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Verizon.net 'Gets Out Of The Email Business' (networkworld.com)
"We have decided to close down our email business," Verizon has announced -- in a move which affects 4.5 million accounts. Slashdot reader tomservo84 writes:
Strangely enough, I didn't find out about this from Verizon, itself, but SiriusXM, who sent me an email saying that since I have a Verizon.net email address on file, I'd have to update it because they were getting rid of their email service. I thought it was a bad phishing attempt at first...
Network World reports that customers are being notified "on a rolling basis... Once customers are notified, they are presented with a personal take-action date that is 30 days from the original notification." But even after that date, verizon.net email addresses can be revived using AOL Mail. "Over the years we've realized that there are more capable email platforms out there," Verizon concedes.
"Migration is going well," a Verizon spokesperson told Network World. "I don't have any stats to share, but customers seem to appreciate that they have several choices, including an option that keeps their Verizon.net email address intact."
Network World reports that customers are being notified "on a rolling basis... Once customers are notified, they are presented with a personal take-action date that is 30 days from the original notification." But even after that date, verizon.net email addresses can be revived using AOL Mail. "Over the years we've realized that there are more capable email platforms out there," Verizon concedes.
"Migration is going well," a Verizon spokesperson told Network World. "I don't have any stats to share, but customers seem to appreciate that they have several choices, including an option that keeps their Verizon.net email address intact."
The big problem is that for years, like, a LOT of years, you built your entire online existence on a single email address - and for many people that address was the one they got from their ISP.
Forums, Facebook, online games, pretty much EVERYTHING ties into your email address. And you do know what happens if you want to change the email attached to an account, right?
Yeah. They email the existing address on file to confirm. If you no longer have access to that address you're screwed.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
First post... AOL SUCKS O'Doyle Rules!!
Since their customers can migrate to AOL, and they own AOL, they are not getting out of the email business at all. They are just moving customers to a different division of Verizon. In fact, the verizon.net email addresses will work on aol servers, so they aren't even saving the cost of the .net domain! If anything, they are probably increasing their costs. Maybe they are getting ready to sell AOL, and want to show that AOL is growing?
I wonder what the implications will be for Yahoo Mail once Verizon finishes acquiring Yahoo. Aside from @yahoo.com accounts, the Yahoo Mail platform powers most of the baby bells' ISP email. Mail for users @sbcglobal.net, @bellsouth.net, @pacbell.net, etc. is all part of the Yahoo Mail service whether the users realize it or not. I can't see Verizon being too benevolent about taking on "competing" ILEC/bell users' mail hosting. And if they were impressed with the Yahoo Mail platform, you'd think they would have waited and migrated their own users there instead of to AOL.
What a tangled fucking web.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
They can always cancel it, be bought out, or you could end up going with another ISP.
Always get an email address on your own domain or a commercial one like iCloud or Gmail.
And now, Yahoo as well.
>"Migration is going well," a Verizon spokesperson told Network World.
"Why, I haven't heard a single complaint from anyone with a verizon.net email address!"
Are they selling the email business - so the next guys can do whatever they want regardless of the Verizon privacy policy?
Yeah, I feel the same way so years ago I chose Yahoo for email... Shit.
"Over the years we've realized that there are more capable email platforms out there," Verizon concedes.
I love GMail and I am sure Google wouldn't be hurt acquiring all those accounts.
My beef with GMail is in its "ugliness" by default, which makes one employ extensions to make it useful.
I love the way Outlook is laid out. In order to have this layout in Gmail, I need to use some experimental add-on!
Following an email thread is just too confusing. I am still learning how to use it myself...
I find Gmail colors too "bland" for my liking and options provided are a gimmick in my opinion.
Why can't I choose what labels are displayed on the left? I sometimes want to hide everything else apart from what has to do with email and to an extent, chat.
For Verizon, the demise of its email service is good riddance.
Still got my 1995 hotmail account, use it everyday
I once did business with a company with an AOL email address. I emailed the president with that sentiment. I have an IEEE alias account that was forwarded to the Verizon email address that I had for two decades. It now forwards to Gmail. I was also miffed when Verizon modified their free personal web pages to a paid service many years ago. Dumped that quickly, also, since I have my own host.
I love the way Outlook is laid out. In order to have this layout in Gmail, I need to use some experimental add-on!
Or... you could set up your Gmail account as an IMAP account in Outlook.
I remember back in the 90's and early 2000's when some websites would actually reject my Hotmail email account because it wasn't "permanent" like my AOL email. Well, guess which one of those emails I still have after 20 years?
I love the way Outlook is laid out. In order to have this layout in Gmail, I need to use some experimental add-on!
Or... you could set up your Gmail account as an IMAP account in Outlook.
Microsoft would love to help you with this!
Not quite.
Always get your own domain, period. Never let anybody else own your address.
And that means your own domain. Not one shared with anybody else. Not one shared with your spouse; you may break up with your spouse (it happened to me; good thing it was amicable). Not one that belongs to your business; you may sell that business.
Have a kid? Register a domain.
Unless you're dirt poor, you're crazy to do it any other way.
Can keep their e-mail address, Verizon has just pushed the e-mail infrastructure over to AOL. I'm quite sure a lot of customers are confused but my 70 year old mother managed the transition on her own just fine. Apparently Verizon did provide instructions that were not lies.
She did need help re-configuring her Android phone, but she got the rest done without any help.
This is certainly annoying, but Verizon actually appeared to handle it reasonably, for once.
A thousand pounds of wood moving at 300 feet per minute. Don't get in the way.
What a colossal failure your email system is when you turn it off and suggest people back to AOL Mail. Has the universe, changed? Do two wrongs now make a right?
They own Yahoo. Does anyone edit Slashdot anymore?
Verizon owns the lab that invented the internet, but they can't even run their own email server anymore, they won't install fiber optic service any more, and they still don't support IPv6.
What pathetic losers.
cuz google never kills off its free services.. that has never happened, nope.
in gmail's case, though, you are pretty "safe", where "safe" means the service won't be going anywhere anytime soon (certainly not "safe" as in your data is safe from greedy corporate databases and government goons. that ship sailed a long time ago). google has figured out a way to efficiently provide the service while milking it for what it can -- valuable data on YOU, your contacts, your correspondence, and the ability to cross-reference with dozens of other data sources it has at its disposal to build a database even spy agencies drool over.
I have an ansible scrip over in github that will do up to 2047 servers as a slum lord email hosting service that will handle over 16 million domain names with unlimited user accounts on various cloud services. (AWS, Azure, Google, Linode, Rackspace)
Now I know why it suddenly got 20 downloads.
I'm kidding of course. I do have such a playbook, but I only share it with folks I know are not spammers.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Haha my wife and I do have our own domain names. Not because of any danger of breaking up, just because personal domain names rock.
ISPs are only in the email business at all because they were the first to offer the service. Now that big national IMAP systems like Gmail have become the norm, ISPs would rather ditch their trouble-prone POP servers. Don't be that grandma who holds up the process by hanging onto that rickety old email address.
Microsoft would love to help you with this!
Pretty sure that's referring to the shitty Windows 10 Mail application (the one that asks you for your email address and password on the account setup screen and doesn't allow you to manually configure the setup in some cases). Not Office Outlook.
That was originally part of my submission..."I guess it's time to switch to gmail. Hopefully they won't orphan it any time soon."
Agile Spaceport - You will never find a more wretched hive of scrum and villainy. We must be cautious.
I have no idea why Verizon picked the corpse of a company like AOL, probably the lowest bidder for the email business. What is more important, Verizon now offers less service in their Internet package and therefore should charge less. So far they refuse. Do we really need to write to Lowell McAdam to make this point? What's next, can only view pages but not submit form data because others do it better? I went through the transition process and while it is not that difficult to do, they could have documented it better and it still was way too complicated. As annoying were the many crap emails AOL sent since then, but those died down after about a week. I don't know if AOL email service is any better than Verizon's. I use a desktop email client anyway. More features, more powerful, and void of advertising.
Look at GMX. Use it as one email platform for 20 years now and never had any issues.
I don't understand what you're saying about the cost of the domain. .net domains are cheap and they would not have got rid of the domain regardless of what action they took with email.
Just because you can't see the result externally, doesn't mean there isn't major changes internally. Since AOL and Verizon were separate businesses they had their own infrastructure for services like email. Verizon likely decided there was little reasoning in maintaining both infrastructures.
This process is removing redundant services and merging them into a single which should be easier to handle one infrastructure instead of two which in turn is more cost effective.
Once they take care of this transition, maybe they will decide what to do with their once again redundant services/infrastructure they've acquired by purchasing Yahoo.
What they said:
"Over the years we've realized that there are more capable email platforms out there..."
What they meant:
"Over the years we've realized that this platform is not making enough money."
But you still need someplace where you can point the identification for that domain. Domains are trivially easy to spoof, steal, poison, or otherwise make unavailable to you.
Everything is tied to my Yahoo account---Ticketmaster, airlines, HMO, and now I have to change all?? I still have EarthLink accounts from 1999, including springmail and mindspring. I guess I'll start using them again. They don't get spam and the NSA doesn't track either.