My hosting company has gone out of business without notice

[bikepacker]

I have learnt this morning after not being able to get my emails that Falcoda Internet have gone out of business. As my computer and internet knowledge is very small can someone advise me of the best course of action to recover what I need to get my both my web and emails up and running. My bikepacker.co.uk registration is with nominet and is okay until April 2024.

[Afasoas]

Is the company in administration, or have they wound everything up?

Are the email servers still accessible? (Is the email still working?)
Where are you DNS records hosted?

[Afasoas]

Is the company in administration, or have they wound everything up?

Are the email servers still accessible? (Is the email still working?)
Where are you DNS records hosted?

Well I've checked, DNS is still up and functional. Looks like the DNS servers are with domaincontrol.com which looks to be a registrar called Wild West Domains.
I can see mail is received by mail.bikepacker.co.uk and that resolves. The IP address it resolves too is owned by Heart Internet.

A quick port scan of mail.bikepacker.co.uk shows that usual mail related TCP ports are open (IMAP, IMAPs, SMTPs).

Can you confirm you have access to your email?

I think the steps to recover from this situation are:
1) Download all email using a client (Outlook/Thunderbird) via IMAP - that probably means moving it into a local mail folder or some such depending on the client you are using.
2) Setup new email hosting and setup appropriate DNS records. You will also have to update the SPF/DKIM (and to a lesser degree DMARC) DNS records so that receiving mail servers hopefully trust the email you send rather than treating it as spam, rejecting or silently dropping it.

[bikepacker]

No access to emails or to my website.

Domain names were hosted by Falcoda but registration is with Nominet

Thunderbird keeps asking me for the new password but there isn't one so I cannot download any emails. Tried the same with Webmail and it refuses to recognise the email address and password.

Will try Heart Internet see if they can help.

[Afasoas]

No access to emails or to my website.

Domain names were hosted by Falcoda but registration is with Nominet

Thunderbird keeps asking me for the new password but there isn't one so I cannot download any emails. Tried the same with Webmail and it refuses to recognise the email address and password.

Will try Heart Internet see if they can help.

That's odd. It sounds like the account has disappeared from the mailserver.
The IP mail.bikepacker.co.uk resolves to has a reverse look-up of mail53.extendcp.co.uk and Extend Control Panel looks like a thing that Heart Internet uses. So it's possible that Falcoda were re-selling Heart Internet's hosting services. Hopefully Heart Internet will maintain some sort of backup regime and even though you are not a customer, will look kindly on you given the circumstances. Hell... can they continue host your email, with you paying them instead? That could be a true win:win scenario.

[Jaded]

Looking at recent Trustpilot reviews, they've been on a downward spiral.

https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/falcoda.co.uk

[Pickled Onion]

My knowledge is a bit rusty, but I would hope/assume
(a) you have a local copy of all your mail (almost certain as IMAP is default nowadays)
(b) you have a local copy of your website.

As afasoas says, first port of call is Heart to see if they can switch you over. Assuming they are the ones actually hosting. The page showing on the website suggests that it exists but has been turned off.

Failing that you need to get new hosting, upload the site and move the domain hosting. The latter will be difficult as the current domain hosting needs to be released, for which you need either access to the current host or tech support, neither of which are available.

[Kim]

My knowledge is a bit rusty, but I would hope/assume
(a) you have a local copy of all your mail (almost certain as IMAP is default nowadays)

Normal IMAP (or for that matter, webmail) practice is to store messages on the server, so this surely less certain than it would have been in the POP3 days?

You'd have to actively go to some effort to maintain a local copy^[1].  Mail clients will cache things, but not in a reliable way.


_{[1] Do you have a backup copy of your email?  Go and make one!  Properly run cloud services are resilient against all sorts of technical problems, but they can't withstand random acts of finance.}

[Pickled Onion]

Ah ok, I said I was a bit rusty.

Webmail, this didn't occur to me that some people use just webmail, and clearly yes there's no local copy..

IMAP. Hmm. Doesn't this store mail both on the server and locally, with syncing? So if you delete on one device, it ends up deleting all copies. But if you leave it be (and don't have time-based auto deletion) you have it locally? Maybe I pressed the right button when I set it up originally, but the fact that the (local, on-disc) folder is some 3GB+ suggests it's stored *something*. Without the local copy you'd only be able to read when on-line, and searching would be a bit crap too.

[Kim]

Ah ok, I said I was a bit rusty.

Webmail, this didn't occur to me that some people use just webmail, and clearly yes there's no local copy..

Shirley most gmail users come under this category?  You can do IMAP with it, but Google make it deliberately hard, because embrace-extend-extinguish.  My rule of thumb is that these days the only statistically significant population of people using a proper mail client (I use the term loosely) are Mac users and those using Outlook in a work context.

IMAP. Hmm. Doesn't this store mail both on the server and locally, with syncing? So if you delete on one device, it ends up deleting all copies. But if you leave it be (and don't have time-based auto deletion) you have it locally? Maybe I pressed the right button when I set it up originally, but the fact that the (local, on-disc) folder is some 3GB+ suggests it's stored *something*. Without the local copy you'd only be able to read when on-line, and searching would be a bit crap too.

Some email clients work that way (I know Thunderbollocks can, and I expect anything that can support POP3 should be able to), but it's not an inherent IMAP thing.

(As my mail server is local, I'm careful to disable caching of IMAP folders for offline use, because it's just a waste of disk for no benefit.  The advantage of self-hosting is that you have full control of the backup process at the server side, where it can happen automatically and in a standard format.)

[bikepacker]

Thanks everyone for your advice. I am still awaiting Heart Internet to get back to me hopefully with a solution. In the meantime I have updated many of my contacts with a different email address. My website doesn't really matter that much as it now has little use.

[Pickled Onion]

Thanks for enlightening me!

My rule of thumb is that these days the only statistically significant population of people using a proper mail client (I use the term loosely) are Mac users and those using Outlook in a work context.

Aha! I've been insulated from these facts as a Mac and iThing user, and at work they wrote their own messaging software that looks and behaves a lot like actual email, but isn't.