Telstra has moved closer to the full closure of its long-running BigPond brand after announcing a new Telstra Mail email service that will swallow up BigPond webmail.
The telco has been in the process of shutting down the BigPond brand since late 2013, when it changed its BigPond homepage to Telstra Media branding.
Several months later, it canned its BigPond broadband service in favour of Telstra-branded offerings, and changed the sign on 'My BigPond' customer accounts to Telstra-branded accounts.
At the end of 2014, Telstra shut down its online BigPond Music MP3 download service at the same time as it closed its BigPond GameArena gaming website. The telco still operates the BigPond Movies brand.
Now BigPond webmail will be shuttered in favour of a new service, Telstra Mail, that will replace @telstra.com and @bigpond.com email for home broadband customers.
Telstra is also shifting its Outlook.com customers off the Microsoft service and onto Telstra Mail. The move will mean Outlook.com users will no longer get emails to their BigPond or Telstra.com email addresses sent to the Microsoft webmail.
Telstra spent several years from February 2012 migrating its BigPond mail customers to the underlying Outlook.com platform following complaints about the BigPond platform.
"Email has come a long way since we introduced BigPond email in 1996," Telstra head of mobile products Nick Ruddock wrote yesterday.
"When we first launched the service Australian households had only been logging on to the internet for a few years and we were still a nation of memo writers and letter posters."
Telstra Mail will provide a cross-platform email offering and 10GB storage, significantly more than the between 1GB and 5GB allocation webmail customers currently receive.
Message size limits will be increased from 10MB to 25MB, and emails will now be hosted locally in Australia.
All @telstra.com and @bigpond.com customers will be moved onto the new service over the next couple of months. Email addresses will remain the same.
The service will be free for existing Telstra customers, but will cost $79 per year for non-Telstra customers. The telco has offered the first year free of charge.
