Yes, except for Telstra who have done their level best to kill ‘BigPond’, but have reluctantly agreed to keep the mail side working. Sort of?
They even tried a migration to Outlook.com and then Telstra Mail.
There was an option or work around (seems like yesterday) to pay to keep the old bigpond email addresses functional, providing you still had a Telstra service. Eg annual fee for a dialup service.
Now there is no dialup and no charge while the legacy accounts, are probably redirected, as you log into the web mail through Telstra Mail using your bigpond ID.
That would not be a good way of doing it however. It would be slow, inefficient and unreliable.
If you are going to do it at all then all obsolete email addresses must forward to the single current email address. How you force users to make that happen is another question though.
Also, this kind of email forwarding has problems with anti-spam detection - because an email sent by the original sender appears to be coming from a host that could never validly send email for that domain. There are workarounds for that but unsurprisingly that opens up other problems. For that reason, it can be better if the obsolete ISP simply provides a referral to a more current email address (and doesn’t accept the email at all).
See also my comments from 2 years ago - nothing has changed
Putting such discussion aside , it would be interesting to know what percentage of normal email is at least attempting to be secure by using something like GPG/PGP or S-MIME.
The former involves doing nerdy things. Glenn Greenwald would have had access to Edward Snowden a lot quicker had he been able/willing to set up secure email.
Mobiles phone numbers are portable. What needs to be done to make email addresses portable eg Bigpond Optusnet etcetera. It’s extremely messy changing say another provider and losing your email address. Can Choice help?
In relation to portable email addresses, it is not possible to port RSP email addresses from one provider to another. The only solution is to use a portable email address independent of that provided by RSPs.
I have moved your post to an existing thread which also addresses the same question and provides solutions. It is worth reading the posts in this thread.
If you have been relying on a RSP email address and plan to change RSP providers, then it may be time to look at using a portable email address. You will need to go back though emails to work out who has been contacting you on the RSP email address and notify them of the change in contact details.
Thank you that’s the advice I have. I could keep Optusnet for 90 days and I may, we have no NBN now for three days. I’d like to know why it is not possible to keep the email address. I’ve read the posts, I get it, if only I’d known over twenty years ago.
If your ISP/RSP provides your email address, it is basically running the service that provides email to that address. An address of me@telstra.com.au would automatically be directed to Telstra’s servers because it is within the Telstra domain.
You may be able to keep your address even after leaving your service provider, but they will charge you for that privilege. You can definitely download and keep your email history, but of course you then need to track back who uses that email address to contact you and update them with your new email address - and expect to lose a few contacts along the way.
In the early days of the Internet most email services came from the ISP, but this has gradually changed as companies like Yahoo and Google started providing free email services and as people realised that keeping their email with their ISP locked them in.
It is in theory possible for your current email provider to forward your emails on to you new provider, but it would be extremely messy and costly to the old email provider - with no obvious benefit. Just imagine in 20 years, if you are providing email services to 1,000 people and each person has changed their email service provider twice in that time. You would have to reroute all of an individual’s email to the ‘new’ provider, and after the next change that provider would in turn have to forward those emails on to the next provider. A lot of fuss and mess - would anyone do that for free?
If you want to think about it another way, imagine if Australia Post delivered parcels based upon where people said they lived. A parcel might be addressed to Joe Bloggs, reference 50743834, and every time Mr Bloggs moves he just tellls Australia Post where he will be and all mail addressed to that reference number get delivered to him wherever he happens to live. In theory, great. In practice, a privacy and record-keeping nightmare.
Then of course what happens with companies that go out of business? My first ISP picked up my subscription fee from my front door once a month and is long out of business - there is nowhere that can forward those emails now.
The RSP.com.au email address sits on and uses their mail server. When you pay your RSP for internet/NBN, they offer to provide an email address hosted on their servers. When you move to a new RSP, they possibly will also offer the same service as part of the internet/NBN package.
As you no longer are paying for a service for your current RSP.com.au email address, you are no longer paying for the email service through them.
To have a portable email address, these would need to be managed independent of the RSPs…possibly on a main email server for the whole of Australia (individuals, businesses etc) so that any email address is unique and attached to an individual (rather than a RSP). This possibly would come at an additional cost, and many would not like such an approach.
Why have a main server for all emails in Australia (would pose a potential security risk and be targeted by hackers etc), when free portable emails exist? This is why free portable emails are recommended instead on relying on a email provided by a RSP. Relying on RSP emails also in some ways encourages customers to stay as it can be frustrating processes to get contact details changed by anyone who knows this RSP address as your email address.
Thank you for your replies much appreciated. Another issue for me maybe working out what I need to do in Outlook my head doesn’t know these things. But we have a PC man to help if we choose to change.
You can have your ISP and your email hosted by different companies. You will have to pay them both of course but the email alone might be $5 a month. This will allow you to change ISP and keep your email.
Most RSPs will have guides about how to set up their email accounts in popular email software applications and smart phone apps. Some are very easy to do if the RSP settings are standard and identified by the email application. Most free portable email providers will also have their setting registered to make setting these up in common email software/apps very easy - most will have easy to follow guides on how to set up their accounts in Outlook. In most cases, all you need to do is have your username and password to complete the setup - the software should do the rest. If you use a IP buff to give you a hand, it is a very easy process and don’t take much time.
It is worth considering a portable email address in the future (instead of a RSP email address)) such as those outlined in the above thread or found through internet searches so such as these. Different free portable email have different features. It is possibly best to get one that will also work with POP/IMAP (most will do this but is worth checking before making a decision). This means you can continue to use your existing Outlook to check, send and receive emails.
When we sold our previous residence in Cairns and moved to NSW in 2014, we arranged for Internode to keep our email addresses active. I think the fee was around $30 a year.
When we moved back to Cairns a few months later and bought our current home, we signed up again for Internode ADSL, now NBN, and our email addresses were folded back into the service.
One solution which costs a few dollars more to avoid the inconvenience of changing your email addresses, unless you really don’t like your existing provider.
… not to mention being even more unreliable and unprivate than it already is. For example, your email now has an extra party who might block it as spam - and your email now has an extra party who might scan it for the potential of advertising to you.
Or think about it another way that may reflect things more accurately:
Imagine if you could never change your postal address but each time you moved residential address, that set up a permanent forwarding from your current address to your new address. By the time you are, say, 50 years of age you have had a dozen different addresses.
When a parcel is sent to the address that you occupied when you were 4 years of age, it forwards through all the addresses that you have had since then and yes it will eventually get to your current address.
Now imagine how sketchy this would get if some of those residential addresses were overseas.
Now imagine that many of the players in the email game are in fact overseas companies. OK, that particular issue may not come up if this scheme only applied to Australian ISPs i.e. once you go with a dedicated email service provider, no “right of forwarding” applies.
Encrypted email (encrypted for you as recipient) may stop working - since that is encrypted for the destination email address (on some old domain), not your current address - and you may not have kept all the necessary private keys for all the addresses that you ever had. But “noone” uses encrypted email anyway.
The problems with this idea are almost too numerous to cover - so that means that the Australian government will love it.
You often can retain an RSP provided email address even after leaving them. This may require that you pay an email retention payment to the RSP. You need to speak to their support team and discuss if it is possible, I retain 3 addresses with different providers. Two of them require no payment, the third costs me $3 a month to retain it.
Not having been an Optus customer I can’t speak to this myself but from a friend who has done so, they can provide a $5 email only account but it may be a pain to get someone to agree to it.
I think easiest answer with Optus is to get a free email account eg gmail, yahoo, Microsoft one (hotmail.com, outlook.comlive.com and similar) then forward all your Optus mails to the new account. Reply to all those you wish to keep in contact with advising of your new email address.
Actually, I have given some thought to physical mail forwarding and it is relatively easy - but has some privacy implications.
So - at birth you are issued with your unique ID - let’s call it an Australia Card. That ID is linked to your physical postal address. Each time you move, you update Australia Post with your new postal address, and it updates its systems once.
There would possibly be some mail that goes to your old address due to timing issues, but all the new resident need do is shove it back in the letterbox and it would find its way to the right place second time around.
Mail from overseas? Doesn’t need to identify your postal address, just your Australia Card number and once it arrives in Australia the postal service would route it correctly.
Parcels through privately operated delivery services? Those privately operated services would need access to the Australia Card system in order to deliver. Nothing really new there - just a change from physical and digital maps to a database that converts an ID to a physical location.
Issues?
If you have escaped from an abusive partner you will need to obtain a new Australia Card - but if this is only used for postal services such a change should be reasonably easy to make.
Businesses will also need Australia Cards.
Anyone with access to the central database and your ID can track where you live. (Totally unlike something like your Medicare Card number or your tax file number .)
Potential for fraudulent redirection of mail, so you would need some controls on how the card is issued and the address updated.
All sorts of things I have overlooked.
All of that said, this would be a lot easier than redirecting email.
(This is going to be a horribly confusing post because the topic is about email addresses not postal addresses but the analogy I made was about the latter.)
Issues?
You can only have one email address? I use multiple email addresses for tracking leaks and also for organising and prioritising email and also for controlling identity. With that background …
would be the spammers. Once the spammers get your address (email/postal), you will be spammed forever because you only have one address and can’t change it.
Some of this I suppose falls into the category of “privacy implications”.
It isn’t really obvious how this would work with overseas senders who may not have access to Australia’s central database, who might not be willing to use a proprietary system that is unique to Australia, and Australia might not want overseas entities to have access to that database anyway.
It isn’t really obvious how the X zillion “legacy” email addresses would fit in with this either.
Your idea works better where we have a single monopoly letter delivery service or even say with mobile number porting where we have a very small number of players (3). Once you have thousands of players, most of whom are overseas, it becomes more difficult to go off in your own little direction.
As you have necrod this topic, I don’t know whether I already suggested this but the low effort way of solving the problem, sort of, is to ban Australian ISPs from offering an email service to new customers.
Sorry, I obviously was not sufficiently clear. This is only for physical mail - email would be a nightmare for all sorts of security/privacy/interoperability reasons. As for mail from overseas, you give your correspondent your ‘Australia Card’ number; once the mail reaches Australia it will automatically be sent to the correct location. This is effectively how the postal service works already, except it uses postcodes and physical street names.
As for spammers, I already get junk mail but it is nothing like the volume of junk email.
I suppose one problem I would have is remembering my street address. “Yeah, come over and we’ll order a few pizzas. I’m at… uh… well, it’s near…”. Of course, the pizza delivery company would need access to the ‘Australia Card’ database in order to deliver my pizzas. Maybe I could ask them where I live?
I can hear the response now - “RESTRAINT OF TRADE” (and free speech, and all these other things that really are not actually clearly dealt with by our Constitution but would be raised regardless).
There would need to be some sort of grandfathering clause to provide for existing email accounts, and new entrants in the ISP market would clearly be at a competitive disadvantage because they cannot offer each customer 300 free email addresses.
Suggesting one uses an ‘Australia Card Number’ freely
We’ve used a PO Box for 40 years. Would it be more appropriate to set aside a specific Post Code for a universal postal service? But only for those who see the need to keep the one life long public postal address. Possibly simpler for those using a local Box for delivery.
It would add an annual fee for the unique Alphanumeric pseudo box number that is never recycled. It would need to cover the costs of the supporting system. For as long as you pay the fee all your mail goes to a centralised mail depot. The bot reads the universal Post Code, reads the ID Code, looks up the current forwarding details, and sends it onwards according to the lookup. Plenty of scope for jokes that ask - “how many bots does it take to loose your mail?”.
P.S.
There are some parallels in how the internet decides on how to move packets of data around, the old corporate private mail bag and common address practices of some Govt Services.
One vision of the near future is mail delivery to the door will eventually cease. With the exemption of physical items it will be digitally connected only. For physical items the options will be divided between courier to the gate or door (fully costed profit driven enterprise) or pick up from an AP box/locker (fully costed profit driven) near you.
If universal email was only that simple. It is if one chooses to register a domain, and pay for a hosted service plus independent backup. It’s not free, but it is portable.
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