OFCOM to review email account retention
 

OFCOM is to review the practice of providers charging for email account use when customers have left. The practice VM has of closing accounts after 90 days is also under scrutiny

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51571275

Re: OFCOM to review email account retention
 

Honestly, VM's approach is better than gouging people for money. Maybe 90 days is too short, but it should be a lesson against using an ISP email.

Re: OFCOM to review email account retention
 

It’s a bigger problem than whether or not people should be charged for keeping their ISP email. NTL were insisting years ago, when their ISP email was flaky as hell, that at the end of the day it was just a free add-on. But that’s before we all got online access to everything we subscribe to, not to mention various local and central government services, with our email addresses as the starting point for logging in. Instead of contemplating free ISP email, OFCOM should be considering whether ISPs should be linking email to internet service at all.

Re: OFCOM to review email account retention
 

Actually the much bigger and wider problem is this assumption that everything costs nothing to provide and so it should be provided for free.

Re: OFCOM to review email account retention
 

Nothing wrong with the principle of charging people for email, but the charges mentioned are ridiculous, £1 a month would be more realistic.

Re: OFCOM to review email account retention
 

Everything costs something, the question is whether the provision of email service can be priced effectively and if so, whether it costs anything like what some ISPs are charging. Given the trivial amount of data a single email box generates I suspect charging for it, with a reasonable profit on top, would likely cost ISPs more in admin to collect than the amount they’re collecting. Google doesn’t charge for Gmail because it has always believed the Adsense data it gathers is sufficiently valuable. Apple doesn’t charge because its basic iCloud data backup allowance is small and it charges a small premium for more (but, I suspect, is charging a lot of people that small premium, so it adds up).

British ISPs who charge are basically following a “value added” approach, namely that £5 or even £7.50 is worth it to someone who lacks the time, skills and/or confidence to go changing their login to all of the dozens of web based services we all now rely on. It is however bordering on exploitative IMO.

Re: OFCOM to review email account retention
 

Those that don't charge for email (Eg MS, Google), fund it by other sources. Each email account may be small by itself, but the system as a whole still has to be funded.

Re: OFCOM to review email account retention
 

This has been an age old problem for me, my parents have had Virgin Media (NTLworld...) e-mail accounts since 2005, that's 15 years worth of accounts. It's actually restricted consumer choice for them as they have turned down alternative broadband providers who arguably offer a better service for them simply due to fear of losing access to their inboxes.

With a potential move in the pipeline, it's been a sticking point of what to do if they can't keep VM - even I couldn't move the amount of stuff that has accumulated in that inbox over to a new e-mail and even if I could the countless business contacts who have those e-mails in their address books would then no longer have that line of inquiry - what do people expect users to do, spam all their contacts or hack their address books?

The idle comments of "shouldn't use ISP e-mail" etc is wonderful, but I think many people forget that when many of these accounts were created, very few people knew what a third-party e-mail service was, and those that did probably didn't trust them (1999 & 2001 Hotmail security issues, Gmail wasn't kicking around until 2004, Yahoo was.... yahoo.). Many users who continue to use them after this date are using what they are familiar with.

They'd be happy to pay £100/year to keep the inboxes, that is definitely more than it's worth by a large margin, yet VM don't even offer that. I think that as a counter to anti-competitive behavior, ISPs should be required to maintain a user's e-mail account for a small fee (£1/GB mail-storage is probably fair), I hope OFCOM do take action on this. My faith in the regulator is almost zero however.

Re: OFCOM to review email account retention
 

Or alternatively, just forward all email to a new address from then on. Email forwarding is nothing new and arguably the old email address should never be made available to new users anyway for security reasons.

Re: OFCOM to review email account retention
 

That assumes VM don’t deactivate/delete the email account after the customer leaves.

Re: OFCOM to review email account retention
 

No I mean that's what Ofcom should make the ISP's do. When you leave, you give a forwarding email. Even if it's only for something like 2 years, that would be enough to move people over.