Cox is ending its email services and moving to Yahoo

Cox Communications (cable internet company) is bringing an end to the email services it offers to its customers. At least, in a way that could be considered partial. Customers are still able to make use of the same email address that they have had for years, it just won’t be hosted on Cox’s servers.

Instead, the email accounts for customers who have them, will be making a move over to Yahoo. This is where customers will be logging in in the future, once the transfer has taken place. Meaning they will no longer being accessing their email via Cox’s website any longer. If using third party applications like Outlook or Thunderbird to access their Cox mail, they will have to change the pop/imap information over to Yahoo’s as well.

With this, Cox will also be dropping all support for its email services. Thus if a problem pops up, it would be Yahoo that would need a contact instead of Cox.

The company hasn’t specified when the move will take place. Simply stating that it will happen in the near future. Users will have the option to opt out of the move, but would lose their cox.net email address in the process.

This is actually a popular move by many companies, colleges, and organizations. It frees up space and resources by partnering with another service to take on the weight for them. You’ll typically see them partner with services like Yahoo, Microsoft, or Google. Kind of like moving general data to a cloud similar to Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure. It is simply another form of outsourcing if you think about it.

What it isn’t, is one company buying the other. Yahoo is not acquiring Cox Communications. At least, there are no legal documents out there hinting to such a thing. This is simply a normal partnership between two companies that is becoming more normal than not.

The only you need to hope for is that Cox will continue to let you make use of the cox.net email address through Yahoo (or any other service) for many more years to come. Else you will have to figure out every single contact you’ve ever been in contact with throughout the years to let them know you have changed to something else.