When a company will not take an email

More than thirty of the companies we cover publish a complaints form and no email address you can use. Three, ASOS, Jet2, Argos, Tesco, Trainline, DPD, Samsung and Etsy are all on that list. It is their choice, and it is increasingly the normal one.

It used to leave you stuck. We wrote your letter, and then your case had nowhere to send it from. There was no address to put in the To field, so the send button stayed off, and the letter sat there reading as though you had never done anything.

What your case does now

When a company takes complaints only by form, the emails tab opens with the whole route on it:

• Copy your letter, ready to paste in.
• Open their form, in a new tab. The real one, from their own site.
• Tell us it has gone, and your case carries on from there.

If we cannot find a form either, it says so instead of sending you looking for a page we cannot name, and you can log the letter as posted or as emailed from your own inbox.

It is free, and we will not pretend we watched it

Logging a complaint you sent yourself has always been free, and now it works for a form as well as an email. No credit, no plan.

We cannot see you submit somebody else’s web form, so your case says “you told us” rather than “sent”. Everything after that is the same as if we had sent it: the eight weeks before an ombudsman will look at your complaint starts counting, and anything the company says back can be logged against the case.

We ask you to confirm before that clock starts, because the date is worth getting right. Press it the day before you actually send, and you lose a day off the end of your own deadline.