TalkTalk is ending its free email service to former customers
It is becoming more common for email providers to cease providing free email. A while ago, John Lewis ended their association with Plusnet and stopped their email service to anyone with an email address @john-lewis.com, @greenbee.net or @waitrose.com. For more information, see this link.
Now TalkTalk has announced that they will be ceasing their free email service for former broadband customers. Note that this only affects former, and not current, customers. Also, former customers will be able to continue email provision by paying for it. See MoneySavingExpert for more information.
What you need to do if your email services closes
It is a good idea to start taking action as soon as possible as this is quite a tedious business and you may want to take it a bit at a time. The steps you will need to consider are as follows:
Get a new email address
The easiest way to do this is to get either a gmail address from Google, or an Outlook address from Microsoft. Both are free. If you have a Windows computer with Windows 10 or later then you almost certainly already have a Microsoft email address. It might end in @outlook.com or @live.co.uk or @hotmail.com.
Inform the people you correspond with
When advising people of your new email address, make it clear that the old address will stop working soon. We are all very very slow to update our computerised address books when someone changes their email address. You may need to inform people several times. You could start by adding a postscript to all emails to your contacts when either initiating an email conversation or when replying to an email.
If you decide to send an email to all relevant contacts in your address book where one message is being sent to many addresses at once, then make sure that you put everyone’s email addresses in the “BCC” field and not in either the “To” field or the “CC” field. If you put them in either of the latter two fields then everyone will see everyone else’s email address. This is not just “bad netiquette”, but a serious breach of GDPR regulations (ie data protection laws). Since you must put an address in the “To” field, put your own there.
Think about whether you need to keep all your old emails
If your email account connects to the server by the IMAP method or if you only ever access your email via the web, then you could be at risk of losing all your email history when the service closes. There are ways of saving it, but it can get a bit messy and can take a while to do. I can probably help with this.
Check all your online accounts and update them as necessary
Online accounts (eg Amazon, BBC) require you to have a “username” (also called a “login” or “account name”). This is almost (but not quite) invariably your email address. If your email service closes and the provider of that account wants to send you an email then you will not see it. You will not even know they have sent the email if you haven’t updated the account. .
You need to go through your online accounts one at a time. For each account, if your “username” is your old email address, do whatever the account provider requires to change it. Also check to see if there’s anywhere else (eg “contact details”) that also quotes your old email address.
Some account providers won’t let you change the username (your old email address). You will need to contact their customer support if that happens. They might even require you to close the old account and create a new one.
Please don’t leave all this until five minutes before your old email service closes
What if, for instance, the provider of an online account sends an email to your old email address asking you to verify that it is you trying to change the email address on the account? If your old service has already closed things could get tricky. It could get even trickier if the account does not include any other account recovery methods.
So, if your email address is no longer going to function, or if you used to be with TalkTalk and don’t want to pay to keep the account going, take a deep breath and make a start on the necessary changes.
Featured image by David Leonard
All other images designed by David Leonard with Microsoft Designer
