Australia’s internet providers are ditching email, to the disgust of older customers
Australia’s internet providers are ditching email, to the disgust of older customers
As internet service providers such as Telstra and TPG curtail their email accounts, customers from older generations are facing a difficult shift
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
I’ve been having a related issue. Another ISP is selling gigabit for a lower price but my mom refuses to switch because she will lose her ISP issued email address. The lesson to be learned is to never use your ISP’s email service.
You should also use your own domain, then you can switch between email service providers without losing your e-mails address.
The biggest issues is that most people don't want to spend even $20 a year on email.
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.
Nah, they offer email only accounts. Ihug doesn't even exist any more and I haven't used their service since dialup, but still got the email
This is another example of ageism. The key characteristic here is not that they are older but they use an ISP provided email address. They could be 24 with an ISPaccount they’ve used for ten years.
It’s also an example of media stereotyping older people as somehow being affected more, implying they can’t/won’t switch, are somehow not savvy enough with technology to cope and to be less capable.
Look at it this way. If you’ve had an email address for 30 years. How many times did they move house or change car or change phone number. Did they cope with that? Of course they did. And it’s more disruptive when you move physically
The UN is campaigning to stop older people being stigmatised as set in their ways, unable to cop and technologically disadvantaged. Not only does it penalise older people but distracts from the real issue. The issue here isn’t their age but the lack of portability of email addresses which are used as a means of identity.
media stereotyping older people as somehow being affected more, implying they can’t/won’t switch, are somehow not savvy enough with technology to cope and to be less capable
because that's all significantly more likely to be the case if you're over a certain age
obviously exceptions exist, but it's a stereotype that exists for a reason. if you haven't spent your life using computers on a daily basis then obviously you're not going to be as adept with them
You are perpetuating stereotypes. They have been using computers for at least 30 years as they’ve had the email address that long.
What do you think this certain age is ? What evidence do you have to counter the UN campaign and the actual research? I’m happy to consider alternative viewpoints. Is this something that just seems logical to you?
One option would be to allow the migrated users to setup a mail forwarder for free. If you don't pay you can only access the forwarder configuration, which would be enough for most use cases.
I think it's safe to say this wasn't meant to benefit the users. The whole point is that they're captive and they'll have to pay.
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.
This makes me not understand many of the complaints?
“It’s a nightmare trying to change logins at many places.”
"I’ve got to go to all of those and say I’ve changed my email address."
Just.. keep using the same email address?
Theyd have to pay to keep it. Thats the whole point. Would you want to suddenly start paying for email? Or having to change every contact email for you to a new one?
I agree they make it seem exceptionally dramatic, but I do understand the annoyance of having a service included (an email address) and soon I need to pay for it. That is extremely annoying.
I agree that that would be frustrating except that:
- They don't have to pay (there's an ad-supported version, in line with e.g. Gmail's free service).
- That isn't the part that they [the quoted complaints] complained about.
Even changing your email address isn't that hard. I used to only have 1 Gmail address for everything before I realized it was a bad idea to have all my eggs in the Google basket.
I changed maybe, 100? services to my new email addresses and it took about 30 minutes tops.
I went through changing a variety of sites recently. That was 300+ sites. It took a few days (not nonstop) and I am still not finished. For the majority of sites it's straight forward but for some they don't let you change your email address without contacting support. I've also had some that just don't let you change at all. For those I have requested deletions. I still have sites waiting to be swapped and others deleted. I've been waiting since February.
Honestly my best advice for anyone looking to do this is to look at using at least one alias. Ideally an alias per site (which I have been doing). That way my email address on sites will never need to be changed again but I am now free to move mailbox providers (which this week I pointed all my aliases to fastmail as I am looking to get away from Google's Gmail). That move took 5 seconds.
Having worked on email servers in the past, I can say that emails is one of the worst means of communication available today. It's totally unreliable, complicated to secure, can easily be a vector for all kinds of dangerous malware. It's used everywhere for everything yet is absolutely terrible as a communication tool.
I genuinely think we NEED email to die and start with a blank slate.
To secure an email domain you have to implement SPF, DKIM DMARC and all kinds of others add-ons to emails to barely control the amount of spam and phishing that will target you.
Emails will often be silently refused by a recipient mail server because they were falsely identified as spam. So the recipient will not know someone attempted to contact them. Spammers are still having lucrative businesses despite the 3 security add-ons I mentioned before and many domains are still completely unprotected. And these have been the guidelines for decades. And it's still recommended to always check the spam folder because everyone needs to keep in mind that emails are unreliable. They are an outdated technology like the fax machines are/were. By the way, even a fax machine is more reliable than an email.
Filtering spam will always mean false positives and lost emails. And it's quite expensive to get a good anti spam filter.
Emails are bad. They need to go. If anything remotely looks like an acceptable replacement we have to go for it.
/rant
I realize this comment is a bit off topic. I just wanted to point out that despite being heavily used emails are on paper an absolutely terrible communication medium. Maybe it's not such a bad thing if people use it less.
Genuinely, the most frustrating technology I had to admin so far and by a long shot.
I kind of get why a business would want to stop providing email services. They are so annoyingly complicated to host.
We need a black hole for all the scammers and advertisers to send stuff to. If we get rid of email, they’ll switch to things we actually use.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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