I received an email from Tesco in April that advised that it will close Tesco.Net for good on 27th June 2018. I’ll be honest, after checking it wasn’t some kind of spoof/phishing exercise, I was rather distressed, depressed and disappointed too.
I have had my firstname.surname@tesco.net (no numbers or other spurious characters) email address for nigh on twenty years now - it has accompanied me for longer than my wife and kids.
Do you remember dial ups from the pre-broadband days? Tesco.Net was with me then. I used to have to trail a phone cable from an upstairs room all the way down the stairs to plug (via a splitter) into the main phone socket.
It’s only an email address, I have others, but having it taken away from me is/was a blow. Like losing an element of my identity. My address was simple to remember and had been mine for so long that everyone knew it.
You might not appreciate just how much you rely on your email address, but, take it from me, losing one is surprisingly disruptive. Hours of work is involved.
Since Tesco’s bombshell, I have had a lot of work to do re-registering on dozens of websites. The re-registration process was a time-consuming pain in the arse because sites won’t just accept your updates, they need to send you emails that you then need to “action” before the change is implemented. All the websites inevitably had passwords and that meant lots of “forgot password” protocols had to be followed through. There is an expression “nothing is ever easy” and fuck me, in this instance it was right too.
Whilst on the subject of "not easy”, I also needed to download all of my old emails (or lose them forever) and so the old school POP connections to the back end of the Tesco server needed making. Then of course you can’t use a POP connection to download "sent" items. I spent ages trying to work out how to resolve that challenge before I simply moved all my sent items to my inbox and then used the POP to download them from there.
Oh, and another complication, the only computer I rely on these days is my work laptop, it is in use every day. The thing about my work computer is that I could hardly download all my old personal emails to it. That meant I had to temporarily recommission my old desktop machine. When I say “old”, it is still running Windows XP. I had to find all the old cables and ancillaries before I could even get it started. Still the old girl eventually fired up and met the task required of her (though her time connected to the internet was kept to an absolute minimum).
I understand why Tesco decided to sacrifice Tesco.Net, the broadband services were shut down in 2015 and it’s only thanks to some sense of civic duty that the email service was allowed to continue from that point. The technology was already obsolete thanks to Gmail and other competitors. And I don’t suppose that any money was being made either. By way of illustration, I enjoyed my email account for 20 years and didn’t pay a bean for it … ever.
Frustratingly, since moving house last year, many of my friends, family, acquaintances don’t actually know my new postal address or landline phone number. That’s not by design on my part, rather a lack of time to write to everyone who knows me. And shortly, those that know me … won’t know my email address either.
Tesco.Net will stop being accessible/visible on the 27th June but the supermarket will provide a forwarding service until the 10th October. After that, it’s all over.
I have had a few weeks to grieve, come to terms with my loss and make alternative arrangements, but I’ll miss my long-term email partner more than I miss my youth, hair, slim figure, 20/20 vision and alcohol tolerance level.
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I have had my firstname.surname@tesco.net (no numbers or other spurious characters) email address for nigh on twenty years now - it has accompanied me for longer than my wife and kids.
Do you remember dial ups from the pre-broadband days? Tesco.Net was with me then. I used to have to trail a phone cable from an upstairs room all the way down the stairs to plug (via a splitter) into the main phone socket.
It’s only an email address, I have others, but having it taken away from me is/was a blow. Like losing an element of my identity. My address was simple to remember and had been mine for so long that everyone knew it.
You might not appreciate just how much you rely on your email address, but, take it from me, losing one is surprisingly disruptive. Hours of work is involved.
Since Tesco’s bombshell, I have had a lot of work to do re-registering on dozens of websites. The re-registration process was a time-consuming pain in the arse because sites won’t just accept your updates, they need to send you emails that you then need to “action” before the change is implemented. All the websites inevitably had passwords and that meant lots of “forgot password” protocols had to be followed through. There is an expression “nothing is ever easy” and fuck me, in this instance it was right too.
Whilst on the subject of "not easy”, I also needed to download all of my old emails (or lose them forever) and so the old school POP connections to the back end of the Tesco server needed making. Then of course you can’t use a POP connection to download "sent" items. I spent ages trying to work out how to resolve that challenge before I simply moved all my sent items to my inbox and then used the POP to download them from there.
Oh, and another complication, the only computer I rely on these days is my work laptop, it is in use every day. The thing about my work computer is that I could hardly download all my old personal emails to it. That meant I had to temporarily recommission my old desktop machine. When I say “old”, it is still running Windows XP. I had to find all the old cables and ancillaries before I could even get it started. Still the old girl eventually fired up and met the task required of her (though her time connected to the internet was kept to an absolute minimum).
I understand why Tesco decided to sacrifice Tesco.Net, the broadband services were shut down in 2015 and it’s only thanks to some sense of civic duty that the email service was allowed to continue from that point. The technology was already obsolete thanks to Gmail and other competitors. And I don’t suppose that any money was being made either. By way of illustration, I enjoyed my email account for 20 years and didn’t pay a bean for it … ever.
Frustratingly, since moving house last year, many of my friends, family, acquaintances don’t actually know my new postal address or landline phone number. That’s not by design on my part, rather a lack of time to write to everyone who knows me. And shortly, those that know me … won’t know my email address either.
Tesco.Net will stop being accessible/visible on the 27th June but the supermarket will provide a forwarding service until the 10th October. After that, it’s all over.
I have had a few weeks to grieve, come to terms with my loss and make alternative arrangements, but I’ll miss my long-term email partner more than I miss my youth, hair, slim figure, 20/20 vision and alcohol tolerance level.
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