Why isn't an email address portable, like a mobile phone number?

ARDaw

I am a rabid switcher and money-saver, except in one area - broadband. And the reason is that BT have got my email address. I'd love to switch to Vodafone City Fibre, for example, but BT has me hostage. I have used my BT email for work and life for so long that it would be an enormous headache to change it, and significantly disruptive for my business. I could pay £7.50 pcm to keep it, and probably still save money overall, but this begs the question - why isn't there a campaign to make email addresses portable, like mobile phone numbers? Surely this is a major market barrier to switching - and we are all about switching here, right? Why have I never heard Martin shouting about this? I remember seeing a suggestion a while back that Ofcom was examining this question, so does anyone know what happened to that?

Carrot007

Becuase of how it works.

You want your own email address then you will have to pay. Or use gmail or some non ISP based free solution for 90% of it.

Making email address's portable would require a complete change to the way the internet works. It is not going to happen. I'm sure that fact won't stop people as many "campaigns" care not about facts and more about what people want.

Hopefully ofgem examined it and decided it was ridiculous as it was not possible. Which is the right outcome. Though it would be rare for such bodies to actually get eh right answer and not something that causes far worse unintended consequences.

FWIW I assume you used a consumer email address for a business. This is also a violation of T&C's. And beyond that it looks very poor and would be the first -ve against you is you were in the running to get my business.

matelodave

You don't have to use your ISP's E-mail address but if you do then you have to accept the consequences of either changing it, losing it or paying to retain it you decide to change provider.

Use something like G-mail, Yahoo or Hotmail. They are all portable and don't rely on your ISP.

My Hotmail and G-mail addresses have been used with various ISP's over the past 20 years including SKY, TalkTalk, Tiscali, BT and work quite happily where ever I've been - even places like Pakistan, Russia and other far flung places.

Neil_Jones

ARDaw said:

I am a rabid switcher and money-saver, except in one area - broadband. And the reason is that BT have got my email address. I'd love to switch to Vodafone City Fibre, for example, but BT has me hostage. I have used my BT email for work and life for so long that it would be an enormous headache to change it, and significantly disruptive for my business. I could pay £7.50 pcm to keep it, and probably still save money overall, but this begs the question - why isn't there a campaign to make email addresses portable, like mobile phone numbers? Surely this is a major market barrier to switching - and we are all about switching here, right? Why have I never heard Martin shouting about this? I remember seeing a suggestion a while back that Ofcom was examining this question, so does anyone know what happened to that?

There is nothing to shout about.

Its common knowledge that if you move providers and have an email with them you will almost certainly lose it.  And it not a "barrier" to switching in any way, as you do not have to use the email of the provider.

Yes it may not look as good to have a Yahoo/Hotmail/Gmail account, but you can move providers until the cows come home and they'll continue to work as they are not provider specific.

JJ_Egan

My email is portable  . thats my email not an ISPs email .

Thousands of MSE users have no problem switching to another email services .

hermante

On the face of it, it should be relatively simple to make UK ISPs provide redirects in perpetuity for email addresses that use their domains. But what happens if they go bust?

basill

Its a wrench to change your email but will set you free. To ease the transfer Gmail can easily be set up to collect (and send ) mail from your old BT account as long as it remains active, this way you will not miss mail from customers and can gradually move everyone to your new address.  Once you are no longer receiving mail from customers, banks etc on the old  address you can stop paying to keep you old BT address alive.

onomatopoeia99

ARDaw said:

I am a rabid switcher and money-saver, except in one area - broadband. And the reason is that BT have got my email address. I'd love to switch to Vodafone City Fibre, for example, but BT has me hostage. I have used my BT email for work and life for so long that it would be an enormous headache to change it, and significantly disruptive for my business. I could pay £7.50 pcm to keep it, and probably still save money overall, but this begs the question - why isn't there a campaign to make email addresses portable, like mobile phone numbers? Surely this is a major market barrier to switching - and we are all about switching here, right? Why have I never heard Martin shouting about this? I remember seeing a suggestion a while back that Ofcom was examining this question, so does anyone know what happened to that?

Please go away and learn about the domain name system, then come back and explain how you envisage this would work.  I recommend (and own) the grasshopper book, "DNS and BIND" published by O'Reilly.  That's only half the battle, you also need to understand SMTP and mail routing, so you should learn those things as well.

unforeseen

hermante said:

On the face of it, it should be relatively simple to make UK ISPs provide redirects in perpetuity for email addresses that use their domains. But what happens if they go bust?

Care to tell us how that could be done so simply? 
Especially without breaking international standards. 

Mickey666

I was with Virgin Internet from the days when everything was dial-up.   When ISDN arrived I got that and no longer needed to dial-up, which was a condition of keeping my virgin.net address.  This was late 90s I think.   I ignored this and the address kept working, even though I was paying them nothing.  Virgin.net customers were eventually migrated to Virgin Media, which I could not use (no service in my area) so I had no contract with them and paid nothing.  In mid 2000s I moved, signed up with BT broadband and set up a bt internet email address and started using it, informing my important contacts about the change.  But I kept using my virgin.net account for unimportant things.

A few years ago, VM caught up with me and said my email would stop working within a month or so unless I signed up with them, which I couldn’t so I didn’t but the address kept working for another year or so. Finally it ended and the address was deleted.  Fine.  I noticed a big reduction in junk mail and it was actually quite refreshing to have ‘disappeared’ off probably hundreds of lists.
I’ve since changed my broadband so am paying £7.50 per month to retain my btinternet addresses, but I’m seriously thinking of changing again, mainly to ‘disappear’ from all the junk mailing lists again.
It’s really not such a big deal to change email addresses - no more difficult than changing a physical address when moving home.

hermante

unforeseen said:

hermante said:

On the face of it, it should be relatively simple to make UK ISPs provide redirects in perpetuity for email addresses that use their domains. But what happens if they go bust?

Care to tell us how that could be done so simply? 
Especially without breaking international standards. 

Any emails received at the ISP's domain would be forwarded to a new email address of your choosing. The UK ISPs would need to provide login details so that you can change the email address you forward to.

It would be just like how bank account switches work, the old bank has to keep the old account number active to receive payments, but they are immediately forwarded on to the new bank.