Leaving BT: Can I keep my btinternet.com email address?

Title says it all, really. I'm helping a neighbour migrate away from his 5Mb/s £60/month ADSL service.

But would he be able to keep his email addresses? If so, what does he need to do (if anything)?

According to BT you can keep it - details here

But, it appears BT Premium Mail is £7.50 per month - that is pretty expensive for an email service.

I'd prefer to say it's a completely ridiculous price. I recommend the OP encourage a migration to Gmail.

I left BT six years ago when they demanded (I think) £1.50 pm for email. My wife and I opened Fastmail accounts, each cost about £3 per year, best move we ever made. We were told and I expected our @btinternet address to be terminated but six years on it's still working fine ... it's handy for semi-spam marketing stuff when we don't want to give out our Fastmail addy.

Gmail was highly regarded even then but I'm a bit paranoid about Big Brother Google's spying.

Also, £60 a month sounds like they either have a lot of extras (anytime calling, international plan, add on telephone services?) or they are on a very old package that could be made much cheaper by just ringing BT to discuss their current options.

How wedded are they to their email address. How much pain would they feel by moving to a different service? Generally it is recommended to buy a domain name and then just direct the email to it to a free or low cost provider. That way if you need to change the email service you just repoint the domain and don't have to tell everyone your email address has changed.

Hi,

If I was you I would purchase a domain then you can forward an email address to wherever you want. Gmail, Hotmail, etc....You could have something like [email protected] and forward it to wherever you like. This makes it easier to switch email provider. Right now if he has to change his email then he would need to contact lots of organisations and people to let them know of the change of email address. With a domain they wouldn't have that issue ever again. Where the emails end up is up to the neighbour to decide. If you would like a hand sorting this out then please feel free to DM me....

HTH,

I would probably not have a town name in the domain - people move around. I use a couple of domains - one based on my surname and one based on something pretty random - the random one is generally used for sites where I want to track who is giving away my email addresses. The name based on I tend to use for "official" stuff - bank and the like.

I have recently created a 3rd domain name which is only 3 letters long at a .uk - just in case I want to be really lazy when giving my email address to people.