by Thinus Ferreira
Goodbye M-Net. Well, at least @mnet.co.za, with the m-net.co.za email domain dumped in the IT-trashbin and now changed to @canal-plus.com following Canal+'s takeover of MultiChoice and M-Net.
In what is M-Net's 40 anniversary year - M-Net is set to turn 40 years old in October - the Canal+ IT bosses have decided to chip away another part of M-Net, with all of MultiChoice and M-Net email addresses that have been switched and changed to @canal-plus.com.
Adding injury to insult - either deliberately, or because it's impossible, or as an oversight - Canal+ couldn't, wouldn't or hasn't been able to apparently add email forwarding or email redirects from the "old" M-Net email addresses to the new canal-plus.com email addresses.
Add to that the unnecessary additional corporate complexity and bigger potential for mistakes: A hyphen to separate "canal" from "plus" because of ... well, just because.
The disappointing and badly done Die Kantoor from the shuttered Showmax was also on kykNET, but this email hashtrash corporate exercise of lets-meddle-where-none-is-necessary-and-mess-it-up feels like an example of real-life MultiChoice-Canal+ The Office.
Forthwith, sending an email to somebody with a @mnet.co.za email address just goes into a void.
The receiver won't know they've been sent an email, and neither does the sender know their email went undelivered and wasn't received. This goes for anybody working at the actual M-Net channel, kykNET or Mzansi Magic channels, Africa Magic or any of these TV brands that all had basic mnet.co.za email addresses.
M-Net's email addresses - when the Randburg-based pay-TV operator rolled out staff-enabled email and addresses in the late 1990s - had the @mnet.co.za email domain right from the start. It's legacy.
People getting an email from M-Net, or sending an email to M-Net, knew who, and what the brand was they were communicating with.
Now M-Net, at least on email - as well as MultiChoice - has been folded into the larger Canal+ corporate email domain architecture.
Goodbye to another piece of legacy M-Net, chipped away and gone forever.
