Can you keep your email address when you switch?

Plenty of switches get as far as the order page and then stall on something that has nothing to do with broadband. The email address ends in the name of the company you are about to leave. Twenty years of banking, bills and family sit behind it, and nobody has ever explained whether you can keep your email address once the contract ends. So the switch gets put off, and this one detail holds more households on an expensive deal than exit fees do.

Can you keep your email address when you switch?

Often yes, and never because you are entitled to it. Some providers let the address carry on for nothing. Some charge a monthly fee. Some close it. In every case they are doing you a favour rather than meeting an obligation, which is the part worth understanding before you build a plan on it.

A provider-issued address was never a possession. It came bundled with the broadband, runs on that company’s mail platform, and what you were paying for was the connection. End the connection and the bundle it arrived in ends too. After that it is policy, not right.

Why your landline number is protected and your email is not

This is the comparison that catches people out, because the two feel like the same kind of thing. Your phone number is protected: the industry rules oblige your old provider to hand it over when the new one asks, which our guide to keeping your landline number goes through in detail. The switching rules say nothing equivalent about email, so there is no obligation to transfer an address, no deadline anyone has to meet, and nobody to escalate to when the answer is no.

Providers are not simply being difficult here. A phone number is a national resource, built to move between networks. An address on a company’s own domain has to keep running on that company’s mail system, staffed and secured, for somebody who has stopped paying them. Free forever was never likely. Knowing that changes what you ask for: not fairness, but the terms.

What the big providers actually do

Policies here change more often than almost anything else in this market, so treat the shapes below as what to expect and the provider’s own help pages as the answer on the day you switch:

• BT. There is a free basic option that keeps the address working through a web browser only, and a paid tier for anyone who wants it in a phone or desktop mail app. BT puts the paid tier at £7.50 a month and gives you around 60 days after the broadband ends to decide, which is a real deadline rather than a nudge.
• Sky. The address generally carries on at no charge, with a catch that has nothing to do with money. Sky’s own terms allow it to close a mailbox left unused for 180 days, so an address kept for the odd important message needs signing into on purpose every few months.
• TalkTalk. Email has been moved onto a separate paid service rather than bundled with the broadband, and the free arrangement former customers once had has ended. TalkTalk publishes the current price and the transition detail, and it has changed recently enough to be worth reading rather than assuming.
• Smaller networks and altnets. Most never issued you an address at all, so there is nothing here to lose or pay for. It also means the new network cannot take the old address on. An address on somebody else’s domain is not transferable to anyone.

Free, paid or closed, the pattern underneath is the same one. The decision belongs to the company you are leaving, and it can be revisited whenever that company likes. TalkTalk changing its arrangement for former customers is the proof of that.

What does it cost to keep an old provider email?

Anywhere from nothing to about £90 a year, depending entirely on who you were with. BT’s paid tier at £7.50 a month works out at £90 over twelve months, and on a free arrangement the cost is nothing but the discipline of logging in.

That figure is worth holding next to the reason you were switching. A household moving off an out-of-contract deal onto full fibre is often saving considerably more than £90 a year, so the email fee rarely swallows the saving. It does eat into it, and it is the sort of cost nobody includes when they compare two monthly prices. Our guide to finding a cheap deal that lasts covers the rest of what a headline price leaves out.

The fix almost nobody does before switching

Move to an address that does not belong to a broadband company. That is the whole answer. It costs nothing with any of the mainstream mail services, and it means this is the last time you have to think about any of it.

An address ending in a provider’s name is rented. It ties your identity to a company you might one day want to leave, which is precisely the wrong incentive to wire into your own admin. An independent address goes with you through every switch, every house move and every price rise, and no provider gets a say in it again.

The honest trade-off is that it is a chore. Not a hard one, but a real one: a couple of hours of updating accounts and then a slow tail of forgotten logins surfacing over the following year. Anyone telling you it takes five minutes has not done it.

How to move an email address without losing anything

Do it before you place the switch order, not after. Access to the old mailbox is what makes all of this possible, and that access is the thing on a timer:

• Set the new address up first. While the old one still works normally. Trying to arrange a new mailbox during the fortnight your broadband is changing over is how people end up paying to keep the old one.
• Import the old mail. Every mainstream service will copy years of messages and contacts across from another account. Do it once, early, and the archive stops being a hostage.
• Turn on forwarding if it is offered. Where a provider allows it, forwarding catches the accounts you forgot. Ask whether it survives the broadband ending, because often it does not.
• Update the accounts that can lock you out first. Banking, government services, pensions, anything holding a card. Then energy, insurance and the rest. Leave the shopping accounts until last; nothing bad happens if one is missed.
• Keep the old address alive while it is free. If your provider offers a no-cost option, take it and set a reminder to sign in. It is a safety net for the six months of stragglers, and it costs you nothing.
• Do not ring the old provider to cancel. Under One Touch Switch the new provider ends the old service, and a tidy-minded cancellation call can close things earlier than you meant. Our guide to how switching actually works covers who does what.

Our view

Do not let this decide where you buy your broadband. An email address is a solvable afternoon and a broadband contract is two years, so a household staying on an expensive deal to protect an address is paying a great deal for the wrong thing.

Sort the address out first and the switch becomes an ordinary decision about price, speed and who actually reaches your street. Start with what is available at your address, then place the order once the mail is somewhere that belongs to you.

Frequently asked questions

Will I lose the emails already in my inbox?

Not immediately, and not at all if you move them somewhere first. Mail sitting in an old provider account stays there while the account stays open, which is why the order of events matters: set up the new address and import the old mail while you still have access, rather than after the account has closed. Every mainstream mail service can pull years of messages across from another account, and it is the step people skip because it feels like the boring one.

Can I forward the old address to a new one?

Sometimes, and it is worth asking before you assume it. Where forwarding is offered it is the single most useful thing you can turn on, because it catches the accounts you forgot to update instead of bouncing them. It is a stop gap rather than a solution though: forwarding usually stops when the old mailbox does, so treat it as breathing room to finish the job, not as the job being finished.

Do altnets give you an email address?

Most do not, and that is generally a point in their favour. A smaller network selling you fibre and nothing else never issues an address on its own domain, so there is nothing to lose if you leave again later. It does mean that if you are moving from a provider that did give you one, the new network is not somewhere the old address can be transferred to. Nobody can take over an address that belongs to another company.

What if my email address is the login for everything?

Then it is worth treating this as a security job rather than a broadband one. An address you cannot renew is an address you cannot receive a password reset at, and losing the mailbox that resets your bank login is a much larger problem than losing the address itself. Work through the accounts that can lock you out first, which usually means banking, government, pensions and anything holding a card.

Is it worth paying to keep an old provider email address?

For a few months while you move everything across, often yes. As a permanent arrangement it is a subscription to a company you have already left, for a service you can get elsewhere for nothing. The honest exception is a household where the address has been given out for decades and the admin genuinely will not happen, and paying a small monthly fee is a fair price for not dealing with it.