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Early Warning... If an email service has closed down or changed the services it offers, or if there are indications it is about to do so, post about it here.

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Old 22 Jul 2010, 10:52 AM   #1
xmailer
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Join Date: Jun 2002
Location: USA
Posts: 5,485
Go.com email closing

Just received at my go.com email address:

Quote:
Dear GO Mail members,

We are sorry to inform you that GO Mail will permanently shut down as of
August 31, 2010, at 12:00 am PST. After this time, your GO Mail account
and all of the information within the account will no longer be accessible
to you.

If you wish to save the information currently stored in your e-mail
account, we suggest forwarding all the content to another e-mail service.
We will not be able to retrieve any data from your e-mail account after
the shut down date.

Please note that after the shut down date your GO Mail member name and
password will remain active and can continue to be used to log in to
many of the online Disney properties including ABC.com, ABCNews.com,
Disney.com, ESPN.com, Family.com and many others.

Thank you for being a loyal member of GO Mail.

Regards,

GO Mail Team
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Old 28 Jul 2010, 11:45 AM   #2
King Of Email
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Lightbulb Go.com

That's unfortunate. Go.com is one of the old ones from the early days, one that I was never able to get my chosen ID at. However, Go.com never evolved in size or performance like may others have done. Still, a short, free, and easy email address like Go.com is a rarity especially nowadays. I really wish some internet entity would take the helm and revive some of these defunct email services that have well known names and popular appeal instead of simply being parked or warehoused forever.
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Old 20 Aug 2010, 10:27 AM   #3
60andclueless
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xmailer, I am in the same boat have had go for amny many years and am now looking at losing all the emails i have had, but would really like to keep (from family and friends that are no longer here, etc.). I am now with gmail, and am trying to import my old emails, but no one seems to be able to help, I saw all your postings and it seems like you are familiar with both could you amybe offer a wee bit of help?
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Old 20 Aug 2010, 12:09 PM   #4
xmailer
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I'm sorry, 60andclueless, but I'm afraid I'm somewhat doubtful that anyone will be able to help you very much, but, truthfully, I think this just shows the potential hazard of relying on corporations like Disney, ABC, Family.com, ESPN, etc., who don't specialize in email and are big and rich enough to get away with having such little regard for their users/customers, or any service which provides no convenient means of migrating messages elsewhere (Gmail, for one, provides several such means).

But unfortunately, unless Gmail's importing tool has provision for migrating from this service specifically, which seems highly unlikely to me, its being fairly "obscure" as far as free email services go, I'm afraid there probably aren't any better options than manually forwarding the messages one by one to your Gmail account.

In fact, I never relied on the go.com "service" myself, using it as only a secondary backup service, which I never even ended up relying on as a backup, and probably would have recommended against anyone using them as their primary email service long before this announced closing, mainly for the reason that they never did offer any practical means to back up or migrate messages elsewhere, even to their users' own computers, except for the option of having all incoming messages autoforwarded to another service as they arrived, which is how I've had mine set up ever since that option was available.

But, if anything, I think they became even less worthy of regarding as a "real" email service when they actually downgraded their webmail features some time ago, which was already pretty abysmal, with advertising taking up nearly two thirds of the page, making it one of the least practical/usable webmail interfaces I think I've ever seen.

As far as I know, the only way to import/migrate your messages might be through some third-party tool, such as FreePops, which provides for the POP3 download (or a sort of "pseudo-POP3" download) of messages from popular webmail services which have no POP3 or IMAP access. But I've checked the FreePops site, and I'm afraid I'm not surprised to see that go.com is apparently a little too "obscure", or not a popular enough service, for anyone connected with same to have considered it worth creating a module for it.

So, unless you can convince one of the developers at the FreePops forum to do so before the go.com "service" closes at the end of this month, which might be much faster than requests for new modules are typically fulfilled even when they agree to add them, or unless someone else may know of a similar third party service or software which can be used for the purpose with go.com, which I'm afraid I have my doubts exists anywhere, my best advice, if you have valued messages there that you don't wish to lose, is just to begin manually forwarding them ASAP in order to try to get at least all the most important ones forwarded elsewhere before the service closes at end of this month.

I wish I had more useful help to offer than this, but I'm afraid that I don't have any better suggestions when it comes to a so-called email service of the likes of go.com, which I likely would have advised anyone against ever relying on for important messages in the first place.

Last edited by xmailer : 20 Aug 2010 at 12:15 PM.
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Old 21 Aug 2010, 04:51 AM   #5
Tsunami
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Wasn't go.com owned by Disney? That alone was enough for me to not sign up. I tried all sorts of email services out of curiosity but the sad conclusion is that the small ones can never beat the Goliaths of email. Those email services backed by very wealthy companies who specialise only in internet related services, are the only ones you can trust to stay active and not cease to exist in the forseeable future. So we have AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, Everyone.net (??), and some local initiatives (Walla.co.il, Seznam.cz, Mail.ru, Web.de, GMX.de, ...) and that's it. Other services, as nice they may be domain-wise or as exotic address, should be avoided or used as backup service only because it's always a question mark how long they'll survive.

I hope one of the big players (preferably Gmail - by far the most reliable and user-friendly one IMO) picks up the go.com domain because it'd be a shame if such domain would end up on a parked-domain page or not be used for anything useful. It's a pity many great domains are in the hands of those who either don't know what to do with it, or don't have the skill or funds to use them for a long-lasting service.
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Old 21 Aug 2010, 05:10 AM   #6
xmailer
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Tsunami View Post
I hope one of the big players (preferably Gmail - by far the most reliable and user-friendly one IMO) picks up the go.com domain because it'd be a shame if such domain would end up on a parked-domain page or not be used for anything useful. It's a pity many great domains are in the hands of those who either don't know what to do with it, or don't have the skill or funds to use them for a long-lasting service.
Actually, since it's currently already owned by one (or many) of the "big players" -- just not one of the big players in the email market -- I tend to somewhat strongly doubt that the domain will be up for grabs any time soon. From the above message from the site, it doesn't look like go.com is planning to...um...go...anywhere:

Quote:
Please note that after the shut down date your GO Mail member name and password will remain active and can continue to be used to log in to many of the online Disney properties including ABC.com, ABCNews.com, Disney.com, ESPN.com, Family.com and many others.
This change has lost them at least one "member", though, since I've never had any use at all for any of those sites other than the email service with a good, short domain name which they did offer. Other than that, I personally wouldn't consider it any loss if all the above go.com-related sites vanished from the internet forever, although of course I don't expect that to likely happen any time soon.

Last edited by xmailer : 21 Aug 2010 at 08:21 AM. Reason: typo
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Old 26 Aug 2010, 11:58 AM   #7
Nikolaos
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I just heard about this and went to check my ancient go.com account for the first time in eons. It redirected me to a blank page with "register" in the url. I guess that means they shut me down long ago. Oh well. I never really used it anyway, it was a pretty crappy provider and never got much better. I do feel a little bit sad though - just for nostalgia's sake!

Quote:
Originally Posted by 60andclueless View Post
xmailer, I am in the same boat have had go for amny many years and am now looking at losing all the emails i have had, but would really like to keep (from family and friends that are no longer here, etc.). I am now with gmail, and am trying to import my old emails, but no one seems to be able to help, I saw all your postings and it seems like you are familiar with both could you amybe offer a wee bit of help?
There used to be this email program called ePrompter that was supposed to work with go.com. You can try downloading it at eprompter.com and installing it on your computer.

I personally was never able to get it to connect successfully to go.com, but there's no harm in giving it a try if you're desperate It won't transfer your emails to gmail, but if it works it might at least be able to download a copy of all your Go.com emails to your computer so that you would have a local copy to keep on your hard drive.
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Old 28 Aug 2010, 08:33 AM   #8
King Of Email
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Lightbulb Go.com

I had a Go.com account before it was run/owned by Disney. I think ABC networks owned Go.com of course ABC and Disney are now the same thing. The small size of the inbox and the lack of upgrades made left this service in the dust while others were adding space, features, and utilities. However, a very easy, convenient extension like Go.com is prime and should be redeveloped and relaunched if only for the prestige of the entities that own it. I'll bet It's probably still in use for Disney corporation employees, but not to the general public. Still, I want my short, easy free email and it's disappearing from the face of the internet.
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Old 8 Sep 2010, 01:36 AM   #9
arwebevenstar
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Join Date: Sep 2010
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Go.com email cessation

Well, those of you who got notification of Disney shutting down their email service are luckier than I was...I was on during July & August and never saw anything about the closing down or I would have retrieved my email addresses, transferred treasured emails...like my grandson's photos (luckily I had my dgt copy to my work email so all is not lost). But I never saw on their login screen or received any emails from them...so I didn't realize until Sept 4th that they had "screwed" me over....I don't know why I expected anything better from them because they had zilch tech help...When I had a problem with my service I could not find a way to contact them directly & had to contact them thru a circuitous route (parent/child registration) and was pleasantly surprised to have a human call me about it, but that was a rarity. So needless to say I was very upset to realize it was all gone & I would have to resurrect my contacts list. So whoopee-dee-do with still being able to use my username & password, I never went anywhere but to Go.com email....
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Old 11 Sep 2010, 11:47 PM   #10
Tsunami
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I guess in a while everyone will be using either AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail or Gmail because they are the only ones backed by a wealthy organisation unlikely to ever discontinue the email service. That means probably all other services will be mistrusted just because people wonder how long it will be before they're next in closing down. Maybe a few regionally dominant providers will survive as well (eg Walla in Israel, Seznam in Czech Republic, GMX in Germany, Mail.ru in Russia, ...) but on international level it seems the email providers ceasing operations are rapidly following each other.

I just hope people won't abandon email alltogether and force people into Facebook () and such. The day that happens I'll just put on my blog that contact is only possible by regular courier rather than re-starting to use those networking sites ...
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