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

Carrot007

hermante said:

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.

And something like £7.50 would be a reasonable monthly charge for doing so yes?

In fact OPs £7.50 option is better as it would allow them to also send mail from their old address.

Or are you under the delusion that forwarding should be free?

And this is nothing like how bank account switching works. They only keep the old number active for a while. And their systems work completely different anyway.

onomatopoeia99

hermante said:

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. 

Email volumes are much higher than bank transfer volumes, and old bank account numbers don't exist in perpetuity after a switch.
Email is processed based on every element of the SMTP envelope, which the eventual recipient's server wouldn't see.  Spam filtering makes extensive use of the envelop and could therefore only effectively be done by the operator of the server for the original domain, but why should they?

Forwarding is not redirection, as SMTP has no redirection method in response to the RCPT command, so all the work remains with the provider of the original address, plus some extra work on forwarding email on rather than providing a mailbox.

While this could all be set up, it would be entirely reasonable for the operator of the original address to make a charge for such a service.  £7.50/month would be reasonable. 

iniltous

AFAIK, you can have basic access to your BT email address for free after you leave, if you want to keep ‘premium’ access etc , you pay , the amount isn’t regulated , BT set what they consider to be reasonable ( no doubt pitched at a level to discourage those who don’t really want to leave, another reason not to ) but switching providers it’s no barrier , you either pay or don’t pay for the whistles and bells, basic is ‘free’,  ...some ISP don’t offer the choice, you leave, they delete your account, the OP desires another ISP, have they checked out the email situation should they join then subsequently leave ?

tehone

Mickey666 said:

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.

I still have my original virgin.net email addresses

But the best portable email address is just to buy your own domain.

With regard to the person talking about "email portability", the issue is less around the practicality of redirecting/forwarding incoming email, but how best to do outgoing email and the requirements for that.

tehone

hermante said:

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. 

What happens when the ISP goes bust, there are plenty of ISPs that no longer exist and weren't taken over by a bigger one - and would it only count for .UK domain names? Who pays for the tech support to manage people and verify their identity when they forget their login details?

As I've already mentioned some of my first email addresses were .NET

littleboo

I always think that a business using an ISP's or free email address is a bit cheap and unprofessional, it's relatively cheap to get a domain name for your business.

DCFC79

You really should have done more reasearch into this OP.

pelirocco

I've always  been able to access my bt Internet  .com mail, even when I've changed provider 

Mickey666

pelirocco said:

I've always  been able to access my bt Internet  .com mail, even when I've changed provider 

I think you can keep a single btinternet.com address for free.  However, if you’ve also created additional addresses (up to 11 with BT I think) then you need to pay for the ‘premium’ service to keep them, which is £7.50 month.

cymruchris

It could be a good time to get a cheap domain and host your own email paying a reasonable annual fee - then slowly migrate all your emails over to it - take as long as you like working the change - and then when you're happy it's all in place - you can go ahead and do a switch. Having your own domain of course means you can set up multiple email addresses, which in itself may allow you to start separating home and work.