Very interesting question and I’ll guess answers will be all over the map.
Same land line # & mailing address since 1986
Same email address since 2000
Same cell # since 2009.
Problem with that is my wife could do all her regular stuff like moving money from savings to checking, set up auto bill pay accounts all without the phone number. I even used Zelle to send $100 to my account and it worked. Really all it did was stop her from changing anything in her profile.
That assumption is pretty big. I know a lot of people who will not answer any number/person they do not recognize. My phone does have a spam filter, I don;t answer any marked as potential spam, and only those marked as “Spectrum verified” or a known number.
Yep.
Are you sure? Like a ATT.com number?
Don’t know about @JohnGalt, but mine has the ISP’s name in it; though it’s not ATT.
(And why did autofill not show up when I atted JohnGalt?)
In general, you can take those emails with you, even if you move overseas etc.
AT&T used to use that as a scare tactic to keep people from switching internet providers.
Of course, if the email was at a employer, that usually doesn’t hold.
You can pay to have them forwarded. Can you keep them, if you stop paying for them?
It of course varies by provider. Here’s one anecdote:
I was until recently the President of my condo association. Which had had Comcast as their cable & internet provider for 20 years since consumer internet became a thing. Many owners / residents had been using their issued Who.Ever@comcast.net email address for decades as their one and only. These are old folks who are not internet savvy; this was probably the only email many of them had ever had.
Comcast being Comcast, each year they were getting ever more expensive, worse on service, and had ancient rotting highly future-resistant infrastructure. So under my administration we switched the complex to a competing fiber-optic system for far less monthly cost per condo for “only” 10x the speed. And it actually stayed up when heavy rain fell, which rain often leaked into Comcast’s coax & killed their signals.
Anyhow, lots of members were worried that they’d need to adapt to having a new email address when Comcast got the boot. Not so. Comcast said that as long as the former subscriber continued to actively use their email address at least a couple times a month, they could keep it, and the rather large server storage mailbox, indefinitely at zero charge. Yup: free and forever.
it’s been two years now since the cutover and our last payment to Comcast and so far there’s no sign of Comcast reneging on their offer. Although they certainly might at any time, it seems unlikely on a cost/benefit basis for them.
One anecdote, but an encouraging one. And this was not a special deal just for us. I don’t have the url handy, but per their website this was a Comcast national everywhere policy both for industrial bulk accounts like ours and for ordinary one-off single-family homeowner Comcast accounts as well.
They might be scurvy pirates, but they know what it takes to keep Congress off their back.
Nice!
All I can say is that link.ny didn’t do that, when I switched from dialup to dsl. But that was 14 years ago, and as you say a different company.
Most reliable? Well, I could always lose my phone I guess. Hell, I hardy ever answer it anyway. But this plot of land ain’t going anywhere.
Maybe I’m missing the Spirt of the question.
Slight hijack: I had to get a new cell number and I also shit-canned the landline. Two of the coolest, funnest phone numbers, gone. I miss them.
Unless you have something weird, you do not pay for the email addy. You pay for the internet service.
Right. Do note one thing- for the ATT emails, which include Yahoo and sbcglobal.net, ATT will give really crappy cust serv, and will demand an ATT account number, even from the past.
So yes, your addy is fully moveable.
Now what exactly Comcast meant by “use” is up to them. Many people used comcast email by going to the webmail interface at Comcast.com. Others may have forwarded the address to gmail.com or set up Outlook or iPad’s Mail app to POP3 or IMAP the mail into their client.
I know I don’t know which of these usages would keep Comcast from cancelling their address and mailbox. Much less any other ISP’s facilities for former customers.
This is good to know; my ISP is Charter (now Spectrum) but who knows what they’d do if we switched to the new fiber optic based competitor in town. (Now if only there was a way to transfer the contents of the DVR.)
I pay for the service, which includes email addresses.
And when I stopped paying for the link.ny addresses to be forwarded (which was several years after I dropped their service), I stopped getting what little mail had been coming to those addresses.
It’s certainly possible that things now work differently.
It depends. Yahoo, Hotmail, sbcglobal, at&t, and many others move with you.
https://forums.att.com/conversations/att-mail-features/cancelled-internet-what-happens-to-email/5deff926bad5f2f606ae
Cancelled internet – what happens to email
“When you cancel service with at&t, you are able to keep your email addresses, whether they be old sbcglobal addresses or att.net addresses. The only thing you lose is support for the emails. What I mean by this is that when you have one of our email addresses and have active service, you can contact our website assistance team and have them reset your password if the self help options (Using ‘Forgot Your Password?’ on att.com) have not worked. When the service is cancelled, the only option you would have for resetting the pw would be the self help options on att.com, which are normally answering the security questions that were set up during set up internet service and assigning a new pw, or have a temp pw sent to an alternate email such as a gmail email which again, was hopefully set up during set up of internet service.”
It’s just amazing how many companies unjustifiably trust Two-factor authentication via SMS. The NIST said “no” to it a long time ago. Even MS is against it.
It’s called “security theater” for a reason folks.
Just like the constant and often IT demands to change your password.
This was a while ago - I had an ix.netcom.com email address from when I first got dial up internet , and then added a few more addresses later on. I kept those addresses as Netcom became Mindspring and finally Earthlink. When I changed my internet service to Verizon, I paid Earthlink something like $5 a month to keep the Netcom addresses. I did that for a few months to make sure that the addresses had been changed everywhere they needed to be. When I cancelled that service, I no longer had access to those addresses in any way.
Verizon at some point retired their email services and allowed those with verizon.net addresses to move them to either AOL or Yahoo. If I change providers , I will still have my verizon.net address as it is really an AOL account. My understanding is that some other companies did what Verizon did with a little twist - they got out of the email business earlier and maybe invisibly so that your Name@internetprovider address was actually a Yahoo or AOL , etc. account.
To a certain extent , that would be true at almost anytime in my life if the address you had was an apartment where someone was living as a twenty-something and you were looking for them 20 years later. But the age where the person lived at the address you had makes a difference - somewhere around 2000, I became involved with planning a reunion for the classes of 79.80 and 81 at my high school. Using the information we had about where they lived in high school got us in contact with a lot of people. Our classmates didn’t necessarily live where they did in high school - but their parents did, which meant they still received the flyers we sent.
Did they change phone numbers more often? That’s not my memory. I don’t remember people changing their phone numbers without moving all that often - in fact, I remember people keeping their number when they moved within the same neighborhood.
I think that a cell phone number is probably most reliable now , but that was probably different in the days when you couldn’t take the number when you changed providers.