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Telstra Bigpond To Use Outlook.com As Email Handler
New submitter sidevans writes "It looks like Australia's largest ISP is working closely with Microsoft and will soon be letting them handle customers emails using Outlook.com. The setup guide is available here. An interesting move, considering the National Broadband Network rollout is coming. What's in the future for other ISPs and how they handle email in Australia? Are the days of ISPs providing in-house email servers coming to an end?"
Why do ISPs still provide email?
There are lots of free and pay for email servers available. I say reduce my bill $1/year and get rid of it.
> Are the days of ISPs providing in-house
> email servers coming to an end?
Considering that AT&T farmed out their email to Yahoo about five years ago, I would say the answer is probably "yes." Or at least "yes, in some cases."
I know of very few people who use their ISP-supplied email addresses. One reason I quit using mine is because I've had 10 ISPs in the last 15 years. Out of all the things an ISP can provide me, an email account is probably the least useful.
Whenever I get an email with a bunch of recipients, I look at all the addresses and I'd say maybe 1/4 are using email from an ISP. (And of those, probably half are AOL.) The rest are mostly split between gmail, yahoo, and hotmail.
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Are the days of ISPs providing in-house email servers coming to an end?
In my experience, ISPs provide at best, a second class email service and I would be surprised if it was anything more than a necessary evil for them.
Microsoft, Google et al can provide a product that is fully integrated across all devices and easily accessed around the world. How many valuable ISP customers are using ISP provided email anyway?
Telstra have traditionally worked closely with Microsoft, and are resellers of their products. This is just business as usual for them.
On one hand you have a massive, monopolistic company that has held back competition in the industry (but whose influence is now waning), while the other company is Microsoft. It seems like an obvious match.
What I don't understand is why there is any reference to the NBN in the summary?
Really having your email on somebody else's server is just a bad way of doing things.
It's doens't give you the same legal protection as having your stuff in your home. It makes you beholden to somebody else for your email address. And it slows down delivery considerably.
Best to just run your own server.
In other news, the U.S. Postal Service is partnering up with local garbage dumps in an effort to reduce its costs, clear landfill space and bring you fresher junk mail than ever before. While some people will grumble about the security and public health implications of re-delivering old junk mail that has already been thrown out, others have pointed out that they weren't using the service anyway.
Outlook.com still doesn't support IMAP, which is why I'll stick to my own email hosting solution.
Telstra started migrating Bigpuddle customers to Live late last year.
Lots of ISPs have been doing something similar all over the world, for a very simple reason:
The profit margin in providing internet service is miniscule. And people expect more and more from email.
15 years ago, you'd get POP3 and a mailbox quota of maybe 20MB. If you were lucky, you might also get some sort of web-based email, but it was usually pretty primitive by modern standards.
Today, people expect a sophisticated web-based service that they can also use with their smartphone and there's still quite a few people who want to use something like Outlook (and so need IMAP). Yet the profit margin per-customer per-month after you've met the costs in providing a DSL line and backhaul to the Internet is something stupid like £1. They're being expected to setup, support and maintain something comparable with GMail for £1/user/month. Well, less than £1/user/month because you still need to make some profit.
Even a Google Apps for Business account is £2.75 per user per month.
No wonder they want to stop providing email, you simply can't do a good job unless you specialise in it.
Microsoft has no monopoly in this area, they're not acting aggressively or anticompetitively, and they're not doing a crappy job. They're also no more likely to be hacked than the competition. And Google isn't exactly saintly anymore. Sure, you can expect that there will be some security breach in the future; there always is in basically every system, and the competition isn't going to be any more immune.
Ok, sure, you don't want to give money to Microsoft. But this is a WEB SERVICE. It's not the same as installing Windows on your PC and letting Microsoft take control of what you can compute. It's email, and it does a good job for most people. If you need to meet some other requirements, you can set up your own email server. But that's you, not Joe User who wants to send photos to grandma.
Anyhow, so this ISP probably evaluated multiple solutions, including Google and Microsoft, and decided that Microsoft was going to give them the best value (them, not necessarily their customers). Sucks for Google, good for Telstra, basically indifferent for most of their users.