NameCheap refusing to refund $7.45

Update: I finally got ahold of someone who had common sense. My money was refunded within 24 hours.



The domain registration company NameCheap.com is refusing to refund $7.45 that is due to me. I had purchased a 1 year email hosting subscription, but they cancelled the service (and replaced it with a similar service, but didn't move previous customers over!) when I had 5 months remaining. It takes very little rocket science to figure out that if a customer buy a 12 month subscription and it only functions for 7 months that the company should refund 5 months worth of subscription fee.

Oh, did I mention that they didn't bother to notify me that they were about to shut down my email service, and that I only noticed because my dad sent me email (from his work account) saying his home computer was not working anymore?

After the jump, one of the messages I sent them after they twice refused to refund my money. Updates will occur when something happens.

My purchase of the ‘hosting package’ had nothing to do with my POP3 Pack problem or the patteefamily.com domain name. One of your techs simply noted that I could use my hosting package to make up for the trouble I was having with the POP3 Pack problem. I have done that in order to get my parent’s email functional again.

I described the POP3 Pack problem in my initial ticket submission. Instead of getting technical support it was forwarded directly to billing. The problem is very simple:

1. I purchased a 1 year POP3 Pack subscription on 7/28/2007 for $17.88 (subscription to expire 7/28/2008)
2. A year later, I purchased a 1 year POP3-RENEW on 7/27/2008 for $17.88 (subscription to expire 7/28/2009)
3. A week ago my father informed me that he was unable to receive email anymore, 3/9/2009
4. I logged in to NameCheap and loaded the information for patteefamily.com, and discovered that on the DNS setting page that domain had its Mail Settings changed to Free Email Forwarding, even though the POP3 Email Setup page still listed the two email addresses I had previously set up.
5. I was unable to figure out how to get the email settings back to what they were supposed to be for the POP3 Pack subscription to work.
6. I submitted a support ticket [187666] stating that on 3/11/2009 at 10:41 pm
7. 4 minutes later, 3/11 at 10:45 pm, support person Dennis M. responded that he was forwarding the issue to Billing and Accounting
8. The next day 3/12 5:52 AM Tanya B. informed me that NameCheap had discontinued POP3 services, and suggested that as a work-around I use the Pro Hosting subscription that I had purchased previously for use with a different web site by using the Addon Domain feature
9. I then noted that I should be refunded for the remainder of my POP3 subscription. There are still approximately 5 months on the subscription. At $17.88 for a year, that is $1.49 per month. With 5 months of my year-long subscription not working, due to NameCheap cancelling the service, that is $7.45 that is owed to me in pro-rated subscription cost.
10. In a message on 3/13 Tanya B. noted that you were not going to be refunding my money because a 3rd party that NameCheap previously worked with was not going to refund money to them.
11. In a response I note that that makes no sense. I have nothing to do with NameCheap’s contract with any 3rd parties. I paid for 1 year worth of service, and received 7 months worth of service, and expect the 5 remaining months to be refunded in the amount of $7.45.
12. On 3/14 at 4:55 am Tanya B. re-stated that NameCheap would not be refunding the unusable portion of my POP3 package. In that message support also confused my not-related web hosting subscription that I purchased recently with this issue, and also stated that I had never said I had a problem with my email.
13. On 3/14 at 4:55 pm I attempted to send a reply (this post, but only bullets 1-11), and received a mail delivery failure from namecheap's mail server. I attempted to resend at 5:03 pm and it bounced again. At that point I decided to post to the forum so someone else at NameCheap could help get my issue to the correct person.