First of all, terrific site! Read the Broadband comparison with interest, now comes the idiot question(because I'm not a techno). I have BT Broadband at present and use a Supanet e-mail address although NOT signed up with Supanet Broadband obviously. I have a wireless set up. If I moved to tiscali (which seems a better deal) would have to change my e-mail address, thereby having to inform about 200 people of my new address? Help!
Thanks for any clarity on this.
mjplum

Hi mjplum

Thanks for your email. Yes I'm afraid that you will have to change your email address in this instance as most of the main ISP's prefer you switch to theirs. Can't you retain the Supanet address via webmail anyway?

There are some ISP's who let you retain your old email address - Virgin.net is one ISP we're aware of where you can keep your old email address but this is an interesting issue you've touched on here. Like mobile phone numbers consumers should be able to 'port' across their email address to another ISP without having to change the actual address itself.

In future we may consider putting together some form of table or functionality highlighting the ISP's that do allow you to keep your old email addresses.

Kind Regards

Jason Lloyd

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Jason Lloyd

moneysupermarket.com

Thanks Jason. That's really helpful.
mjp

Jason, as in my email in the AOL forum, I'm not sure I fully understand.

Does this mean I could, for example, switch from AOL to BT or Post Office broadband+phone packages and keep my aol.com email identities?

Yours hopefully!

Hi

Unfortunately it depends entirely on who your broadband supplier is. As a previous post stated Virgin are one of the companies that let you retain access to your old mailbox. (Although mine has just been deleted as I didn't access it for some months).

However, you never actually own an e-mail address, as all you're doing when you're a customer of a broadband supplier is renting webspace from the ISP for your e-mail, which is then deleted and made available again to other customers once you leave. My advice is to get a good public e-mail such as Google Mail or MSN Hotmail which keeps you independent from any broadband supplier. They're both free, have a decent amount of mail space to offer, are accessible from anywhere in the world via a web interface, and most importantly you'll never lose it should you change supplier!

Also, they're both accessible from programs like Outlook or Thunderbird, which makes reading your e-mail easier.

Before you leave BT i would send a group mail out, back up all your historic mail, and then sign up for one of the above.

Guys,

why dont you try and get an email redirect / forwarder places on your account.?

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George

It may be best to set-up a new e-mail address, just in case (keep a list of your old contacts.) I had this problem when I was with tiscali dial-up, then switched to blueyonder broadband. Even though I cut the dial-up, the e-mail adress is still used years later.

If it comes to it, you can place your e-mail account into the hands of such software as outlook which will drag your address book along with it. Then you can move the address from account to account!

You could probably even do this with the trial version of microsoft outlook!