GCI decides not to eliminate 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 and alaskan.com accounts sometime in mid-2024. It also launched a new fee for the old 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 month, the company said in an online statement that it is “no longer pursuing any options that would affect your GCI email address.”

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

The monthly fee will remain.

“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.”

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 recent 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.