Email address - change accounts

[Rogue-1]

My in-laws have been on Telus email since the early days of telusplanet dial-up. They are moving into a retirement home and the internet service available in the building is through shaw so they will be shutting down their telus account once the sale of their house goes through. The problem is that everything they have ever signed up for is tied to their telus email address. As I am on Telus, my thought was that we shutdown their account and recreate the email address under my account using one of the available email accounts I have. I am not sure how long it would take between the time the account was deleted before the name would become available to create a new account with the same name. Anyone see any issues with this or have a different idea to make this happen? 

[NFtoBC]

Check directly with Telus by calling in, and asking if the email account can be maintained independent of the internet account. Your parents would not be the first to find themselves in this situation.

To my knowledge no ISP releases old email addresses for re-use.

The only alternative I see would be to migrate all the accounts using the telusplanet address to a new email. Hopefully, they maintained a list of sites they joined.

[FuzzyLogic]

Telus has an option to forward email to another address. I'm not sure what happens once the Telus account is closed. Once you have the Shaw address you could then forward your Telus email there. You may need to keep the Telus account active until you are confident that any important contacts have the new email address. More info here:

http://webmailhelp.telus.net/en/rich/mail/managing-your-email/#automatically-forwarding-messages-you...

[Upcraft]

A customer cannot re-create a telusplanet.net address even after it is deleted.  Those domains are legacy and not available again once deleted.  

Telus technical support has the ability to add those legacy domain names as an alias but you will have to call in or use chat and talk to someone.  I'm not even sure if they give this ability to all new support reps or if it is reserved for tier 2 reps or higher or they may have even removed their access to add them back again.  But for sure the only way to maintain the telusplanet.net emails is for a Telus rep to help you.  Customer logins only get the ability to add @telus.net accounts.

Telus reps should be able to use their helpdesk login on the old page at https://reg1.telus.net/selfcare/SelfCareApp to get to the spot where these old email domains can be added back as an alias.  They called this "infranet administrator" system internally, if a helpdesk rep knows that term they likely have been around long enough to know where to look.  If they do not know that term it's likely they are too junior to know what they are talking about and you should either call back or ask them to consult with their support team to find someone who still knows the older systems.  

I'm guessing the official position though is once you cancel your service your email is no longer available though most support reps are willing to help out there will be some portion who just want to be jerks about it and follow the rules and get you off the call as quickly as possible so their stats look good and their manager gives them a gold star for not taking too long on the phone during their performance review.  (You want to avoid those guys)