I received an email a few days ago from my Internet Provider telling me that they were concentrating on Internet provision and farming out their email system to another company. They told me I would be able to keep that address if I registered with that company and paid a fee.
When I first joined them you could have up to 10 free email addresses.
Ironically the email arrived in my Hotmail account because I rarely look at the one they provide and my account with them is sent to Hotmail.
It did affect me - my Ebay and Paypal accounts use that email address because when I set up those accounts over 20 years ago (doesn’t time fly?) they would not accept a web based email address. I have now changed my registered email and log in with those companies to my Hotmail account.
Have you had this experience with your Internet provider? Is this a common thing for them not to provide a free email address these days?
Virgin Media caused me lots of grief back in 2015 when they told me that I could no longer use their services because I was on an old copper wire system and they were only going to serve people on superfast fibre. My email address was a virgin email address (probably my fault really) and I had to go with someone else. I chose Gmail so if my present server goes tits up I still have my email address. And just as it happens, I’m leaving BT for a company called ‘Quickline’ but I’ll still have my google email address. Yay!
I can’t complain about their internet service, this month they are are upgrading me from 100/40Mbps to 500/50Mbps at no extra cost.
To be honest I think they are just rationalising their service and providing less choice and 500/50 might be the slowest they offer to fibre customers.
One thing I do still have because they offered it when I first started with them - a fixed IP Address very few companies offer that for free now…
Virgin media always upgrade speeds at no extra cost and then, some time later, the cost of the service goes up.
I still have a virgin media email address but it gave trouble a while ago. I read that the service could be stopped altogether at some time or another, so opened an outlook.com email account and use that one mainly. I have a gmail account too. I use it sometimes.
Virgin Media used to supply web space at one time as well but that stopped ages ago. I downloaded all the files of my web site and always intended to upload them elsewhere but never have done. I think the site would look dated now.
I go with Proton on almost everything. They are privacy-based and do email. VPN, crypto wallets (only BTC now; it’s new), AI (Lumo; they don’t report your queries to the central database), and drive. Everything is encrypted, and if the receiver has Proton, only you and the recipient can read it. They don’t keep logs. I can’t wait until they come out with Chat, but for now, I use Signal for that.
When I was a kid, privacy mattered. To some of us, it still does.
I have used hotmail/outlook for a long, long time and 2 weeks ago I had a message telling my I have run out of space! I deleted a ton of stuff and still it says i have no space so I will not receive any incoming messages or be able to send outgoing mail. I was furious because I have a ton of things using that email address including paypal, ebay, amazon etc. To keep my email I have had to pay £2 per month and perhaps I shouldn’t have but I have paid it because it was all causing stress and headache.
I don’t know how you are accessing e-mails but if not done already, you could log into your e-mail account on the server (using your Internet browser) to make sure the e-mails have been deleted there and not only from your computer.
That charge is for each email address remembering that Exetel offered up to 10 free ones, so a small business could be suddenly faced with an extra $40 to $50 per month.
I have already deleted the account from my Thunderbird mailreader, as I said before I never used it except for Ebay and Paypal but have changed all that.
Yay!