I never felt emotional about my email address, until they tried to take it from me

I sent my first-ever email in 1997, the year of Princess Diana’s death and Hotmail’s birth, using my housemate’s email address during a working holiday in London. During the months before that, I’d met travellers who were excited about this new way of keeping in touch, but I eschewed the new technology. Instead, I spent a day sitting in the Istanbul sun writing 30 postcards, none of which ever arrived (likely thanks to the circular conversation I’d had in the post office: “Austria?” “No, Australia”).

My email address has been my identity. I can’t dispense with it lightly.Credit: Shutterstock

Fast-forward more than 25 years and I’m encountering a modern-day version of those wayward postcards. Three months ago, the trusty email addresses I set up after returning home to Australia stopped fully working. Mysteriously, and for reasons I’m not technologically qualified to explain, I could send emails from my phone or my service provider’s archaic webmail platform but not from my laptop. Suffice to say, Optus recognises it’s not just me. This is a wider problem. And for a freelancer like me, who runs a business largely via email, it’s a big problem.

It seems that both Optus and Telstra are ceasing support for their email addresses (optusnet and bigpond respectively). I say “seems” because finding official information is proving difficult. From what I can find (mainly thanks to a PC repair business blog), Telstra’s decision to gradually ditch bigpond emails was announced back in 2022, accompanied by an option for users to set up a slightly different and possibly paid address via Microsoft. The only info I can find about Optus is Reddit rumours.

From what I can gather, telcos initially offered email addresses as a customer loyalty tactic because, unlike mobile phone numbers being transferrable when you switch providers, it’s not possible to transfer an optusnet email address to another telecommunications company. For me, at least until now, that loyalty drive has worked extremely well.

Optus has acknowledged my problem and even provided a resolution case manager, but my hopes of re-establishing email functionality rapidly diminished and I was sick of having to wait minutes after every webmail click. So, I finally set up a work email address via my website’s domain, an action involving significant time, stress and outlay of tech-help funds.

But the impact of this change is not just practical. It’s the emotional aspects that are hitting hardest.

I’ve been “[e-mail]” for my whole writing career. I chose this address around the turn of the millennium after winning a Tropfest / Triple J short film script competition when, like every second person and their dog, I was an aspiring screenplay writer.

Even after switching my wordsmithing focus to articles, I kept this address because an editor mentioned he found it memorable. For a beginning writer, that was more than enough incentive to cope with the occasional side effect of someone assuming my surname was “Films”.

Vivienne.films is an important part of my identity. I’ve had this email address even longer than I had my childhood home phone number. I recently met a woman who told me she was delighted to be able to take her home phone number with her when she moved into a retirement village. I wish I could do something similar by taking my email address to a new provider.

I’m now a seasoned freelance writer, so transforming my email identity to the more corporate [e-mail] could be a power move, but it just doesn’t feel right. I’m trying to stay open to Marie Kondo-style benefits that could possibly accompany this out-with-the-old, in-with-the-new transition. Perhaps I’ll see a lift in my income and a dip in my procrastination levels? I’m not convinced, though. I feel like I’m losing part of me.

Except … drum roll … in an example of truth being stranger than fiction, I’ve had a last-minute stay of execution. The day after commissioning my new email address and a week after my Optus case manager told me there was no solution in sight, I inadvertently sent an email from my old optusnet address – and it worked. And this address has worked perfectly well in the weeks since.

So, for now at least, I have full access to both my newly minted professional address and my long-held, emotional-support address. This unexpected fix also means I don’t yet have to work out a solution for my two personal optusnet addresses. (Yes, I’ve considered Gmail but I’m not keen on Google having any more access to my data than it already does.)

I wonder, did the telcos ever consider that people might be happy to pay for access to functioning and well-supported email addresses? And why haven’t they communicated these changes. Optus, please be more upfront about what’s going on with your email addresses so people like me have time to prepare, both practically and emotionally, for the loss of an important part of their identity.

Vivienne Pearson is a freelancer whose email is now linked to her website: viviennepearson.com