Cox: no more new email addresses

A few days ago Cox disabled email address account creation for their domain.

In recent years, fewer customers have taken advantage of a Cox Email account, so we decided to modify our email service to better serve our customers. As of August 15, 2019, Cox no longer offers the ability for new and existing Cox Internet customers to create new Cox Email accounts. Customers with Cox Email accounts created prior to August 15, 2019, will continue to receive support for those email accounts. Cox Email Creation Policy

This doesn’t surprise me. In the work I do for clients I’m seeing fewer and fewer @cox.net email addresses in their lists.

Let’s face it, consumer email is hard and expensive to do well. Filters are tough to get right and the incoming threats are always changing. The free mailbox providers spend a lot of resources developing and maintaining services.

On the consumer end, there’s not a lot to like about an email address tied to your broadband provider. Move out of the providers’ area, and you lose access to that email address. Having an email address that is independent of your internet access means you can move across the country or across the world and still have the same address.

For senders, this shouldn’t change much about how you’re managing email address. It does mean that you can expect the number of cox.net addresses to slowly decrease over time, probably eventually falling to zero.