a new email address or deleting an old one by the Telus account holder.   With Shaw this task is delegated to the Shaw account holder.   With Telus as an ISP sub-contracting to Google this task is not only possible by the Google Account holder (i.e Telus).  Why can't Telus delegate this task to Telus account holder?  Its because GSuite (Workspace) does not allow that.   It appear that this task within Telus has only been allowed to certain Telus employees and certainly none in CustomerCare (by my experience).   Hence the protocol for a Telus account holder to add or change or delete email addresses (the 10 free ones) entails phoning CustomerCare, asking for the changes and allow them sufficient time to contact a Telus/Google account administrator to execute the instructions.  Of course for new emails one has to go back and forth a few times to get an email address that is unique - so all in all a time consuming exercise.  Note that ONLY CustomerCare can initiate the link between Telus Account holders and Telus Google Administrators: this cannot be done through Telus tech support.  Now why did Telus not just allow and publish on their website a specific phone contact number to get to a Telus Google account administrator?  Because tech customer support is not their strength.  Note that

[zulu53]

He was talking about the Telus Account holder being the administrator not the individual email address holders.  The amin tasks he was talking about are the fundamental ones of adding/changingpasswords/deleting email addresses (10 of them).  The downside of going with Google - ALL email admin tasks including the fundamental life or death tasks sit with the primary account holder company and cannot be delegated to thousands of users.  Telus, of course, could have delegated email admin to CustomerCare reps but did not choose to do so.  They merely provide a list of such people to CustomerCare who can contact them on the Telus Cusomer behalf and request changes be made.  The Telus customer has to just wait on the line for the 10 mins or so that doing this takes (plus the wait time to get CustomerCare).   A very "kluge" solution and not one that I would have implemented: particularly since it is not documented on the Telus website.  This is all new to Telus so perhaps they will learn and provide a more customer focused solution.

[NFtoBC]

I’m unclear as to what you mean by: “ Any emails sent out under the telus.net system is associated with the main account holder's name” as one can set return addressing and Reply To in email application settings. Each users email address should allow access to IMAP and SMTP servers.

Aliases, on the other hand, would be associated with the prime account holder, but still can appear independent to outsiders.

[FuzzyLogic · Accepted solution]

My understanding, and experience, has been you can have multiple, independent, email addresses associated with a single Telus account. I currently have 3 email addresses with independent login credentials to Telus hosted Gmail. Two were migrated and a third was added at the time of migration. I had to work with Telus to get this working as expected.

There seems to be some confusion with regard to accounts, email addresses and aliases. From what I understand you have one account (for billing) and wish to have 10 email addresses and no aliases. Not sure why there is an issue with the account holder being responsible for all the email addresses? Login information and specifics are unique to each email address so you can control anything related to that address through Gmail.

Prior to the Gmail move you could do a lot of this yourself. Now most of it must be done by Telus.

[zulu53]

All GSuite (GWorkspace) administration must be done by delegated persons within the account holder group - Telus is the account holder with GSuite NOT the Telus customer.

[zulu53]

The issue is because Google Workspace (Telus has one Account) does not allow delegation of the Administrator task of User management (email address management): that is their is no way to tell Gmail which email address are associated with which Telus account holder (i.e. which 10 address are part of the "group" that is the Telus account holder) - to Gmail all that exists is a number of addresses associated with the "telus.net" domain.  The only people that can add/change/delete Gmail addresses are a select few within Telus.  Unfortunately the only access to these people is through CustomerCare by phone.   Even contacting Telus Tech Support will not work; the only people able to connect to the domain administrators are in CustomerCare.   Why Telus did not just provide a direct phone number to the admin group for the email task only?   I presume they did not think of this; and also saw that putting up barriers to an account holder creating email addresses would help keep their costs down since Google Workspace also charges on a per email address basis.

[zulu53]

All email sent out under the domain (telus.net in this case) are always associated with the DomainHolder user group.  All ISPs do this since they only offer a limited number of addresses per customer (as you call it "the primary account holder".  I don't know how this could be done differently by Telus so don't see why it is a negative for using their services.