Gandi: another dissatisfied customer

[French version]

I have been renting the koalie.net domain name for 22 years via Gandi. E-mail came as part of the service.

Domain Name: KOALIE.NET
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.gandi.net
Creation Date: 2001-02-08T20:37:46Z
Registry Expiry Date: 2027-02-08T20:37:46Z

(quoted from ‘whois koalie.net’ in a terminal)

In June 2023, Gandi announced two things:

1. The free e-mail service becomes a paying service after November 30, 2023 (FAQ) at the rate of 4.79€ TTC / month / mail box
2. General price increase of their products on July 13, 2023.

In January 2022 I had renewed it for 5 years, so I’m all set until February 2027 product-price-wise, but e-mail becomes a paying service whether or not I’ve paid the rental of the domain name to which it is attached.

38 months at 4.79€ TTC per month for GandiBox is a sum of 182€.

I tried to make the case, unsuccessfully, that the least they could do to reward the customers who paid for several years in the future, is to give them an equivalent grace period for “GandiMail” before having to switch to the premium “GandiBox” service. Nope.

I also tried unsuccessfully to make the case that they were in breach of article 27.2 of their services conditions on the ground that:

1. according to the definitions on page 1, “services” represent “all services offered by Gandi on its web site which can be subscribed to via your user account“: GandiMail was indeed included in the services I paid for.
2. according to article 5.1, “payment of selected services is done for the duration of your choosing“: so in January 2022, I paid for “services’ until February 2027.
3. furthermore, article 23 states that “contracts, including prices, can be modified. New versions of our contracts are subject to your acceptation via your user account at any renewal point of the related service, or at subscription of a new service“: in my case, the renewal of the related service does not apply before February 2027.
4. finally, article 11 allows Gandi to “withdraw any service at any time in which case Gandi may replace the service by another or extend a pro-rated reimbursement at Gandi’s discretion“: so I solicited that Gandi made the GandiMail service available for free until my next renewal, and ideally that they extend this gesture to all others who like me subscribed and paid for several years in the future.

Nope. Their response took a few weeks to come and started off with the notice that their entire procedure had been validated by their legal department. It did not address the above argumentation. Helpfully, it included a direct link to the documentation to set up mail redirection for free.