How Capitalism Destroyed Email and Made It Better, Or
Get Your Domain Names Right Here, Right Now. Red Hot — Fresh Off
the Server
Freedom's
just another word for nothin' left to lose
Nothin', don't mean nothin'
hon' if it ain't free
—
Me and Bobby McGee,
Fred L. Foster / Kris Kristofferson
In April 2016, the eminent demise of free email from an Internet Service Provider (ISP) was foretold when Frontier Communications Corporation, "announced completion of its $10.54 billion acquisition of Verizon Communications, Inc. (NYSE:VZ) wireline operations providing services to residential, commercial and wholesale customers in California, Texas and Florida." This action began a series of calamities for users of Verizon email. Their free email accounts were transferred to Frontier — well some email accounts were transferred to Frontier. Eventually, all verizon.net email accounts and the data of those accounts were deleted — well most email accounts and data were deleted.
Then things went from bad to worse for former Verizon now come Frontier Communications email customers when Frontier offed their email business to AOL come Yahoo. Now users of bs@verizon.net/frontier.wtf email addresses had to use AOL web based email and enjoy the comfort of knowing their email is being monetized by a company they never agreed to do business with, and said companies are now littering their emails with the latest offerings on discount vacation packages in the Bahamas.
Your Frontier email account is provided through Frontier's partnership with Yahoo. Yahoo and AOL have come together as Oath, a part of Verizon, and have a new Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Please read and accept the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy so you can continue using your Frontier email with no interruptions. The following information comes from Oath. Thank you for reading.
No interruptions of email, unless you are a user of MS Outlook, and like most users of Outlook, really do like and would prefer to use Outlook as your email client. No 3rd party ads in MS Outlook.
If you try to find a reason why all this off-loading of Verizon's email
accounts, and tormenting of what were once happy Verizon customers,
occurred, you will encounter corporate gobbledygook telling incensed
customers how better off they are now that their email has been ground into
dust. I do believe on Verizon's part it was, however, very smart long-term
strategy. In the early days of the mass marketing of Internet
services, ISPs offered email has sort of a
loss leader item given away to attract more new
customers. This
was long before the problem of malware reached pandemic levels (or so it
seemed) and before people were regularly emailing 10 years worth of tax
returns. And it worked!
Email
became, and remains, very popular. And very costly
to maintain.
Verizon came to the conclusion that its core business was as a 21st
century
communications provider, and not as an Internet provider. Verizon also
seemed prescient as it saw the Internet becoming an entertainment
product and not primarily a communications product.
What's that about "the Wisdom to Know
the Difference."?
Compared with 20 years ago, providing email to customers
is labor intensive and costly in terms of all the needed software and
hardware. Factor in all of the potential liability of the malware
crisis, and the coming stringent security requirements and protocols of
implementing Zero Trust, it
is a sound business decision for ISPs to abandon email if they cannot
recoup the costs of providing a product with an every increasing overhead.
Apparently, Cox Communications has done the email math, and, they too
have found
out that "the math ain't a mathin'."
[ed. I love that phrase. I have only heard it once before.] On
August 19, 2019, Cox announced that it would no longer
allow NEW EMAIL ACCOUNTS to be created. Meaning
existing customers can use their existing email accounts, but new
customers will not get @cox.net email addresses, and if an existing
customers wants a new or additional address, well too bad about that.
ATT offed their email to Yahoo long ago. And, if you are fortunate to be in a service area of Spectrum, you still have 5gb of free email storage and could use any email client you prefer.
There is an immutable law of capitalism. If you have a product
that a
vast swath of the public really wants, you must monetize that product
someway if only to keep up with the every increasing costs of operating
a constantly growing business. Yahoo, AOL, and other providers of
"free email accounts" monetize their product by selling advertising
space on their email applications. It is very difficult to use MS
Outlook with web email providers, except one. Outlook.com works
just fine, thank you, with the Outlook email client. Of course,
Microsoft has already monetized your email Jones; you had to pay for
real live Outlook one way or the other. Dedicated Outlook users
will not be happy with that "free Outlook" on the web. Of course,
that would entail changing your email address. Which brings me to
the point.
My suggestion is to take control of your email completely by having your
own email domain. First, it does not have to be expensive,
depending on your storage needs. Once established, you own in
every possible way your own email address, and any subsequent email
address associated with yourmail.com. Moreover,
once established, your own email is no more difficult to maintain than
any other email account using MS Outlook. If you do need support,
chances are a web hosting company has better support personnel dedicated
to email than might your cable TV provider. One thing is certain,
once you have paid the meager domain name registration fees for the
domain name itself, even if your hosting company would go out of
business, no matter how unlikely, you could simply take your email name
elsewhere. You are the owner of the name; and simply leasing email
server space from a company whose core business is hosting customers'
Internet Domain Names, no matter the purpose for the hosting.
For my clients, I prefer to use the hosting company,
GoDaddy, for their web and email hosting needs.
Their service and support are proven. GoDaddy is based in the Bay
Area. I will only recommend that which I have the most confidence
in. And I get no commission for any new customer I bring to
GoDaddy. GoDaddy is not the most costly web hosting company; nor
is it the cheapest. All that said, I have used for both of my
websites the hosting company,
IONOS. Their first year offerings were
unbeatable. For myself, most support questions were far more
complex than about simple email, but were handled promptly through Chat,
my preferred method of communicating with tech support. Below you
will see first year promotional pricing for Domain Name Registration.
A @yourname.com or @yourname.net
domain name is $1.00.
That's right, friends, for just one thin
Yankee Greenback, plus ICANN Fees (about $1-3), you can own your very
own email address for one year. And it doesn't
really go up dramatically for subsequent years. Moreover, if at
the time of initial registration, the more years you register for the
greater the overall savings. For a personal email account, there
are several choices for suffixes, but I recommend you stick with
.com or .net.
The email hosting can also be as low as $1.00
per month. And commodity pricing prevails; the greater the
storage capacity, the greater the monthly fee. Still, relatively
cheap given the price of things today.
The image above is for 1 user for each pricing point. For $15, 5
separate user names can be had with 50 gb of storage for each user.
50gb is still a fair amount of email storage these days. And the
hosting company will be happy to sell you more. So for $15 a month,
a small business can instantly improve its image and web presence.
Or an entire family or other group can have its own email.
Of course, an email address change requires some prior planning and
strategizing to avoid a calamity. And any such strategy would
differ somewhat depending on the provider you are migrating away
from, and thus beyond the scope of this general discussion. Plus,
I just assume you are backing up your email.
My prognostications on most subjects are just about as useful as anybody
else's, i.e., not all that much. Except when it comes to overall
trends in IT. In the not too distant future, having a one's own
email address will be just as de rigueur as one's own telephone number
is today. In fact, more than one high profile individual has had
to buy back their own name. Anybody can register any domain name
that meets the standards. There are people who invest a few bucks
(see above) to buy a bunch of common or high value names. Throw it
against the wall and see what sticks is a tried and true business plan.
I suggest you nail down your own email address while you still can.
Return to sender, address unknown
No such number, no such zone
—
Return To Sender, Otis
Blackwell /
Winfield Scott
Gerald Reiff