Consumer protection criticizes Swisscom fee on e-mail accounts
Published: Friday, Apr 26th 2024, 15:30
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Consumer protection criticizes Swisscom's plan to charge fees for some Bluewin e-mail accounts. It is incomprehensible that long-time users are being asked to pay.
In August 2023, Swisscom emphasized that the prices for subscriptions would remain unchanged until the end of 2024, the Foundation for Consumer Protection wrote on Friday at the request of Keystone-SDA. Email accounts cannot simply be changed so quickly. Changing an email address causes "an enormous amount of work" for each individual person.
The fact that Swisscom customers now have to dig deeper into their wallets for various services is inexplicable. Swisscom has "always been the most expensive provider", but at the same time was able to make a billion-euro deal in Italy, it continued.
The introduction of the fee was first reported by "Blick". When asked on Friday, Swisscom emphasized that "Bluewin E-Mail light" would remain free of charge (1 e-mail address and 1 gigabyte of storage). The "Bluewin E-Mail basic" webmail service costs CHF 2.90 per month and has been available to new customers since Wednesday.
The changeover for existing customers will be staggered from the end of May. Customers will be automatically switched to the new platform and the new offer in line with their previous usage. After receiving the information letter, customers will have three months before they have to pay for the Basic subscription.
Outdated infrastructure
The reason for the fee is the ageing infrastructure on which the Bluewin mail service runs. This must be replaced in order for the service to cover its costs. According to Swisscom, this is not currently the case.
For this reason, Swisscom has decided to migrate Bluewin-Mail to the AWS (Amazon Web Services) cloud. Data storage (on Amazon Web Services) will continue to take place in Switzerland. Swisscom did not provide Keystone-SDA with any information on how many users are affected.
©Keystone/SDA
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