Vodafone email servers closed: What does it mean for you?

After carefully examining their ageing infrastructure, Vodafone New Zealand decided to close their email services, effective as of November 30, 2017 – however as of March 31st, 2018, there is now no forwarding.

If you have an email account with Vodafone which you are currently using this affects you now. You need to act now to keep all your emails and contacts and ensure any new incoming mail gets delivered to you, including your newsletter and email subscriptions.

How do I know if I have a Vodafone email address?

If your email address ends in any of the following, it is a Vodafone email address:

  • vodafone.co.nz
  • vodafone.net.nz
  • clear.net.nz
  • wave.co.nz
  • quik.co.nz
  • paradise.net.nz
  • es.co.nz
  • ihug.co.nz
  • pcconnect.co.nz

If you want to keep anything from this email account, then you’ll need to transfer it to a new email address, as your old Vodafone one will no longer be available to use.

What do I need to do?

Create a new email account

First of all, you will need to set up a new email account with a different service. We recommend signing up with Google’s Gmail. You’ll get a new email account, which will end in @gmail.com.

Transfer contacts and emails from your Vodafone email account to your new Gmail account

On the landing page of your new email setup, you will see an option “Import contacts and mail” – click on this. You’ll need to go through a few screens for the whole process. When it prompts “What account do you want to import from?”, type in your full Vodafone email address, for instance, bobjones@vodafone.co.nz. Enter your password at the next screen. When it comes to the “Import options” screen, check the boxes “Import mail”, “Leave a copy of retrieved message on the server”, and “Add label to all imported mail” – and write in the box “old Vodafone emails” or something similar. Then you can start the import. The import process may take a very long time – up to 2 days. Be patient!

Set up automatic forwarding

Automatic forwarding means that even if someone writes to you at your old Vodafone email address, you’ll receive it through your new Gmail address – much like postal mail forwarding works. Vodafone will have sent an email containing a unique link to your old email address. Click on the link and fill in your new Gmail email address for it to be all set up for you.

Tell people your new email address

Even though people will still be able to write emails to your old email address (it will simply end up in your Gmail Inbox), you should consciously start using your new email address instead (yourusername@gmail.com). Give this new email address to friends and family, as well as other like your electricity provider. Make sure to start learning it early to make things easier.