Email at a Crossroads
So, what’s the situation with emails at the moment?
As our world moves progressively more and more digital, emails are an essential part of communication. We use them for personal, medical and banking correspondence among many others. It has become clear that some email providers have dropped the ball in regard to the service offered to their customers.
In the past, a large part of Internet Service Providers (ISP – e.g. Telstra, Optus, TPG) involved providing you with your personal email address. This was a part of their strategy to get you connected and to stay connected for as long as possible. In doing so, we all signed up for something we though would be sustained for a while, and ended up committing to these email address, using them for our primary e-communication. These were great while they lasted (albeit, sometimes the support aspect from these companies has been less than anticipated), and we used them for everything.
These days, ISPs are realising that hosting these email addresses is no longer a profitable part of business, or is not in their best interest, so they are slowly phasing them out. Last month, TPG stopped supporting their email accounts and hundreds of thousands of Australians were left with the option to either close their email addresses, or pay an ongoing fee to have access to their past emails.
Optus and Telstra have started the phasing out of their email addresses too. No longer can you create a new bigpond or optusnet email address. I speculate that this means that the service for these emails will come to a halt in not too long.
What does this mean for current Optus or Telstra customers that rely on their ISP email addresses? Unfortunately, the news is likely not good. Much like TPG, these customers probably will be forced to make a decision – stop using their email or possibly pay a fee to have the email history.
Greyology’s recommendation is to move away from these email addresses. Gmail is a great alternative. It’s free, it gives you access to 15GB of email storage (can be upgraded) and it is likely to be around for a good amount of time as it is one of Google’s main services. Telstra carries a storage of 10GB, and Optus carries a tiny 500MB – 1/30th of Gmail’s. This means that if you’ve been with Optus, it’s more than likely you’ve run into some storage issues such as not receiving emails or being unable to send any as your mailbox is full.
Channing email addresses can be a hassle, but you’ll be grateful in the long term. It’s easier to make the decision to change now and transition over the next few months, then have to do it quickly if the ISPs do announce they are ending support for these emails. Changing email addresses is exactly like moving house – it takes some time and isn’t always easy, but you’ll appreciate it once it’s over. Send an email to your friends from your old account to advise them of your new address and tell companies that you want to hear from of the change. It also gives you a chance to leave behind the junk emails, and be very selective about who you give your new email address out to in the future. Contact Greyology today if you need assistance with this.
Edin Read.
Founder & Chief Technician.
☎️ +61 401 018 615
