Paul Stenhouse: If you have an Xtra email, you're going to start paying

Xtra says there are 260,000 email accounts which will need to start paying.  

From May 16th, 2024 Xtra Mail will be $9.95 a month, or $5.95 a month if you're a Spark customer with broadband, a monthly mobile plan or a landline (That works out to be $71.40 per mailbox per year, almost $18 million a year for all those customers). 

So where to from here? What are your options? 

If you choose to go somewhere else, Xtra says it has a free email forwarding service. Free services are available from Gmail or Hotmail/Outlook, you may get ads or your data may be used for targeting ads. Microsoft Outlook has the option to go "premium", which is an ad-free experience for $3 a month, or you can bundle it with a Microsoft 365 subscription for $129 a year, or $179 for a family plan. 
 
A .nz domain name is going to be about ~$20 a year, then you need to pay for a mail service on top of that.  Fastmail is an option for US$2.50 a month, there are also offerings from Proton Mail (Swiss based), Hey (US based) or Zoho (India based). Google Workspace is US$6 per user per month, and Microsoft 365 is NZ$9.70 a month. 

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