Vodafone has announced that it is shutting down its consumer email services and advising users to set up accounts on free services such as gmail or Hotmail. It is promising to forward messages sent to their Vodafone email addresses to customers’ new email addresses without any time limit and regardless of whether or not they remain a Vodafone customer.
Vodafone NZ Consumer Director Matt Williams said the decision had been taken because the Vodafone email system no longer provided the level of service customers had come to expect.
“Since we launched our email service in the 1990s, email and technology have grown up a lot and our customers have told us their email service is no longer delivering the sort of experience our customers need today,” he said.
“That’s simply not good enough for us here at Vodafone. We’ve made the decision to close the service down and connect customers who need a hand setting up a new account to the email experts, Google Gmail and Microsoft Outlook.”
Vodafone says all its email customers will receive an email with the news of the closure, support around how to set up auto-forwarding and an introduction to Google gmail and Microsoft Outlook.
It has also warned that spammers are likely to exploit the closure. FAQs about the closure say: “Scammers may try to take advantage of this [closure] and target our customers with different phishing scams purporting to be Vodafone. … Please always remember that any emails from Vodafone regarding the closure of our email service will come from ‘Vodafone’, and if you attempt to reply the email address will be noreply@vodafone.co.nz. Any links in the email will direct you to links.vodafone.co.nz or pages.vodafone.co.nz.”
The existing service will close on 30 November and before that date customers will have to download from Vodafone any messages they wish to retain and set up an alternative address and the autoforwarding option.
The shutdown affects email addresses ending in vodafone.co.nz, vodafone.net.nz, ihug.co.nz, wave.co.nz, quik.co.nz, pcconnect.co.nz, paradise.net.nz, clear.net.nz, es.co.nz. Customers with domain names and email services under those names hosted by Vodafone will not be impacted.