Verizon is quitting the email business....now what?
So if I sent mail to your old verizon address, you would receive it at your new address? That's what I call forwarding.
Thanks for your empathy and encouragement, Tom. I'm a firm believer that you get better at anything just by doing it regularly, so I'll keep practicing and hopefully it will start to feel more natural. The iPhone made sense for me because my son has one, so it allows us to use iMessage and it's handy to have him show me features I don't know about.
I haven't gotten my "instructions" from Verizon yet, but my understanding is that if you agree to transfer your email to AOL, you can keep your Verizon address, but otherwise, they will simply drop your account after the deadline and you can no longer forward emails to another account from it. So I intend to transfer to AOL and keep my Verizon address at least for the near term in case there are businesses or old friends that attempt to reach me who I failed to notify about my new address. Since Verizon is our internet provider, I assume there will be no additional cost to maintain the address, and hence no compelling reason to cancel it.
You are correct jasper (in what you wrote in your second paragraph above).
It sounds like Verizon is just transferring the service to AOL, and AOL will be operating Verizon email addresses going forward. People would be replying from the Verizon email address, so I wouldn't call that forwarding.
Tom_Reingold said:
So if I sent mail to your old verizon address, you would receive it at your new address? That's what I call forwarding.
Oh, I get it. I was slow this time to understand what you all are talking about. Thanks for the explanations. You don't have to give up your address, just that another company will handle your mail from now on, and that's a good thing. It's really an upgrade, since AOL offers IMAP, and I don't think verizon did or does. This lets you keep mail on their server, which makes it accessible from all of your devices if you access email from more than one place.
Tom_Reingold said:
Oh, I get it. I was slow this time to understand what you all are talking about. Thanks for the explanations. You don't have to give up your address, just that another company will handle your mail from now on, and that's a good thing. It's really an upgrade, since AOL offers IMAP, and I don't think verizon did or does. This lets you keep mail on their server, which makes it accessible from all of your devices if you access email from more than one place.
Yes you now get it Tom! 
I decided not to try to switch to IMAP just now but you're right that is a very helpful option for most people.
AOL appears to be a very helpful option, except for the fact that AOL is considered an outdated legacy address by many people, who have long since migrated away due to problems with constantly being hacked, etc. Perhaps now that it is owned by Verizon, Verizon will provide the necessary support and upgrades to make it a higher quality server. Certainly migrating to AOL sounds like the easiest temporary solution.
Jasmo said:
AOL appears to be a very helpful option, except for the fact that AOL is considered an outdated legacy address by many people, who have long since migrated away due to problems with constantly being hacked, etc. Perhaps now that it is owned by Verizon, Verizon will provide the necessary support and upgrades to make it a higher quality server.
But the verizon.net users don't have to have aol.com addresses. aol is outdated in many ways, but their email is better than most other companies. Not as good as gmail, but you could do worse.
Jasmo said:
AOL appears to be a very helpful option, except for the fact that AOL is considered an outdated legacy address by many people, who have long since migrated away due to problems with constantly being hacked, etc. Perhaps now that it is owned by Verizon, Verizon will provide the necessary support and upgrades to make it a higher quality server. Certainly migrating to AOL sounds like the easiest temporary solution.
Not an issue since the email addresses will remain "@verizon.net" which may or may not be considered "hip" but certainly doesn't have the same rep as "@aol.com".
We finally got our notification this past week. It was pretty easy to move it all over to aol. We can always change later, but this was the "path of least resistance" for now.
Got mine this week, too. Took about 5 minutes. I kept my address, and will continue to use Thunderbird on PC and the native Samsung app on my tablet.
I know Verizon didn't think they had IMAP, and I have been using POP3, but my emails have always stayed on the server (for 14 days) so I have had no trouble using readers.
Verizon didn't have IMAP but I too always kept my emails on the server for 30 days. The beauty of IMAP over a POP3 is that when I send an email to you Max from my home Outlook I will see that in sent mail regardless of which device I follow that sent mail out on. Plus those older emails are only going to be on my Outlook so I can't look for them via my phone or the aol website from my work computer. I still didn't switch to IMAP however as it didn't really matter to me but I can see why it would be helpful.
max_weisenfeld said:
Got mine this week, too. Took about 5 minutes. I kept my address, and will continue to use Thunderbird on PC and the native Samsung app on my tablet.
I know Verizon didn't think they had IMAP, and I have been using POP3, but my emails have always stayed on the server (for 14 days) so I have had no trouble using readers.
I have always kept my emails on the server indefinitely and then gone in and manually deleted or archived when ready. This was mainly because of accessing via POP3 from multiple devices (work, home, phone) and no longer needed with IMAP.
@wendy, a well-configured email app using IMAP will put the Sent mail on the server, so you will see the mail you sent from any device. I suggest you try IMAP and see if you like it. I'm betting you will. It's also faster.
Tom_Reingold said:
@wendy, a well-configured email app using IMAP will put the Sent mail on the server, so you will see the mail you sent from any device. I suggest you try IMAP and see if you like it. I'm betting you will. It's also faster.
As I said above perhaps not that clear (but earlier you didn't think I was clear about the switch to AOL but keeping the Verizon address without forwarding) I am aware of the limitations of sticking with a POP3 Tom and didn't want the hassle to change. In fact the instructions made it sound like it would not be as simple to change if I already was using POP3 for Outlook (home computer) and my phone and so I chose not to.
I don't know what would be hard, but maybe you do, so I guess you're doing the best thing for you. Just trying to help, as always. Ignore it if that's best.
My email address and all of my contacts I used through the Verizon server have migrated to AOL. There is no forwarding. It still is my email address and will remain so. Difference is that AOL is the email server.
"Starting February 2017, Verizon will no longer provide verizon.net email service. Instead they will focus on providing their internet, TV and phone customers the best experience possible. Verizon has teamed up with AOL to provide verizon.net email customers with AOL Mail, an enhanced email experience."
And
"You will use your verizon.net email address, including @verizon.net, as your user name for AOL Mail.
When you register with AOL Mail, you will be prompted to create a new password for your account. This new password will be used to log in to your new AOL Mail account. Your Verizon password will stay the same and will not be impacted by this change."
In other words:
I still get my email from Outlook or my phone and when I am at a different computer like my work computer then I go onto AOL.com using my verizon email address to check my email that way. No different than when I used work computer and went onto netmail.verizon.net.