Telstra Mail changes and how they affect Bigpond email accounts

Have you received a recent notification, either advising that your Telstra email service is about to change, or that it has ALREADY changed?

My own daughter found that her email suddenly stopped working yesterday because of this Telstra change (which she had been advised a few weeks ago would be occurring soon).

She immediately contacted me yesterday to find out what to do - and I figure many other iTandCoffee subscribers will soon be asking the same question.

The image here shows the email that my daughter received from Telstra yesterday.

So, what does this change mean?

For my daughter and many other people, it is necessary to do some setup and modification of settings on your device/s as soon as Telstra makes the change to your email.

For other people, Telstra advises that no change is necessary - but you may wish to make some changes if you want to take advantage of improvements offered by the new mail service.

​Let's look at this in more detail.

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​The good news

If you have an email address that was set up before about 2012, this email account will have been the old stye of email address known as POP that can cause several frustrations.  

For example, your POP mail is not synchronised across multiple devices, which means double (and, perhaps, triple) handling of your emails.  Emails you read on one device are not marked at 'read' on the other.  Emails you delete on one device are not deleted on the other.

With Telstra's old POP style of email account, your Sent mail can only be viewed on the device from which it was sent.  

Additionally, POP accounts do not allow you to set up mail folders/mailboxes for filing your mail, so you cannot organise your mail across your devices in the same way that you can with services like Gmail and iCloud.

You may have also discovered that you have trouble sending emails when you are not on a Telstra-provided internet connection - especially overseas.  

(More recently created Telstra email accounts, created since 2012, do not suffer these problems because they are usually Microsoft Outlook accounts.  These newer accounts are also being migrated to Telstra's new 'Telstra Mail' service, away from the Microsoft platform - we'll talk about these int 'The bad news' section below.)

The good news for those with these old-style Telstra mail accounts is that new Telstra Mail service is a different style of email account that can support something called IMAP, and will resolve these issues for you.  

When you connect to your mail account using IMAP, your mail stays in sync between your devices.  mail read on one device will be marked as read on another.  mail deleted on one device will disappear from the Inbox on other devices. 'Sent' mail will be able to be seen from any device, and sending issues when overseas will disappear.  

Not only that, you will also be able to organise your mail into your own set of mailboxes that synchronise across all your devices..

The bad news

The issue that is affecting many Bigpond account holders is that their email stops working after Telstra 'moves them'.  This is impacting those clients who had newer, Outlook-hosted Bigpond accounts.  

Unfortunately, to continue accessing your email, you must change the email setup on any devices on which the email account has been installed.  In my daughter's case, changes were required to her iPhone, iPad and Mac computer.

In most cases, the Telstra Mail account must be added as a NEW ACCOUNT.  

If you have the older POP style of account, the email you get from Telstra says that you don't have to do anything.  This means that your mail should continue to work on all devices without any changes.

However, to take advantage of the new features offered by Telstra Mail (which are described in 'The good news' above), you will have to add your Telstra Mail account as a new account on each device.

If you are not sure how to add a new Mail account on your iPad, iPhone or Mac, fill in the below form and we will send you an iTandCoffee video that provides a tutorial of how to do this.

For those who are not confident about applying these changes, please don't hesitate to make an appointment with iTandCoffee and we can make the changes for you (applies Melbourne residents only.) 

Just book online or call 1300 885 420 to make an appointment.  (Please note that iTandCoffee is not affiliated with Telstra and charges apply to any appointments.)

What do you do with the 'old' version of the Mail account

If you need to add Telstra Mail as a new account, something to consider then is what to do with the 'old' version of the Bigpond mail account.

You may want to just delete this account.  (If you are not sure how to do this on your iPad, iPhone or Mac, fill in the below form and we will send you an iTandCoffee video that provides a tutorial of how to do this.)

Before you delete your old version of the account, there are a few things to consider, depending on whether you were on POP or Outlook previously.

Be warned about deleting your old POP account!  

If you you have the old 'POP' style of Bigpond account, removing the account from your device will mean that you will delete all of the account's mailboxes from your device.  In particular, you will lose all the 'Sent' mail that is stored for this old account.  For POP email accounts, this Sent mail will not be available on any of your other devices, so will be completely lost.

If you need to keep some or all of this Sent mail so that you have a record of important emails you have previously sent, there are a couple of options.

• You can move that Sent mail to to your newly set up IMAP email account, either into that account's 'Sent' mailbox or to a specially created Mailbox in that new mail account.
• On a Mac, iPad or iPhone, you can simply 'disable' the mail account.  This will mean that the account will no longer appear in the Mail app.  However, if there are situations where you need to view old Sent mail, you can temporarily re-enable the account then disable again when you are done.

Here is a hint that covers the topic of creating Mailboxes and moving mail to a mailboxes.  (Note.  You must be a member of The iTandCoffee Club to view the hint.)

Deleting your 'Outlook' style Bigpond account  

If your Bigpond Mail was an Outlook account, you may have some Contact and Calendar information stored in that account (as well as your Mail).

This Contact and Calendar information has, apparently, been migrated to the new Telstra Mail service, but is also staying with your old Microsoft Outlook account. Even though this data is migrated, it is not included in the list of features of the Telstra Mail account that you create, so can not be easily turned on and off on your i-Devices and Mac.  You have to separately add the 'accounts' to your device - something that will be beyond the majority of Telstra Mail users.

So it is probably best to keep both the 'old' Outlook and 'new' Telstra Mail accounts so that you don't lose your Contact and Calendar information.  Just 'turn off' the mail aspect of the original Outlook account (which will no longer work) in your Mail settings.

I am sure that previous paragraph will leave a few of you scratching your heads, wondering what I am talking about?  This might be something that you need to contact iTandCoffee about, especially if you find that your Contacts or Calendar items have disappeared after you move to the new Telstra Mail setup.  Call 1300 885 420 if you need to make an appointment to look into this.  

(Please note that iTandCoffee is not affiliated with Telstra and charges apply to any appointments.)

When will your Bigpond email account be moved?  

It is possible to check when your own Bigpond account will undergo this change.  Here is the link to the Telstra page for checking this. If you find, like me, that your account has not yet been scheduled for the move, you can choose a date for the move.

My 'Outlook' Bigpond account is scheduled to move in 2 days (eek), but my POP account is not scheduled until August.

I'll let you know if there is anything to report after these moves.

Update 9/9/16:  
My own Bigpond account moved without issue and the 'forwarding' of my mail to a different email account was still in place after the move.  

However, another client of iTandCoffee found that the 'forwarding' option was NOT in place after the move, so we had to go and set this up again.  
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​So beware of this - you may need to re-establish any forwarding that was previously set on your Bigpond account.  Here is another iTandCoffee article on this topic: Will the move to Telstra Mail resolve problems with sending mail while overseas?  And will my 'mail forwarding' still work?

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Need more information?

iTandCoffee has a couple of FREE instructional videos about what to do on your iPad, iPhone and Mac to set up your modified Telstra Mail account.  If you would like us to send you a copy of this video, just fill ini the form below.

* We'll also sign you up for our free fortnightly Handy Hint Newsletter, which contains all sorts of great articles like this.

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Related Articles about Email  

Please note that many of the below articles are only available for iTandCoffee Club members - sign in first so that you can access these articles.   Find out more about the iTandCoffee Club here - and gain access to a FREE iTandCoffee class.

General ​

• Moving from an old-fashioned POP email account to something better!
• How to set up your new Gmail or Outlook email account so that it retrieves your POP email from Bigpond, Optusnet, Primus, iiNet, Netspace, etc
• Auto-Forwarding your Bigpond POP emails to your new email account

​iPad and iPhone ​

• Managing mail on your iPad and iPhone 
• Organising mail into mail folders (mailboxes) on iPad and iPhone
• ​Quick access to Drafts in Mail on iPad & iPhone 
• 'Save The Date' provided in an email or message
• iPhone, iPad Navigation - Get back to top of a list or a page really quickly
• A new email feature - 'Send Again'  
• Oops - I didn't mean to delete that!  How to undo.
• How can I save documents and photos that I get in emails?
• Getting rid of the 'Sent from my iPad' and 'Sent from my iPhone' 
• Saving PDFs to your iPad or iPhone
• Understanding Mailboxes in Mail
• My iPhone (or Mac) knows people's email addresses but my iPad doesn't!
• Why can't I send my emails when I am overseas or just away from home?
• How to stop your Mail app from grouping your iPad and iPhone emails  
• Getting rid of the 'Sent from my iPad' and 'Sent from my iPhone' - setting up an email signature
• Find out about this great Mail feature here
• Where is the trash can for my Gmail emails!!??
• Sending a mail message to a group on your iPhone or iPad - is there a way?
• Are you finding it hard to control your 'Swipe' in Mail iOS 8?
• When non-junk mail is suddenly junk
• Move a draft email out of the way to look at other mail
• New Swipe gestures when previewing mail   ​   

Mac

• Saving email addresses received in Mac emails to Contacts
• How to work out where an email link is really going to take you
• Setting up an email signature on your Mac
• How can I read windows mail files attached to my Mac Mail message?
• How to send large files in emails using a new feature on Mac
• How do you change the 'reply to' address in Mac Mail?
• A handy Mac Mail feature - Send Again
• How to set up an 'out of office' reply for iCloud Mail
• ​Creating and then emailing a Contact Group on the Mac