UK ISP Your Co-op Broadband to Migrate Old Email Platform
Customers of Your Co-op Broadband, specifically those who use their email platform, have been informed that the platform is to be closed and migrated to another provider from 6th November 2023. Customers will need to migrate their email address or create a new address before that date to avoid losing their messages. But it comes at a cost.
A Co-op Broadband spokesperson said (Which?): “After careful consideration, we have agreed to transfer our existing email service to another Co-operative provider, Innovation.coop (trading as Mail.coop) from 6 November. This will offer an alternative solution that allows customers and members to retain their email addresses.”
Migrating your email address will apparently cost customers some money – annual costs start from £24 for one mailbox and 5GB of storage, which rises to £50 for 25GB and 5 mailboxes. The provider added that any customers or members wishing to retain their current email address will need to fill out the registration form via www.mail.coop by 5 November.
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Some of the email addresses used by Your Co-op Broadband customers go back more than 30 years, so it’s only natural that many will want to hang on to them and continue to use it. But as we’ve always said, it’s generally wise to use a separate email service from the one provided by your SP. Not only does this make it easier to switch providers, but it also means that you’ll hopefully be with a service where email is a dedicated focus (for most ISPs it’s an afterthought).
Mail.coop added that they will aim to “minimise any disruption to your e-mail service“, although they rightly warn that there may be “instances where this is unavoidable due to the nature of transferring data from one provider to another“. This is a wise warning because, in our experience of observing this market across several decades, major migrations of email platforms rarely go smoothly.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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I think ISPs which provide email, should be required to give much more notice. Id suggest a year, rather than what would seem to be a week
I get the impression they may have announced this before, but the media (myself included) have only just picked up in it at the final notice. I could be wrong, though.
Twenty four quid for a single email address? Thieves. You could buy your own domain with a single email address for £1 for year one and a tenner a year thereafter. Admittedly there’s only 2GB of storage, but if you’re using any competent email client that doesn’t matter at all.
I suspect that the majority of Coop email customers will simply roll over and pay up.
You can get more than that for free.
https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html?src=zmail
Scroll down to “Forever Free Plan”
Up to five users, 5GB/User, 25MB attachment limit.
There’s also Skiff – https://skiff.com/pricing
1 user, 10GB storage.
Also Cloudflare sell domains at wholesale cost, no mark up. You have to use their nameservers but they’re some of the best in the world anyway.
Then go ahead, nobody is stopping you, mail.coop is run by a cooperative like Webarch by people paid fairly, that costs more money than a big tech like Zoho or GoDaddy or Gandi.
We can look to other markets and see a different way of doing business though. For example, a “fixed” energy price is typically more expensive than a “flexible” one on day one, because the “fix” protects the consumer from price increases. Of course, the cost of supplying energy is much more variable than the cost of supplying internet…
D’oh, somehow I replied to the wrong post!
“But as we’ve always said, it’s generally wise to use a separate email service from the one provided by your SP.”
Exactly. I generally avoid any dual / multi play services for exactly this reason, no matter what those services are, not just internet related.
Exactly. I haven’t had isp email address since I was on AOL dialup over 20 years ago and it was tied into their proprietary software – you’ve got mail, LOL. Come to think of it anyone with an android phone will already have a Gmail address already setup.