Don't Rely On The "Free" Email From Your ISP

[suzyne]

People have always told me, don't make the free email address (with the ISP's domain) that comes with your internet service your primary email.

I have never before heard of the "unbundling" in the news article actually happening, but it is a concrete example of the why the above is good advice, because it might cost you later.

https://www.gadgetguy.com.au/tpg-internode-westnet-iinet-email-replacements/

[moonbat]

ISPs still offer email accounts? Haven't seen that in years. A huge number of people jumped to free webmail right when Hotmail started off, many have never had anything else and would give you blank looks if you talked about an email client for their personal mail.

[Night Wing]

You are in Australia. I am in the USA.

What you are experiencing with a large ISP provider, I think it won't happen here in the USA. Why? Because the USA has a population of around 331 million people. The population of Australia is around 25 million people.

What I am getting at is this. With Australia's small populatlon, a large Australian ISP can serve lots of people . In essence, a walled in garden. But here in the USA, we have many different ISP service providers. Probably many more ISP providers than Australia has and the number is probably not even close number wise when comparing them to one another.

I have Comcast as my ISP and I also have Comcast for my telephone and television service. I also have a Comcast email address. But I also have a Gmail and a Hotmail email address.

But if Comcast tries to pull the same thing which the ISP company in Australia is doing, I would drop Comcast "like a very hot potato being carried in a bare skin hand" because with Gmail and Hotmail, those are backups email address wise.

In fact, I would guess just about everyone in the USA has at least two email addresses (and probably more since I have three email addresses).

[moonbat]

I also have a Comcast email address. But I also have a Gmail and a Hotmail email address.

That option to have a separate webmail address also has been there for Australians ever since those services began; what amazes me is that they chose not to have any other.

[Pentium4User]

Many ISPs had that in the days when Gmail & Co. didn't exist.
They also had a free NNTP server access for their customers.

All of that was coupled to the internet contract. If people used the mail address, they couldn't cancel their internet subscription without loosing it.

[moonbat]

Many ISPs had that in the days when Gmail & Co. didn't exist.
They also had a free NNTP server access for their customers.

All of that was coupled to the internet contract. If people used the mail address, they couldn't cancel their internet subscription without loosing it.

I'm aware of all that - I'm just surprised how these people still clung onto their ISP mail decades after the advent of free webmail accessible from anywhere with a browser.

[suzyne]

That option to have a separate webmail address also has been there for Australians ever since those services began

The fact that Australians have been free to do this for many years was never intended as the point of discussion from my post.

And it is worth noting that the story does not have numbers on how many people are wedded to their email with an ISP domain and will have to pay extra if they wish to continue doing so.

Of course, I would be surprised if the typical Pale Moon user wasn't completely aware of the disadvantage of having only a single email that ties them to their ISP, but I still find it an interesting story that one of the biggest ISPs in this country has decided to do this.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-08-10/tpg-telecom-email-shutdown/102708134

[moonbat]

Meanwhile they (TPG) have also hiked their rates by 25%.

[Moonchild]

I've run my own e-mail server on my own domain for literally decades. The few times I've used ISP e-mail it always turned out to be a bad long-term plan because of me not being married to a single ISP, so I quickly learned that lesson. The issue is that people don't want to separately pay for e-mail in most cases, so they use what comes included in their ISP subscription (it's paid for by that, anyway) or they end up using a "free" mail provider (gmail, hotmail) with other drawbacks.
Running a mail server yourself is dead easy. Heck you could even get a super cheap shared hosting domain and use e-mail from that which is often included.

I always suggest people look around for paid-for mail services with a clear business model. Basic e-mail doesn't have to cost more than a cup of coffee a month (if it does, you're usually getting screwed hard and should look elsewhere). They provide a service, and you pay a reasonable price for your mailbox without having your data harvested (I hope) like "free" ones do.

[Pentium4User]

I also run my own at home and it works, but you need an ISP that cares about abuse - if not the entire AS will be on blacklists and you can't send mails to others checking these lists.
I am also surprised that sending to Google with IPv6 works.

[Night Wing]

Of course, I would be surprised if the typical Pale Moon user wasn't completely aware of the disadvantage of having only a single email that ties them to their ISP, but I still find it an interesting story that one of the biggest ISPs in this country has decided to do this.

I'll give you some examples from a few non-Pale Moon users.

My wife's oldest niece, she has three email addresses. Her husband has four email addresses. My wife's youngest niece has four email addresses. Her husband has five email addresses. My wife's cousins, most of them have three email addresses while others have four email addresses and a few have five email addresses.

And again, all them do not use Pale Moon. Most of them use use Microsoft's Edge browser, Google's Chrome browser and Mozilla's Firefox browser.

In the USA, we have lots of choices for just about everything which includes ISP's, email addresses, alcohol (beer, wine, hard liquor), entertainment, politics, computer operating systems, etc; because we have a very large population. When people get ticked off to the max, "they vote with their wallets and for other reasons, their feet" as well. And these people never come back.

[Raava]

I'm just surprised how these people still clung onto their ISP mail decades after the advent of free webmail accessible from anywhere with a browser.

I never used the email as provided by any ISP.

I use a webmail that comes in one European flavour and in one US flavour (meaning they are two different accounts)
Both are GMX, but an account on gmx.com was not accessible via gmx.de and vice versa. (Might have changed the last few years, it was like so for many many years) [but e.g. gmx.at and gmx.de could use the same account if you want your emails ending like so; at being the TLD of Austria]

Since GMX offers free email (as web mail, but also useable as SMTP with the email program of your choice) and also offers 20 free aliases (that are just that: aliases that act like a symlink in a filesystem) you can use it however you want. You have the convenience of using an email reader when using your main PC, but also the accessibility from everywhere of a webmail. When you want to use an anonymous sounding email address you use one of your chosen aliases, when you want to use the more official with your Christian name and Surname (e.g. for official business when you have your own business or anything job-related) you use your john.smith at gmx.de for example. And for being anonymous you have something like whateverfancy at sonnenkinder.org (both are just spontaneously made up addresses but they could exist in the real world)

GMX sucks big time, but it is free. Hotmail and GMail also suck when you look at it from a technical standpoint of a person coding an email reader - but when you use a service for free you should not expect 100% perfection.

And I changed my ISP many many times over the years and my accessibility via email never changed since I knew all of my email addresses (via just one account) will be mine forever (unless gmx goes down, but that's unlikely)

And technically, gmx offers a paid premium service but since all the basic things that suck still suck when you pay for it, I never use such premium thingy to begin with.

[somdcomputerguy]

I used an email address forwarding service for a few years before I got a shared web hosting account (with many 'mailboxes') and a few years after that I paid into a dedicated email service. So basically I've had the same email address(es) for nearly 30 years.

[BenFenner]

I have only ever used ISP-provided e-mail.
One day I might switch to Fastmail or Proton Mail...

[athenian200]

In my personal experience, there is basically very little difference between a free e-mail address from your ISP, and a free e-mail address you get from any other service.

In fact, ISPs often contract with companies like Yahoo or Oath to provide e-mail services, leaving you with basically a branded portal to what is otherwise a normal Yahoo account. In my experience, the free e-mail address that comes with an account usually either is provided by one of these companies, or is eventually handed off to one of these companies later on for one reason or another. It's often been the case for me that even if I stop using a particular ISP, they let me keep the free e-mail. With AOL, I think they even let me keep my old AIM ID up until the day the service was shut down.

In other words, if you trust free e-mail at all, an ISP e-mail isn't much worse than the alternatives unless your ISP insists on hosting the e-mail themselves and is stingy enough to take it away if you happen to move to a place they don't serve, or they stop serving your area themselves, which is a very common reason why people switch ISPs. The only ISP that ever actually did that in my experience was a very small one that didn't have a lot of name recognition, and they are also the ones that provided such a ridiculously small inbox size that I wound up continuing to use the e-mail of my last ISP anyway. So in my mind, big ISPs with good reputations generally don't kill your free e-mail after you stop getting Internet service.

The smart ones find ways to partner with companies that specialize in free, ad-supported e-mail as they retire their in-house service, and give current and former customers some kind of cushioned fallback to avoid... well, precisely the kind of situation TPG has put their customers in, because it would be bad PR.

[Moonchild]

In other words, if you trust free e-mail at all, an ISP e-mail isn't much worse than the alternatives

I agree, from a technical perspective if they outsource it, but with one essential and very important difference: it is directly bound to your contract with the ISP and you will flat-out lose it if that is terminated for any reason.

If you ever move, want to switch providers, or for some other reason no longer have a contract with your ISP, then it will impact almost innumerable other places that you have registrations at with your e-mail (which has been the "username" in most places; something I still think is a bad idea, but that's a different story). ISPs use it as a form of retention as a result because nobody wants the task of changing it everywhere (and/or losing accounts and their recovery if not changed beforehand). Life happens. You don't always get the choice to stay in one place. Also, ISPs may decide for any number of reasons they no longer want you as a customer, and then you're also scrambling to get something else.

So many reasons I can think of why ISP-married e-mail is a bad thing, stemming from that one simple fact.

[Raava]

^
Good points, I fully agree.

Some or even many ISPs might not act that way, but they could, and be it one single employee who for some reasons believe you need to be punished. (Maybe he/she had just a bad week when you decided to move the state and cancel your old ISP and he/she was not feeling do do actual work that week…)
Some people are just like that, it is a kind of "hobby" (in a psychopathic way) to be able to tyrannize some random folks. It might not happen to lots of people, and I believe it rarely happens because of some uber jerk is a jerk once more, but it could happen to anyone who has to leave one ISP, and the workload you get when it is done to you…would be a nightmare.

Better safe than sorry, like I wrote above: my free email provider sucks, but it is free and I have it for decades now and it is still better than to have to forcefully change my all of my emails with friends, family, work, and whatnot contacts, and all settings of forums and logins and whatnot other sites.

[athenian200]

If you ever move, want to switch providers, or for some other reason no longer have a contract with your ISP, then it will impact almost innumerable other places that you have registrations at with your e-mail (which has been the "username" in most places; something I still think is a bad idea, but that's a different story). ISPs use it as a form of retention as a result because nobody wants the task of changing it everywhere (and/or losing accounts and their recovery if not changed beforehand). Life happens. You don't always get the choice to stay in one place. Also, ISPs may decide for any number of reasons they no longer want you as a customer, and then you're also scrambling to get something else.

So many reasons I can think of why ISP-married e-mail is a bad thing, stemming from that one simple fact.

I guess I just haven't experienced that particular consequence myself?

The impression I get is that ISPs using this as a form of retention must be a lot more common outside the US, because it seems like ISPs here often don't terminate your e-mail account after you switch providers. I just checked and I still have access to past ISP e-mails, in particular one that I had 15 years ago that I occasionally wind up having to login with to access sites I signed up for in, say 2007 or so and forgot about for over a decade. And also one from even longer ago, an ISP I haven't had since the early 2000s as a child. I have moved most of my stuff to a free e-mail provider just because I prefer their service, but it seems like ISPs using the threat of taking your e-mail away as a form of retention isn't really a thing here.

To be honest, I would have intuitively expected it to work the way you describe, and took precautions with switching the most essential services over to an account I knew I could keep before switching ISPs, but in practice I've found that it just doesn't seem to be used as a retention tool here very often.

I guess the key word is "rely," that is, don't set things up so that you can't afford to lose that e-mail address, because there's always the possibility they could terminate it, even if a lot of times they don't. That is, there's no technical reason to be afraid to use it for security reasons, but just don't expect to always have access to it. Though really, I would say that relying on something like a school e-mail or a business e-mail would be even worse than relying on ISP e-mail, because those absolutely will be terminated the moment you're no longer a student or employee (this is something I've seen people do and regret), whereas the ISP may try to work with you to prevent you from losing your e-mail. Even in the article cited, the ISP in question did give people the option of paying to keep their e-mail, which is not ideal, but it is an option someone could take advantage of while trying to get everything switched over.

One caveat, though, is that I sometimes see online services reject e-mail addresses from free provider sand specifically request you to use your ISP e-mail because they've gotten too much spam or abuse from free services. That kind of situation obviously puts people between a rock and a hard place, not wanting to rely on their ISP e-mail, but also being locked out of using services that won't trust a free e-mail. I suppose that goes back to what you said about how people should ideally pay for an e-mail account that is more likely to be trusted, and which they have a bit more control over.

[Moonchild]

The impression I get is that ISPs using this as a form of retention must be a lot more common outside the US, because it seems like ISPs here often don't terminate your e-mail account after you switch providers.

Yeah that's pretty much unheard of in Europe. if you no longer have a contract with the ISP, then they also won't continue providing you with a free e-mail service that was part of that contract. Also, there's a lot more provider competition in the EU; I know that in the US a lot of areas are pretty much fully monopolized by a single provider so they have the wiggle room to keep running e-mail for ex-customers since they can charge more for their regular customers than is reasonable/necessary.