I caught something about this on Radio 4 in the car the other day. Seems that Ofcom are threatening to regulate ongoing email provision for old accounts, after people switch ISPs.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51571275I don’t really see how they can regulate free email provision for former customers. Email provision requires resources including data storage, it wouldn’t seem fair to ‘order’ BT that they had to continue it for free, indefinitely, for former customers. Email has never been free, it costs the ISP money that comes from customers’ pockets, it’s just it’s not so visible as it’s bundled into account costs.
Even apart from storage costs and bandwidth, the provider may one day simply want to stop using the domain name. Even Google might one day make a business decision to drop ‘gmail.com’, inconceivable as it seems today.
Some ISPs do allow ongoing use of old email addresses for free, presumably because that’s less bother than cleaning them up, but I’d be surprised if they actually guarantee to do so.
Then again £7.50 per month, if that’s what BT are charging, would indeed appear to be opportunistic daylight robbery. Just my opinion.