GCI reverses course, decides not to shut down longtime email service

Alaska telecommunications company GCI no longer plans to end its longtime email service.

The company had said last summer it would end the service and cancel gci.net accounts sometime in mid-2024. It also launched a fee for the accounts, at $4.99 monthly.

The company said it hosted about 40,000 email accounts last summer. The announcement upset many customers who had used GCI for their email for decades.

But last week, the company said in an online statement that it is “no longer pursuing any options that would affect your GCI email address.”

Existing gci.net email accounts will continue to operate, the company said March 20.

Also, the new $4.99 monthly fee will remain. The monthly fee is applied to gci.net email addresses, a GCI spokeswoman said. Some GCI account holders may have multiple addresses and will have to continue paying the fee for each address.

“We have received a lot of feedback letting us know just how much our customers want to keep their gci.net email addresses,” the company said in the statement. “We value your feedback and have decided not to take any action that would discontinue the use of GCI-hosted email accounts.”

Marilyn Leland, retired former executive director of the Alaska Power Association, said on Monday that it’s too late for her.

After hearing last year that her gci.net account would be canceled, she has spent about 30 hours transferring old emails and contacts to a new Gmail account.

She’s had the GCI account for decades and said it contained important records covering financial and medical information and other history.

A few days ago, she got a letter in the mail from GCI saying it would keep the service. It didn’t state that the $4.99 fee would continue, but she assumed that’d be the case.

The move to Gmail should be final in the coming days or weeks, and she’s not going back, she said.

“Even with them now saying they’ll continue it, I’d be worried they’ll do it again” and announce a cancellation in the future, she said.

GCI’s statement last week said, “If there are any changes to the future of gci.net emails, we will inform you in advance.”

GCI’s plans to cancel the service were first disclosed last summer in a draft fact page that the company said was prematurely posted online. It included tips so customers could transition to other email hosts, including how to back up old emails and transfer contacts.

Customers who closed their gci.net accounts cannot rejoin, GCI’s statement said.

GCI has provided the email service since the mid-1990s.

The company stopped offering new gci.net accounts close to a decade ago, and the number of accounts was tapering off as users moved to other email providers with more services, a company official said last year. The growing complexity and cost of providing the service led to GCI’s plans to cancel it.

GCI, launched in Alaska in 1979, has undergone major changes in recent years. It was sold to Liberty Broadband of Colorado in 2017, upsetting some customers who wanted the ownership to remain local. Among other developments, it has outsourced its call center to the Philippines, affecting dozens of Alaska jobs, and ended its cable TV platform in favor of an internet streaming service.

GCI representatives could not immediately be reached for comment Monday.