The irreducible Movistar: 250,000 Spaniards continue to use an email account @telefonica.net

There was a long time, going through the stages of 56 Kbps to ADSL and even to the first dawn of fiber optics, in which Telefónica offered its home Internet customers a free email service. It made more sense in the early days, when Hotmail was a standard that fought with Yahoo! or even Terra, but there was still room for more competitors. Then Hotmail consolidated its position until Gmail came to eat all the toast, but that’s another story.

The thing is that Telefónica spent years offering emails @telefonica.net for your customers, but in 2013 it discontinued this service. Only for new registrations, because in these nine years it has continued to operate. “Although this service is no longer charged, Telefónica Spain maintains it because many customers continue to use it daily. Some customers, freelancers for example, had their businesses, shop windows or vans labeled with those emails, and although these are no longer registered mailboxes since 2013, we think that keeping these accounts active is a fair reward for their loyalty. We even continue to give them telephone support if they have any problems”, they explain from the teleco.

250,000 active accounts and 2 GB of storage

Receiving an email from an account with this ending sounds almost anachronistic in 2022, when Gmail and Outlook are the alpha and omega. But there’s still half a million mailboxes like that, half of them active. 250,000 accounts still in use, although it is not possible to specify how many are from companies and how many are from individuals. The registration process was the same and the companies that used them were usually family businesses that used this option after contracting their communications with the T company.

The 250,000 who continue to use it (not necessarily as a main account, but as a pure secondary inheritance; or as a traditional small business) have access to 2 GB of storage space. Little compared to what others offer today, but let’s not forget that it is an exclusive service for old customers, more out of the courtesy of not causing them problems with a blackout than to pretend to compete against anyone in the modern world.

The latter is admitted by Telefónica itself: “We do not intend to compete with other services on the market, but we do make discreet functionality updates as we advance our platforms.“Those updates include having brought it to modern infrastructures or implementing the same security standards as in the rest of the platforms. Otherwise, it could be a security level drain.

“They usually give me a strange face”

One of these survivors is Antoni Rosich, commercial director of an insurance company who opened this email in 2006, when he was 39 years old. Today he is 55 and continues to use that email “because it doesn’t work badly for me,” he tells us. Before, by the way, he explains that he used emails from Terra and Wanadoo, the Orange sub-brand in charge of fixed connectivity that was later unified with Amena —mobile connectivity— to give way to Orange and disappear in 2006.

“I also have Gmail or iCloud accounts that I created at some point, but I hardly use them. The Telefónica one is the one I use for my account in any application, in stores, in invoices… I use it from the Mail application of Apple or from Outlook, I just go into their web interface.” That web interface may not be spectacular, but it does look surprisingly up-to-date.and even cleaner than that of several competitors in the screenshots provided by Antoni.

Offering a personal email with this ending can cause strangeness to our interlocutor, an extreme that confirms the aforementioned. “They usually give me a strange face when someone asks for my email and I tell them this, but nothing happens,” he says with a laugh. Living in a minority forges the personality.

Where perhaps something does happen is at a professional level: in positions where hundreds of resumesany detail can be a reason for sifting, from unserious typography to misspellings. Is an old email like this a reason to discard? Antoni doesn’t know (“it’s been many years since I sent resumes nobody!”), but Sonia Mediavilla, a psychologist specializing in Human Resources and a worker at the University of Nebrija, thinks so: “It depends on the type of professional you are and the criteria of the recruiter, but the small details make the difference . It also depends on the type of position you are trying to access. Perhaps for someone who handles a very specific technology for which the recruiter has an urgency, that doesn’t even look like it. But for processes in which there are many CVs and that does not mean much, it can be a reason for discarding “, she explains to us.

In any case, what is before the at sign is usually more important than after it. “I once had an application from someone whose email was something like ‘shu_morenito_69’. Not suitable. Anyone with an email @telefonica.net? I would not rule it out because I like to give a vote of confidence and get to know the person, contrast, but it can happen that someone perceives that he is a person who is not up to date and discards him for that “.