The short version — through 2026, one internet provider after another has quietly stopped offering email: Goo, Dodo, Sparklight, EONI, Ptera, Evertek, Quadro, Lycos. Not because email died, but because running it well costs money and none of it is theirs. If your everyday address ends in your provider's name, you are on a clock somebody else is holding. The fix isn't another free mailbox somewhere — it's an address you own, so this can never happen to you again.
Why they're all leaving at once
Running email properly means spam filtering, storage, support, abuse handling and — the expensive part — defending a sending reputation with Gmail and Microsoft, forever. For an ISP it is a cost centre attached to a product people chose for bandwidth. When the accountants get to it, email loses.
It rarely arrives as a dramatic announcement. It arrives as a line in a service-update email, ninety days' notice, and a suggestion to "export your data".
What actually happens when an ISP address dies
Worth being precise, because the mail is the least of it.
- The mail stops arriving, usually on a fixed date. Sometimes there's a forwarding window, often measured in months, sometimes there isn't.
- The archive goes with it. Whatever is only on their server is gone unless you copy it out first.
- Everything that authenticates you by that address breaks. Password resets, two-factor recovery codes, bank notifications, your domain registrar. This is the part that turns an annoyance into a bad week.
- Anyone who writes to you gets a bounce, and the ones who don't notice quietly assume you ignored them.
The one decision that matters
You can move to another free mailbox at a large provider, and millions of people will. It works, right up until the terms change, an algorithm suspends the account, or that provider decides email isn't strategic either.
Or you can spend about ten dollars a year on a domain, and never do this again. you@yourname.com belongs to you. The company that delivers the mail behind it becomes a supplier you can replace in an afternoon — the address doesn't change, and you don't have to tell a single person anything.
If you have been putting this off, an ISP shutdown is the moment it pays for itself. The reasoning in full is in email on your own domain.
Move in this order
The order matters more than the speed. Do it wrong and you lock yourself out of an account while the old address is already dead.
1. Get a domain (15 minutes)
Any registrar. Your name, your family name, a project — something you'll still like in ten years. This is the only part that costs money and it's roughly the price of a coffee a year.
2. Set up the new mailbox and start receiving
On MailHow, connecting a domain and receiving mail is free — no card, no trial clock — which is exactly what you want here: the new address should be working and proven before you start rewiring accounts. Add the domain, publish the DNS records, verify. Send yourself a test message.
3. Copy your old mail across before the shutdown date
If your ISP offers IMAP (most do), import the whole archive into the new mailbox — every folder, every message, read state included. Do this early. On the shutdown date, a server that was reachable yesterday simply isn't, and there is no appeal.
4. Set up forwarding at the ISP, if they allow it
Many offer forwarding for a grace period. Turn it on. It's the safety net for step 5, not a substitute for it — the forwarding ends too.
5. Rewire your accounts, in this order
This is the real work. Attack it by blast radius, not alphabetically:
- Your domain registrar and your new mail provider. If you lose these, you lose everything else. Do them first.
- Bank, tax, government, health. The ones with real-world consequences and slow support queues.
- Anything holding two-factor recovery — password manager, authenticator backups, cloud accounts.
- Shopping, subscriptions, utilities. Tedious, low stakes.
- Everything else, lazily. Every time a message arrives at the old address via forwarding, that is a to-do item telling you exactly who still needs updating. Let the mail do the inventory for you.
6. Tell the humans
One short message from the new address: "my email has changed, this is the new one, the old one stops working on [date]." Sent from the new address so it lands in their history and autocompletes next time.
What "never again" looks like
Once the domain is yours, a provider shutting down stops being an emergency and becomes an errand. You change one DNS record and your address keeps working — same address, same history if you keep it synced, no announcement to anyone.
That is the entire difference between renting your identity and owning it, and this year's round of ISP shutdowns is a very expensive way for a lot of people to learn it.
Moving off an ISP address? On MailHow you can connect your domain and receive mail free, forever — set it up and prove it works before you change a single account. Sending is $29/year for every domain you own.