They did that 20 years ago when they outsourced email to Yahoo. Unfortunately we have three big telecoms up here and they all suck differently.
Good bet Rogers is paying Yahoo something for that. And would rather not keep paying.
I think in spite of their incompetence, they want you to keep the @rogers.com email address as it discourages switching to another Internet provider since you would lose your email address.
This seems to be a common problem across most ISPs now. A few years ago a friend of mine was getting almost impossibly bad email service and was basically told outright by the ISP’s service desk to go elsewhere.
My current ISP has just terminated all email services. If we want to keep our email address we are forced to move to a designated commercial service that will start charging after a honeymoon period. It seems self defeating as the one thing that kept one tied to the ISP was the email address. But as internet service becomes concentrated in a few players in a cost sensitive market there is no incentive to offer retention benefits that are a burden on the business.
Which is sad. My ISP was once one of the shining stars of the business. No more.
That’s incredible! I’m pretty sure that would be illegal in Canada where internet in general and email in particular are considered essential services, and such irresponsible actions would be denied regulatory approval. Last year the CRTC came down hard on Rogers when their ongoing incompetence caused a nation-wide outage of internet, cell phone, and cable-based landline services for 12 to 15 million Rogers customers for nearly an entire day, including the failure of associated 911 services which caused at least one death.
I do not, however, think that Rogers is deliberately trying to drive customers away from using their email service, although their actions are certainly having that effect for many. I think the operative principle here is “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”. Rogers and Yahoo – joined in holy corporate matrimony by their mutual incompetence – are just flailing about trying to make email more secure, and doing it in their usual inimitable style that could only have been inspired by the Three Stooges.
The scuttlebutt on the Rogers discussion forums – the only place that I’ve been able to get any information about any of this at all, because the CSRs certainly know nothing – is that Rogers wants to drive PC users to their webmail service as the exclusive access point. This rumour is supported by the wording on their website when you try to generate an app password (roughly paraphrased): “We don’t currently support generating app passwords for email client apps, but the good news is you can go to our webmail for a superior experience!”. I presume the reason for this is that email clients impose technical support requirements and costs on them for supporting IMAP, SMTP, and POP3, and, well, they’d rather not.
They do, however, continue to support email access from mobile devices. Why? Because Rogers is the largest wireless provider in Canada, that’s why.
There’s a third-party app called Mailstore that is supposed to be an effective intermediary in moving mail archives from Outlook to Thunderbird, but even if that doesn’t work, Thunderbird should at least provide me with a integrated email client for both Rogers and Gmail.
Thanks for all the comments. I continue to work on my challenge. 
I just wanted to update you fine folks on the fact that I think I finally have a temporary workaround. It is what might be called a terrible, no-good, pain-in-the-butt, bad, bad, bad workaround, but it will do until I have a permanent fix, which will likely be to change all of my important contacts over to Gmail, and never let Rogers/Yahoo darken my doorstep again. It basically consists of using Thunderbird to access emails from those contacts that I haven’t changed over to Gmail yet, and periodically (like about once a week) exporting them to Outlook where I have my permanent database of everything.
It’s a long and convoluted story and riddled with bugs on all sides, but I’ve basically been able to use a buggy tool called SysTools MBOX Converter to move emails from Thunderbird to Outlook (which, as it turns out, is also buggy). There are bugs on all sides and it basically only works if you stand on one leg and squawk like a chicken, but it serves the purpose. Anyone with the same problem can inquire here for details or via PM. I was going to post all the sordid details but they’re not relevant to those not suffering the immediate same problem.
I don’t hate technology, but dammit, do I ever hate technology when it refuses to stand still and has no regard for backwards compatibility of anything! 