
Email charges: 'They've got you over a barrel' - ColinWright
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-53442244
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quantified
I don’t get it. If I stop being a customer of the ISP, I lose whatever I was
paying for from them. If I hate spending the money, I can change my email
address. At a generous 10 minutes per change, it’ll cost me less than 4 hours
to change 20 of them. 4 hours to save 90 pounds a year or 4500 pounds over the
rest of my life seems straightforward.

Not much different than the classic work of changing a phone number or mailing
address when you move. I can’t imagine asking the new owner of my old house to
keep getting mail there.

For this reason I would never use an email address provided by a telco.

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ColinWright
Looks like there's space in the market for a 3rd party email forwarding
service. Call it O2N ... it would look like this:

* You provide O2N with your login credentials for your old account;

* Every day O2N logs in as you and collects all your emails;

* O2N then forwards the emails to a designated address;

* Each day you can set it to do this every minute for an hour.

This last lets you continue to use your old email for 2FA.

The old BT service here says you can access your email via a web interface,
but not via an app. O2N would provide a halfway house for the ones that matter
to you, and give you time to migrate.

I'm sure someone could design a better system ... there's a market for it.

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vmilner
I have some slight sympathy with the providers, in that they shouldn't have to
provide a service for ever, but it's hard to see a strategy to get ex-
customers to move, without seeming evil. (Though 6 pounds a month is obviously
excessive). Maybe they should delay all inbound emails by 24 hours, if the
users don't want to pay.

