Bye-bye Telinco - death warrant finally issued by TalkTalk An eight-week notice of the final end has been issued to any remaining customers of ancient ISP Telinco by its owner TalkTalk - which inherited the mail and hosting servers after it bought Tiscali in 2009. Legacy email addresses have tended to do a fairly good job of surviving multiple buyouts of a company and its underpinning …
How much a year does it cost the owner to keep the domain alive? £20 a year inc their own Admin costs, plus a once off script to move the existing accounts to a currently maintained server?
It's about branding and income. If a service doesn't make money and isn't current corporate branding it will be axed.
The alternative to zero privacy "who knows where hosted" email is your own domain and hosting package with a smaller known National datacentre. Move it when they can't tell you what country it's in.
Even if they didn't want to maintain the old email addresses they could sign them up with a talktalk email and just a forward to send any telinco emails to the new talktalk address so they won't miss out on any emails sent to the old address.
I tend to find though after a couple of years you need to ditch an old email and sign up for a new one as eventually no matter how hard you try to keep it off the radar it will become full of spam.
I've been with PlusNet for a long time and their spam filtering is pretty good. I also have my own rules-based and Bayesian filters. It's not a big problem. But you can usually change your username without ditching your ISP. The latter could be inconvenient if you're running a web site inside the ISP's domain.
"I tend to find though after a couple of years you need to ditch an old email and sign up for a new one as eventually no matter how hard you try to keep it off the radar it will become full of spam."
Hurray for Bayesian filtering. I've had my email address for 13 years now where it's been on websites and posted to mailing lists that forward to newsgroups. Since my last anti spam upgrade I only get a few spam emails per day.
Line One.
More like scum united.
And should anyone trust Stalk Stalk either?
Were I a business user I'd have worked out that any email address that incorporates my ISP's name is a bad idea which locks me into them forever.
But I knew that when I left Compuserve in the late 90's.
"Were I a business user I'd have worked out that any email address that incorporates my ISP's name is a bad idea which locks me into them forever."
The same applies to private addresses. I grabbed a domain a dozen years ago from a registrar rather than via an ISP so if I want to move it I can.
That came in very handy when Tiscali cut me off. I could move the domain name elsewhere and tell them where to shove their bills, and that stood up in court when the toe rags wouldn't stop invoicing me.
I became a customer of Tiscali when they swallowed up Lineone, and of course I was required to have a Tiscali email account. Left them for Plusnet when Talk-Talk took over but both Lineone & Tiscali accounts are still active and accessible via the original POP3 connections. I would like them to be ceased but my requests to Talk-Talk have been unsuccessful, no surprise!!
I started Northwest Net (nwnet.co.uk) in 2 small rooms above a printers in Salford in 1995. Within 12 months we'd moved into Manchester Science park and within another 2 years we had merged with Telinco and were over in Knutsford.
I had a look on the Internet Time Machine at my old creation and it made me feel happy to think that we were a fundamental part of getting people and businesses onto the early Internet.
I wonder if Talk Talk would let me have the nwnet.co.uk domain name back for nostalgic reasons? Perhaps I'll approach them.
"Maybe it's spring cleaning time at Talktalk - they are also switching off the old Homechoice/Tiscali TV service today, forcing customers to sign up to Youview."
In fairness, switching to another service is less painful then not h aving the service but being forced to subsidize those who do. I was given notification that my bill was increasing with a view to funding projects such as YouView, So you'll forgive my lack of sympathy.
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