Easynet to Finally Close UK Email Service After Decades of Use
The once popular managed UK service provider Easynet, which finally became defunct in 2015 after the last bits of their business were sold off to Interoute (GTT) for an enterprise value of £402m (here), has begun informing long-time users of their legacy email platform (running since the 1990s) that the service is due to close.
In case anybody has forgotten, Easynet was one of the first operators to deploy an unbundled (LLU) copper broadband and phone network in the United Kingdom, and they were later snapped up by Sky Broadband in 2005. Sky eventually sold what was left of Easynet to private equity firm LDC in 2010 and in 2013 Easynet was acquired again, this time by the time by the MDNX Group.
Suffice to say that Easynet is a familiar name to industry veterans, although we suspect that most will still be surprised to learn that the Easynet.co.uk domain has – for all these years since the brand vanished – continued to be used by an unspecified number of users as part of their legacy email platform.
Sadly, it looks as that final vestige of a once familiar brand will soon be vanishing too. Several members of ISPreview’s Forum, who continue to use the old email platform, have been informed by GTT that the Easynet email service will be terminated on 31st August 2023.
GTT’s Email to Easynet’s Remaining Email Users
Dear Valued Client,
We are writing to inform you about an important update regarding the email services under the @easynet.co.uk domain. We will terminate this email service, effective 31 August 2023.
We understand that this notice may come as a disappointment, and we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. We want to do everything possible to provide enough time to allow you to transition to another email service provider.
GTT has outlined the following information:
- Termination Date: The email service will be terminated at 23:59 GMT on the 31 August 2023. After this date, you will no longer be able to send, receive, or access your emails through this platform.
- Backup and Data Retrieval: We strongly recommend that you backup and save important emails, contacts, attachments, or any other data that you wish to retain before the termination date. After the termination date, all data associated with your email account will be permanently deleted and will not be recoverable.
- Termination Notice: We understand that time is a key point for a seamless transition. GTT wants to provide you enough time for you to be able to perform the needed steps to guarantee that all important data is safeguarded, therefore we are sending this termination notice with +60 days notice, which we believe is sufficient time for the migration of your services to an alternative email provider.
- Alternative Email Service: We recommend researching and selecting an alternative email service provider. All of the major email providers have the capability and guidance to migrate your mail archive to their service.
- Communication Updates: GTT will send a reminder closer to the termination of service date.
GTT would like to take this opportunity to express our gratitude for your continued trust and support throughout the years. Please contact your account team with any further questions.
As we’ve said many times before, it’s always wise to use a separate email service from the one provided by your ISP, and we assume that most of Easynet’s email users would have long since moved away. But in fairness, GTT has generally kept Easynet’s email service going for a very long time, which would make their platform one of the longest running – older even than Gmail.
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 and Linkedin.
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Presumably, that will include all email addresses within the Easynet group, such Pavilion Internet and UKOnline’s. End of an era.
Pavilion Internet – there’s a name from the past!
I seem to recall the aim of Sky purchasing Easynet was always to acquire the significant (at the time) fibre network that Easynet had built up which formed the basis of Sky Network Services.
I’m not sure if the LLU presence was also desirable or if the BeThere/O2 acquisition by Sky made that part redundant.
The SMB arm – Easynet Connect, which had all those pesky customers was then quickly dumped to MDNX/Interoute/GTT.
I presume the network still lives on as part of Sky’s backbone/wholesale network…
Yeah the fibre network is the Sky Broadband network though I’m sure they’re using it for other things as well.
The routers were switched out when Sky purchased Easynet – Juniper was replaced with Cisco. The transmission network was upgraded extensively too for more wavelengths at higher bandwidths.
The LLU stuff was an attraction and Sky replicated the Easynet solution all over the place. I do not believe it was made redundant but Sky moved Be/O2 customers to their platform. I may be wrong with that!
Easynet had some interesting LLU products at the time – one called EtherStream that bonded up to 8 SDSL circuits to provide a symmetric 10Mb/s service. It may have been the first Ethernet in the First Mile implementation in the UK?
It worked pretty well and at a lower cost than a similarly specified leased line, so made a good secondary line – the only downside was when an engineer frequently needed a spare pair in the green cabinet and only checked for a dial tone!
on the ADSL side I seem to recall they were doing interesting things too – only ISP to use seamless rate adaption as I understand it.
Certainly end of an era. I worked for Easynet from ’96 to ’04, and look back at that time extremely fondly. We did some groundbreaking things (literally in some cases) and I made some lifelong friends. I can see some similar things happening with the new full-fibre providers, although I’m a bit surprised to see some making all the same mistakes we made in the mid-90s. Long live easynet, I wonder what price GTT would put on selling the brand?
Martin
UKOnline is certainly a blast from the past. It reminds me of the early days of the ISP boom of the 1990s. Demon, Pipex in the early 90s. I think there were more “virtual” ISPs around than proper ISPs who operated their own networks.
Freeserve was probably the most famous and influential virtual ISPs when it launched with no subscription fee. I remember it was like a “big bang” moment for the Internet in the UK. Loads of new subscription free virtual ISPs appeared within a year and all of a sudden 100,000s of folk started to join the Internet for the first time as it was “free” and you only had to pay for your dial-up calls.
The Internet boom of the late 1990s coincided with the mobile phone boom at virtually the same time, when Vodafone introduced “Pay as you Talk” in 1997. Again within a couple of years we went from a society with a small proportion of businessmen and wealthy folk owning mobile phones to virtually over 50% of the population owning a mobile phone.
Massive change in only a few years.
Are there any British free email providers?
Even if there are, for how much longer?
Also, you might want to refine your definition of “free” (and perhaps “British”). Either you pay for the service, or you are the product, ie they make the money to run the service from your data.
Even bundled ISP+free email+free hosting is steadily receding, with both BT and Virgin Media no longer providing email services to new customers, and haven’t for a year or so. You can get a single email address and your own domain for about a tenner a year, which might be worth a thought if you need a new email address and don’t want that to be at somebody else’s whim.
I’m an old easynet worker. Unfortunately I still have dealings with GTT.
Miss the old simpler days of Easynet. It was a party. Shared an office with Sky in the southwest and would swap between working for Sky or Easynet depending on volumes of work!
SNS still making use of the old easynet LLU network, and it’s still being used by some of GTT but they have lost alot of access and are slowly migrating to other wholesale providers.
I remember chatting to some of the ex-Easynet tech support who had moved over to Shepton Mallet – the out of hours team were usually quite happy to have a chat if it was quiet but it was at the point that the Sofia(?) team were starting to get trained up which meant a lot of the old team had moved on.
One of our Easynet leased lines had been due to be migrated from a SNS POP by GTT due to ‘imminent closure’ for about 3 years until we finally moved it away first. I think we were the only customer left on that access router and finding someone at GTT who even knew that POP existed was a challenge!
I’ve been with easynet as a private user since 1998! I was gutted to receive the termination email but have been expecting it for years. It lost its authentication and I couldn’t even forward an email to myself at one of my other accounts. I am a little bit heartbroken though.
I used to sell dial-up access via good old-fashioned dial up and later isdn in the early 1990s. I was one of their major sellers in London and it all worked very well… I still use my email account every day but obviously we’ll have to stop at the end of August. It’s a rail shame as it’s so quick to log into when you’re away working at a show or in a hotel etc and means you can take a very small computer with you which may not be able to send out to authentication issues which was very much the case. It certainly is the end of an era and I’ll miss talking to melody Norman who ran the tech support in London but I later believe she moved down to Shepparton Mallet. Compare to Outlook or Gmail the nice concise inbox was really easy to see what email you had and extremely easy to delete stuff as well. I look forward to receiving farewell emails from everybody on the last day of service which is 31st of August 2023
Yes I have been still using the service since the 80s I was half expecting but didn’t think 60 days notice was enough notice as I have been using it for so long How can I contact every service I use in 60 days.
today I lost connection with the server and this was the first I had heard that the service was being closed, so no 60 days notice keithm@easynet.co.uk, I was one of the first to use the service working in the london office…
I’ve been an easynet customer since 1995. today the 11/08/2023 my email couldn’t. have they pulled the plug early? anyone know a contact number for GTT? I called them a few years ago when I forgot my password. just want to tidy up everything before it goes off line at the end of August
I’ve been using mine since the dial up days with Pavilion, who then handed it over to Easynet and then GTT. I knew the end was coming and was working my way through my account, knowing that I had until the 31/08 and it just stopped working yesterday (11/08). I hope it comes back, so I can finish sorting my stuff, but spect it might be gone for ever now! Not sure what I’ve lost, but a lot of my history…
Been using it since 1995 and just found out about the closure- and can’t connect! Going to have a lot of hassles trying to change account details in lots of places when I can’t access the old e-mail address. I hope it comes back before the supposed closure date!
How do I go about keeping my personal email myname@myname.co.uk
kmeehan@easynet.co.uk Any help appreciated
I am having exactly the same problem. Need to transfer my business domain hosted by easynet to a new provider. I have been trying to speak to GTT about this for weeks but can’t get through to anyone. I have called their European General Inquires number (+44 115 983 6200) but no-one there has any idea what easynet even is. They promise to find someone to call me back but no-one does. They advised me to email support@gtt.net which I have done 3 times now and received no reply. How is it that a company can send out a notification of termination of service and then blank people when they need support?? Has anyone out there had any luck making contact?
I thought the service was being switched off on 31st August. I was in the middle of replacing my easynet email address on so many accounts including utilities – but have just been switched off today. That’s just not proper customer service after 20+ years of paying for an excellent email service.
Exactly! I was working my way through a great many accounts, and am now facing the “we have sent a security code” to a no longer functioning e-mail account situation again and again.
If they gave a date why on earth could they not stick to it?
Same. Setting up and changing contact details but verification being sent to easynet email.
It’s back! Get everything done while you still can!
Yes. They had an outage all back now.
Hi
Having real trouble finding where I would log into my account for admin of my Domain with easynet. Does any have this?
Thanks
Raise a dispute claim with Nominet for .uk Domain Names or with ICANN for .com domains.
When I called Nominet re my .uk Domain, they seemed to know about Easynet and GTT’s tardy responses and were very helpful.
Relatively easy and pain free for .uk domains, much more complex for .com
I had a Domain Name with Easynet and have used the POP mail service with that Domain Name for over 25 years.
Managed to avoid GTT and get Nominet to transfer the Domain Name to a registrar of my choice, signed up for an alternative email supplier and added Domain name back and hey presto I’m up and running again, like it never went down.
I am am old seller of eaysnet.
Worked well in outlook2007 for years
RIP
And it’s gone!
Bye bye Easynet!
the bastards