Over the last couple of months, Verizon.net has been notifying their customers that they are shutting down their email service, impacting millions of customers. Notices issued in recent days indicate a shutdown date of June 24, 2017. Verizon is encouraging Verizon.net users to migrate seamlessly to AOL email, which we recommend, even if you want to end up on a Gmail platform.
Keep in mind that AOL is a Verizon owned company, which provides an incentive for making the transition to AOL easy and painless, while retaining full Verizon email functionality along with significant improvements.
From a Verizon email account, an AOL account can be set up that will easily import Verizon emails, folders, contacts and calendars. Improved features include more storage, advanced spam filters, virus protection, and many others. On the other hand, Verizon states that emails, excluding folders, can be transferred to Gmail manually.
Our testing and research of the Gmail transfer process resulting in the following findings:
- Although the Verizon site provides a link to Gmail importing instructions, errors can occur when attempting to follow those instructions. As an example, Gmail does not recognize the Verizon ID/password when using the Settings/Accounts Import/Mail & Contacts functions.
- Verizon support, in at least certain cases, has stated that a mass import of emails to Gmail cannot be done. The support group indicated the only way to get Verizon emails into Gmail would be to forward each email individually one-by-one. Obviously, this would be time prohibitive for a typical user with hundreds of emails.
- Our further research shows that a mass import of Verizon emails into Gmail can be accomplished, although it requires a fairly complex series of configuration steps in Gmail, which we believe to be cumbersome and requiring additional technical expertise.
Consequently, for Verizon email users that want to utilize Gmail, we recommend first performing the very simple migration to the AOL platform. From there, importing the data from AOL to Gmail should be relatively straightforward – clicking through the Gmail Settings/Accounts Import/Mail & Contacts functions.
For our small/medium and enterprise clients, we typically recommend either Microsoft Hosted Exchange or an appropriate level of Office/365 email to achieve advanced business level capabilities such as increased security functions, archiving, recovery, eDiscovery, and indexing.
If your SMB is looking to upgrade the email solution, please contact us by calling (855) 551-7760 x 311
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