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

Takmon

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?

As others have said it's very unprofessional to use an ISP email address for your business. 

Setup your own separate email address now and change everything over to the new one. You can then keep the BT one active for a year or longer and catch any companies you have missed in the change over. It's not actually that difficult to do it and doesn't take more than a few hours of work in total to change everything.