Thanks Dave. Still use Shaw because I am a dinosaur, have used it for many years, and don't want to change our email address.
Thanks Dave. Still use Shaw because I am a dinosaur, have used it for many years, and don't want to change our email address.
I hate to be blunt, but in case you haven’t heard the news: Shaw will be going away, and your email account(s) with it if you don’t take steps in the near future.
In short (because really this could be quite a long discussion), Rogers is ultimately going to be successful in buying Shaw after some additional wrangling. Once that goes through, in most areas the transition will be quite smooth: Rogers uses all the same equipment Shaw does, so home phone and home internet and TV service will, apart from branding changes, remain the same.
But Rogers does not offer home email service **at all**, so the poorly-maintained and contracted-out Shaw email service will probably be given a short grace period and then be dropped.
If you’re reading this here on the VMUG forum, my suggestion would be to develop (if you don’t already have one) or shift (if you do) to your iCloud email as your main email address. You could also shift to Outlook.com if you prefer, or GMail (if you are okay with their lack-of-privacy policies). You can set your Shaw email to forward to your iCloud (or whatever) new email address, send out notices to your loved ones and companies you do business with about the new address, export any Shaw contacts or archived email with relative ease — but only if you get started on it NOW and don’t wait until Shaw gets shut down.
There were plenty of good reasons to dump Shaw’s email before (small mailbox, poor customer support, difficult to access away from home, etc), but the time to put it off is drawing to a close. You DO NOT want to wait till the last minute to do this, particularly if you feel you need assistance from a specialist, as we will all be SWAMPED by people who didn’t heed the warnings.
The universal recommendations from all the home-tech consultants in town is that for many practical reasons, it is time to move your primary email to a company that isn’t going anywhere before we’re all dead. That would be either Microsoft, Apple, or Google. I encourage everyone reading this who is still on Shaw email to start the transition to one of those services NOW, while you can still go about it in a relaxed manner, make decisions about what to keep, and in particular change the email you registered with various online accounts — from your bank to your dentist to your beloved VMUG – as soon as possible.
Bureaucracy being what it is, we’re probably looking at the spring before all the dust settles on this, but as you know — time marches on quickly. If you need help, contact your friendly local home tech consultant: Alan, Aitan, Brian, Tofi, David, Priority 1, Tesseract, or even little ol’ me at London Drugs.
PS. If you’re wondering why you haven’t heard/read more about all this, it’s because a) you’re not listening to Alan Perry’s show, and/or b) the TC can’t say much until the deal is done. Also bear in mind that 95+ percent of email users these days are already on one of the above-mentioned email services — it’s just us (and Parksville and other places with high senior populations) on the west coast that have been stubborn about this.