Telus moves consumer emails to Gmail without thinking about the consumers. Do you have an @telus.net email account? This affects you.
Do you have an @telus.net account?
If you have a personal email account through Telus you will receive an email advising you about the migration. How I found out about this was a client called me about the email thinking it was a phishing attempt or scam.
You have to log into your Telus email via the web site (webmail.telus.net) to start the process. You will be asked to pick a migration date. Telus will then text you that day to let you know it’s happened.
The switch to Gmail means you will have to change your email account information/log in on every device: computer, phone and tablet. While this is easier than it used to be it is still a lot of work for the average user.
Telus claims they will be migrating all your emails, calendars and contacts to Gmail. But what they really mean is anything stored in the website webmail or synced via IMAP. Telus does admit they won’t be moving over any rules and anything stored in a program like Outlook. See their FAQ about the migration.
Telus claims you will be able contact their support during the migration. I imagine the support call time wait will be in days not hours once this gets started.
I will be assisting with a client migration next week. Will update this blog or start another on the process. Stay tuned.
Not in Canada
Any data migrated into Gmail will not be stored in Canada. Google does not have any data centres in Canada, the closest data centres are in the U.S. . This means your personal emails will now be subject to the whims of the United States government.
Telus admits this in their FAQ. Telus does not acknowledge the federal privacy laws to which they are subject, they just mumble about keeping your account personal information private, so much for the privacy of the content of your emails. Telus doesn’t mention the CRTC which is supposed to regulate Internet Service Providers aka internet service bullies. I recommend if you are a Telus customer you complain to the CRTC about this email migration.
What you need to know and do
- You have to log into the webmail to start the migration
- You will have to change your email settings on every device
- If you use anything other than IMAP and the web interface, you will have to migrate information
- Good luck getting help from Telus Support while this is going on
- Your personal emails will be stored in the U.S.
Unhappy about any of the above? Complain to Telus and the CRTC.
Update
I successfully migrated a client’s email account from Telus to Gmail. The main problem we ran into was that Google decided to block Outlook as an insecure app. Had to dig deep into the Google settings to allow Outlook to work. Also not all of the emails transferred into Outlook but as the client had access to all of them on her iDevices and there weren’t that many (about 12 hours worth) we decided it wasn’t worth trying to contact Google about the problem. My client, like a lot of other folks, could not have done this migration on her own.
2nd Update
One client was using IMAP for her Telus email account on all her iDevices. She had problems adding the Gmail account until we deleted the old Telus email account in her macmail. Before we deleted the old account, we double checked that all the data had been moved over from Telus to Gmail.
