Transferring E-Mail Addresses to Another ISP (No thanks to Tiscali)

tonymc

Having had a rant over the catch 22 I am in with the Tiscali/Talk Talk charge "alignement" fiasco :mad:, when I called BT to discuss cancelling my calling plan with them in order to migrate to Talk Talk, I was told that it is possible to keep your "old" e-mail address if moving over to another ISP.

Can anyone confirm if this is correct, or is it a bit of sales hype to get me to sign up with BT??

Nilrem

It's rubbish.

Your email address is generally linked to your ISP, unless it's hotmail/gmail or similar, ot you pay for your own domain (in which case it's part of that package).

I've never heard of someone being able to move their email from one ISP to another, at best it might remain active on the original ISP's system for a while (going back to Virgin dial up days, as long as you dialed in once every six months your email address with them kept working).

scottishblondie

if it's a tiscali address you want to keep you're totally out of luck. my parents left them a few months ago and there wasn't even a grace period. on the day they changed we lost access to our email accounts, and were told we couldn't even have access after that to pull down local copies

mrJ_5

you could possibly keep it if you downgrade the account to pay as you go

alternatively, it's a good time to move away from ISP tied email to Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, or even G-Mail ... or simply pay a little for a domain name each year and have your own personal email address!

tonymc

Thanks for the replies - I suspected that it may have been some sales hype, but you can never be sure!!

robt_2

This is the reason why you should never use the email address tied to your ISP as your main email address.

Jemma-T

Get a Hotmail.co.uk address. You can keep that for a very long time.

Why should a private company keep supplying a service for free? Microsoft manage it with Hotmail but they use spam, adverts and charge for lots of their other products.

Effervescent

If its a Tiscali email address then after about 6 months, you will be able to reactivate the same address and pick your mail up from their website.

scottishblondie

Effervescent wrote: »

If its a Tiscali email address then after about 6 months, you will be able to reactivate the same address and pick your mail up from their website.

hey do you mean i can reactivate the email account and get mail back that was on the servers when we left them or do you mean sign up to use that email address again?

if it's the former how do i do that? i had a look at the website and i can't figure out how to do either.

Jemma-T

Tiscali may not have full access to your email but they do have some access as they must retain it under law.

You'll have to email their tech/customer service and ask very nicely and see if they'll divert or allow you to download older email by POP. This should possible with POP if it's still there. POP email http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pop_email

scottishblondie

I'm afraid I tried that on the day the ISP switched over, Outlook couldn't connect with the pop server. I also emailed Tiscali support and they told me I couldn't have any access at all since we weren't customers any more.

There wasn't anything vital on the account, I did pull my emails down fairly regularly. I just would have liked a little more time to wrap things up!