Archived version: https://archive.ph/4QzFt
After 30 years, Simon* is facing the prospect of moving.
“I think we’ve been using their products since we built the house,” he says. “We’ve gone through dial-up and then eventually there was an ADSL connection.”
The Canberra-based iiNet customer has had the same email address since the 1990s. For millennials and younger, the notion of getting your email address from the company you pay for broadband might seem antiquated. Free online services such as Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook and others not tied to the internet provider are the default. It is now not uncommon for someone to set up their own email address in a domain of their choosing.
But in the nascent days of the internet before Google and Microsoft were the online internet behemoths, getting your email address from your internet service provider was the norm, and even attractive as a bundle package – and a way for internet providers to lock you into their service.
The cost for relatively small – by comparison to Google – companies to offer the service has gone up in server and administration costs without the economies of scale.
Australia’s largest internet provider – Telstra – ceased offering its Bigpond.com email addresses to new customers in 2016, shifting to using Telstra-branded email.
TPG – which owns brands that have historically offered email including iiNet all the way back to OzEmail – informed customers in July that it would migrate their email to a separate private service, the Messaging Company, by the end of November. Users will keep their exisiting email addresses on this service, and would get it free for the first year. After that, there will be options of paying for a service, or an ad-based free service after that.
The amount to be charged from next year has not yet been decided.
The announcement was met with outrage among users of the long-running web forum Whirlpool.
“It’s a shitty move. My wife has never set up a Gmail or Yahoo and only ever used her iiNet email address for her business as well as personal. This screws us royally,” one user said.
“Us oldies couldn’t start out using Gmail etc because they weren’t in existence 25 years ago,” another said.
“It’s a nightmare trying to change logins at many places.”
Simon too says he is not happy about the sudden shift, describing the move as “shrinkflation” given the change didn’t come with a reduction in his internet bill. He said he is still considering his options.
He says it is difficult as he viewed his email address as part of his identification, and with not everyone on social media, it’s also the only way some people might locate him.
“That email address is used to identify me in what I estimate to be probably 50 or 60 different locations,” he says. “I’ve sold a car on Carsales.com, I have a Gumtree account, Booking.com, Duolingo. I’ve got to go to all of those and say I’ve changed my email address.”
An RMIT associate professor in the school of engineering, Mark Gregory, says he is having to help move his father away from his iiNet email address.
“There’s going to be an impact on quite a few older people that took up some of those accounts with some of the companies that were absorbed by TPG,” he says. “I’m still at the stage where I’m trying to convince [my father] that he has to do it.”
Gregory says the shift reflects the changing business dynamics, and businesses looking to minimise costs. Even Google appears to be feeling the pinch, messaging its customers in recent weeks saying that accounts deemed inactive in the past two years could be deleted beginning 1 December 2023.
The other factor is the increasing security risk. Legacy systems, particularly those managed under a variety of absorbed companies, as with TPG, can over time become more at risk of a cybersecurity attack or breach. External providers who offer this service either in place of, or on behalf of the internet service provider are becoming seen as the more secure option.
Randall Cameron, the director of sales and marketing at AtMail, the parent firm of the Messaging Company, says there’s been a good opt-in rate for users wanting to keep their existing email addresses so far.
“When the bar tab that is TPG runs out, we’ve got to make sure people hang around. And if we say it’s now 20 bucks a drink they’re going to say, ‘Well, thanks, I’ll go somewhere else.’”
The Australian Communications Consumer Action Network chief executive, Andrew Williams, says that ultimately internet providers getting out of the email game is a good thing because it means customers don’t feel locked into one internet company. But it will take a while for people to get set up in new accounts if they decide to switch.
Gregory advises those who need to switch to a new account to start preparing now. That means figuring out which services you need to alert to switch to a new email address. “It’s not going to be as straight forward as some people might think, because when you’re talking to the older generation it becomes quite complex.”
TPG won’t say how many customers will be affected by the changeover, citing commercial confidentialities with the new email provider. A spokesperson says the strategic decision was made to allow TPG to focus on mobile and broadband services.
“Migrating our hosted email services to a specialist provider will ensure our customers have an updated and modernised webmail experience with the tools they require for all their email needs,” the spokesperson says.
“We appreciate this change could be challenging for some customers who have been with us a long time and thank them for their understanding and cooperation during this transition.”
There’s no sign Telstra will follow and stop providing services to its legacy Bigpond customers. While the company did not answer questions on how many still remained seven years after it stopped offering new accounts, the chief executive, Vicki Brady, said they were still very active.
“We have a really engaged Bigpond email customer base … which is why we made the decision to actually upgrade and make sure we had the right features and functions to be able to support their needs. So it’s absolutely important part of our broadband service for our customers.”
With the rise in data breaches, and the avalanche of spam and scams, the shift offers people the opportunity of a clean email slate, according to Andrew Williams, of the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network.
“Your email accounts do build up with a lot of redundant information over time,” he says. “So it’s a good opportunity to have a clean start and just really look at what was really important.”
*Name changed
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I’m pretty sure the biggest issue with this is most people not understanding how to do it and (understandably) not wanting to invest the time to learn. Most folks want things that just work out of the box.
Also a lot of the time, the issue isn’t the setup, it’s the maintenance. When things go wrong and you have to figure out what went wrong. For the less tech savvy this can be an impossible task. There’s a reason why managed services are so popular.
You covered one of the major points here. The unwillingness of people to learn new things that ultimately is not that hard when it comes down to it. Willful intellectual lazyness is paramount here.
Good luck getting a boomer to setup their own domain. Hell, I’m GenX and I wouldn’t know how to.
You can always buy a domain, and let a service take care of email hosting for you. Lots of email providers allow this.
That still requires a certain level of technical understanding (purchasing a domain, understanding where to host, setting up domain records, having to deal with your mails landing in the spam directory of common email providers, etc.). I doubt my father, for example, could set all that up without help.
My current provider took care of most of that but i agree it is too difficult for most.
You don’t need to configure DNS with many providers, just buy the name and check the mail service box.
I didn’t know how to do it, so I followed the instructions and did it.
The amount of times I’ve looked great at work because I just read the manual that came with the product.
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And then all your emails land in spam folders or get dismissed from big email providers. Or the ip you use gets put on a blacklist.
I’ve run my own email server for the last 10 years (actually own server + domain, not with an email provider) and so much can go wrong even if you set it up right.
For critical emails (work, banking, taxes, …) I still use a third party provider I trust and not my own server.
You definitely should not run your own email servers, but he’s just saying to buy a domain and pay for a GSuite account (or Fastmail, Proton, whatever) to actually operate email on that domain. All those companies handle all the modern anti-spam functions for you.
Anti-spam is relatively easy to set up and gets trained automatically the more emails you get.
Yeah, using an email provider with your own domain is probably the way to go. But it can be pricey just for email. For example Proton Mail costs 4€ a month if you want to use a custom domain. And in theory they can adjust that price upwards at any time. Fastmail is 5€ a month at the moment.
A lot of people are used to email being free, so that might be a tough sell for them. But having your own domain (especially with a wildcard email) is super nice.
That was my biggest takeaway from all this. Should my ISP cancel email service, Ill just have to roll my own.
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Precisely, me and my wife have switched email providers several times while keeping the same address.
I am using my own domain. I’m using a bit of an unconventional setup. I have a webhosting plan with up to 100 mailboxes and redirects and 10GB of storage. The plan includes a domain name (but I can also transfer it later) and costs about the same as the cheapest migadu option (without domain and) with 5GB storage.
With the proviso that you don’t give it to companies. Use a feature like hide my email or use forwarding from a gmail etc account.
(Companies like Facebook can use your own domain to profile you and your family. Other companies use Facebook services for advertising )
Domain whois privacy is very important. They can still use the domain itself to figure out you’re related in some way but they don’t outright get your data. EU ccTLD registries typically offer whois privacy by default.
Also, it’s very important to hide your main mailbox address behind aliases. Plus addressing (real+alias@domain) helps with automated spam but not with privacy. I prefer wildcard aliases (bla.*@domain).
Excellent point
Any way you could tell me/link me to somewhere to figure out how to do that? Bonus points if an idiot (me, I is the idiot) can understand it. I’m willing to pay 20 bucks a year… I just don’t know how.
Get in touch with migadu.com, they’ll help you.
In short:
Picking a registrar and a domain name is a story in itself, if you’re going for privacy. Some TLDs like the ones for European countries (.nl for example) have very strong privacy laws that will keep your identity hidden by default in the domain information. Pricing is of course another factor. I would stay away from novelty TLDs even if they’re cheap, you never know in whose hands they will end up and who’s looking at their data. A country TLD is unlikely to hike prices suddenly and will never disappear.
DNS records that you need to copy are very few, and typically only a few of them are essential, but it’s best to add everything the provider gives you to best fight spam and help your email app figure things out. The domain registrar usually has a nice interface where you edit DNS records with a form that explains everything.
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