Cancel att.net dial-up - Retain att.net email address

[deanvp]

There has been a recent thread on this that has been closed. I need to close my att.net dial up account(only use wifi now) but I absolutely need to retain my  xxxx@att.net address. I have been on att.net since the mid 80's and have used the same email adress plus several sub accounts for years including some business email addresses.  I receive over 200 emails a day on these att.net email addresses. In the previous thread is appears that I can retain these email addresses after canceling dial up with some caveats that I don't fully understand. Then the moderator listed some phone numbers by state that we can call and my state Washington wasn't listed.  Would someone clear this up for me?  Thanks in advance.

[deanvp]

I contacted att and after being transfered 6 times I finally got to dial-up technical support. Tech Support clearly states that onecan keep any and all existing att.net email addresses free of charge after cancellation of dial-up att services. To support that they reference currently published for HS and dial up services terms and conditions paragraph 5. a. at

http:/info.yahoo.com/legal/us/att/terms/all/

where it is stated as follows:

" When you cancel your service, your account iD email address will remain active, as will all e-mail sub accounts you have created."

However, then tech support transfers you to the billing department where Billing states that is not true and that to retain the existing email addresses the subscriber has to pay $7.95 a month after cancelling the dial-up service.  The two department representatives got into an argument while I was on the phone with them. They never resolved it while I was on the phone. I repeatedly asked them to resolve the conflict within ATT and once resolved give me a call.  Have not received a phone call yet..

This is most disturbing and unbelievable. How this conflicting information remains within the ATT organization is really hard to understand. The right hand and the left had are not part of the same body.

[JohnL369]

I just had a similar experience.  I first got the AT&T dial up service years ago when I got my first DSL service.  At that time it was around $5 and provided email, news groups, and a few other things that I wanted to maintain.  Over the years the cost has gone to close to $8 and the only thing I was gaining was my email IDs.

I contacted AT&T through the chat associated with the internet service and asked whether I could drop the dial up service and maintain my email.  The answer was I could as long as I went through the web mail service.  I confirmed that I would therefore drop the dial up service and asked for the correct phone number.

This morning, after going through no less than 6 phone numbers (no transfers, just endless menus leading to nothing applicable), I finally got to the correct billing line.  I told them that I wanted to drop the dial up service and proceeded to give them all my information.  When the representative asked why I was dropping the service I explained that the only thing I was using was email and I was given to believe I could retain my email addresses with the free service.  The rep. then told me that I could transfer to a new free email address but would not be able to retain my current email address.  When I told her that the rep. on the chat line told me I could, she said that she was sorry that I had been misinformed.

I would appreciate it if you would keep this forum updated if you get resolution.  I agree that at best this demonstrates a lack of communication within AT&T.  In the mean time, I will be going through pages of contacts and associated profile pages and changing my email to a free service.

[deanvp]

After many more p[hone calls and being quite forceful I finally got a supervisor on the line. Yes, one can keep their att.net email addresses if they have been truly transfered to the Yahoo system. I don't fully understand that caveat since that ocurred for us a year or more ago. The supervisor said the only reason for the $7.95 / month charge was for att to continue to maintain the email addresses. I responded that Yahoo was maintaining the email addresses now. She didn't have an answer to that. But she assured me I would not lose my att.net email addresses currently being supported by Yahoo mail. I have been unable to figure out if att is deliberately making this difficult to avoid customers cancelling their dialup accounts or whether the company is totally incompetant. I guess I would settle on both.