REMINDER O2 UK to Close All Email Accounts from 1st November 2013

Customers of O2 UK have been told to wave “goodbye” to their free email / webmail service because the operator intends to close the accounts for “all mobile customers” on 1st November 2013. The service, which was once offered to all of their subscribers, is apparently no longer popular enough to be worth maintaining.

The closure has been known about since July/August 2013 but some customers have only recently been informed and many remain angry about the loss of a service that has been active for many years (note: all @o2.co.uk , @genie.co.uk and @u.genie.co.uk accounts will be erased).

O2Mail Closure Statement

“In the past, O2 email has been provided free of charge to all of our customers. Over time we have seen that the majority of our customers prefer to use freely available services from other email providers like Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo. As a result we’ve decided to withdraw this service for all mobile customers.”

O2 has had an FAQ Page up for a month or so, which explains how to move your messages over to Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo!. But that’s unlikely to comfort those whom will have expected a major operator like O2 to maintain the service indefinitely.

Meanwhile O2’s former Home Broadband customers, which are currently being migrated over to Sky Broadband, will already be aware that they get to keep their o2.co.uk email address but the mailbox capacity will be reduced from 1000MB to a piddling 20MB. But Sky have already said they’d scrap BE Broadband’s email addresses from Spring 2014 (here) and thus we wouldn’t be surprised if O2’s addresses follow suit.

Unfortunately this is just another example of how important it is NOT to stick all your eggs in one basket. We always recommend that email be kept separate from your ISP or mobile operator, which makes it easier to switch.