TPG has made the decision to stop providing email services. This change will help us focus on creating better experiences for our core products: internet and mobile.
You can opt-in to transfer your TPG email address to The Messaging Company. The Messaging Company will become your email provider and most importantly, you will not lose any emails, contacts or calendar events as part of the transfer.
They can’t tell us what The Messaging Company will charge for an email address. Previously this was “free” with TPG internet, or $27/pa without.
TPG had a “just don’t care” attitude to email, failing to provide any security and requesting the customer take all the risk of an insecure service by ticking the box. There were blatant scams in their name with links to fake websites sent from TPG accounts. The same message kept turning up over and over, and I kept reporting it, but nothing changed. Yet when I send myself a message from a gmail account it went to spam on the server. So did some hotmail accounts.
I just hope The Messaging Company is better. I have had these two email addresses for 30+ and 16years.
Since it is not their place to set prices for another company. To be fair, what they do say:
You won’t need to pay anything to use your TPG email address with The Messaging Company until 15 September 2024.
At least 60 days prior to 15 September 2024, The Messaging Company will contact customers with pricing options that will apply if you wish to continue using your iNet email address with The Messaging Company.
I guess you have to hope that they are competitive with other paid email services.
Is this applying across the whole TPG family (Voda, iiNet, Internode, …)? Or just TPG?
TPG’s iiNet brand has been relentless in pursuit of conversion of my city based broadband needs from an NBN service to their lower cost Vodafone wireless network.
It includes TPG, Internode, iinet and Westnet customers who used their ISP email account. All these email accounts will be migrated to The Messaging Company.
Any charges will be in addition to that already paid. I don’t see anywhere TPG (and owned companies) reducing their RSP prices.
It very much becomes a captive audience and they could charge a lot more as many customers rely on their RSP email accounts. It maybe difficult for many to change and paying an email subscription, even if it is expensive, might be the easiest option.
I personally won’t be migrating to ‘The Messaging Company’. Unknown company with unknown risks/reliability/security.
Our RSP email account is only used for a limited number of correspondences/senders and it will be very easy to change senders to a new email account. Having a password manager makes it easy to identify those accounts which use the email, as well as looking at who the senders to the email account have been for the past or so 12 months.
The reality is though that the advice has always been to have an email address independent of your ISP. If someone would readily and easily do that, it could have been done a long time ago, and should have. So my guess is that a lot of the people who are affected by this will just move across.
The cynical side of me thinks the company has been set up by TPG to move email accounts to. This is either to
make more money from its existing customers for a email account (which has been ‘free’ in the past and included in NBN packages); or
to move email accounts to and then sell off the company as a going concern with ‘loyal’ (or is that locked in) customers.
Either way it sniffs of revenue generation, especially since the company is new, no prior announcement has been given and the existing TPG related email servers will in effect be managed by the company.
I suspect it has been set up to shirk their responsibilities regarding scams and spam.
I would get emails from “TPG” saying my last payment didn’t process - click this link (fake site requesting user name, password, credit card = phishing). I reported them, yet they kept arriving. Their spam filters didn’t pick them up despite the same message. TPG would refer me to the community forum where luckless customers were trying to help other befuddled customers.
Oops! My bad - should’ve checked that it worked, before posting. Thank you for pointing it out - and thanks to @PhilT for correcting the link in my post.
Agreed! And that’s always been the advice I give friends and rellies. To be sure, they don’t always take my advice. So I know some people who’ll be affected by this change.
I agree. But “just move across” might not be a simple matter … one’s email address is embedded in so many places, it can be an interesting exercise to track down and update them all. Even more interesting if the old address is about to disappear, which it will do if people jump ship from the affected ISPs or don’t accept the offer to transfer to The Messaging Company.
And yes, password managers are the ideal place to keep track of who has your email address, and how important (or not) that contact is.
I don’t know how anyone manages without a password manager of some kind, to be honest.
Yes - if you had a Myspace account this would not be an issue. (At which point the author realises that Myspace still somehow exists.) You could also use BBS and IRC for your online communications, although they are even less secure than email.
The Messaging Company looks very much like an attempt by TPG to spin email off into a profit centre. ASIC says it applied for registration on 13 July, matching the ABN registration and making it an extremely young pup. Its websites do not appear in the Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine (until now, as I just created snapshots).
Were I still with TPG or any of its alternative trading names I would be looking to other email alternatives (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo etc.). You could even try something secure like Proton Mail's free tier.
Once you’ve created your new Google / Microsoft / Yahoo / Proton / Whatever mailbox, consider creating one or more email forwarding addresses to conceal and redirect to your real mailbox, then register the forwarding address rather than your real address with online businesses etc.
Not only do you not have to update all those accounts when/if your mailbox changes again, you can also tell where your address leaked from by which address the subsequent spam/scam email comes in on.
An example: SimpleLogin, which is part of the Proton group, provides this type of email forwarding service.
The Messaging Company is not a spinoff of TPG. It is a newly created company of Brisbane based Atmail.
My ISP, now RSP, Internode has been using the Atmail software for Webmail ever since I started using them. And that goes back to before ADSL.
Seems the idea here is that the TPG group of companies, which includes Internode, have decided to use common Atmail system hosted by Atmail rather than having separate systems.
Makes a lot of sense to me. And this new mail provider is geared towards being independent of RSPs.
And in my view, the features and interface of Atmail makes email systems of the likes of Gmail and anything MS provides look like the toys they are.
My wife an I own personal domains and had to find a new email provider a few months back when iiNet suddenly announced they were dropping out of supporting such email services. (Given their performance over the previous months, I wasn’t surprised.)
We went with VentraIP - https://ventraip.com.au/email-hosting/ - and so far, it’s been a good experience. They were super-helpful in assisting us during the transition, and email services have been all we could expect since.
To clarify, by “just move across” I meant … keep their existing email address and accept the migration of the email service from their current ISP to TMC. Negligible hassle for the customer. The fly in the ointment is: what will it cost come September next year?
And to elaborate on that … if you accept the migration to TMC and then subsequently terminate your ISP service then you may lose your email address (at least per Internode’s Ts and Cs for this migration).
So the migrated email address still has the same problem as ever of being bound to your ISP service.
So far in this topic people have offered a range of theories about the true motivation of the TPG group of companies. Since none of us can possibly know, I’m not going to argue for or against anyone else’s theory but will add a speculation of my own:
TPG is getting out of email because customers are getting out of email.
A lot of people prefer to use ‘messaging’ of some sort instead of email, whether that’s SMS, or messaging mediated by social media. This is amplified by an increasing number of people accessing the internet mostly or solely from a mobile device.
Add to that: more customers are understanding that the email address should be independent of the ISP, so even if they use email, they are not using email with their ISP. It only takes a customer the experience of changing ISP the first time to bring this home. With a heap of years since the internet was available in Australia, many customers will be on their second, third, fourth, … ISP.
Add to that: mailing lists have been supplanted by more recent alternatives for a lot of ‘groups’.
Fewer people sending emails, and even fewer people sending emails via their ISP, means an even more pathetically low percentage of email sessions are productive.
I have my own domains and run my own mail servers so let me just get the stats for the previous month. (Aside: this means that the impact on me from this change is negligible. I will just let the email addresses die. The only impact is that I will need to remove an account from my mail client, since I do in principle check for new email on the ISP address every X hours even though it ‘never’ receives any email.)
For June:
Primary mail server … 7769 connections, 497 emails delivered (useful work 6.4%)
Secondary mail server … 10624 connections, 1 email delivered (useful work 0.009%)
(The very low legitimate traffic on the secondary mail server indicates that there is high uptime on the primary mail server and legitimate senders will always preference the primary because that is how I have configured it.)
It is well known that a very high percentage of all email is ‘spam’ (and perhaps more recently also ‘scam’). Anecdotally, my figures back that up.
That situation is not good for customers and it is not good for mail service providers.
Thank you for pointing it out - and thanks to 
