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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.
I've always thought that using an ISP-provided email address is a form of vendor lock-in. Want to change ISPs? Then you will lose the email address you've had for so many years.
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?
Yea must better to lock into Google. Your best interests are definitely in their mind for the zero dollars/month you give them.
Whilst I tend to agree that using Google isn't the best idea; you're wrong here - you can set up google mail on your own domain, if you want to move you can just move whilst keeping the domain.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
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?
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.