IMPORTANT NOTICE: Catholic Online to END Webmail service on July 31, 2014

Catholic Online Webmail will close on July 31, and users will have until then to transition to new email services. Catholic Online is citing expenses and other challenges in maintaining the service. A paid version of Catholic Webmail is possible in the future, but is not presently planned.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - After nearly 20 years of free service, Catholic Online Webmail is about to close. A combination of factors including security, costs of operation, and a lack of support from users.

The URL, webmail.catholic.org will be closed on July 31, 2014 and users will have until then to transition to other services of their choosing. Although Webmail has been part of Catholic Online's offerings for nearly 20 years, it is not the core business of our company which is dedicated to providing a magisterial, Catholic perspective on news, media and current events.

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The creation of new accounts on Webmail has already been closed for over a year. Now, without financial support from users to maintain the infrastructure behind the webmail service, the painful decision to close the service has been made. Catholic Online has provided free webmail and support for users without cost for many years, but those costs cannot now be maintained as expenses grow. 

This will be felt in the Catholic community, but part of the problem is that many Catholics have chosen to use other services and not to support Catholic email. Instead, many people use "free" services which scan your emails for marketing purposes to monetize your usage. Most of these services are provided by Google, Yahoo, and Bing, which are also major proliferators of smut and spam online, including pornography.

Every Catholic, and especially every Catholic student in school should have a Catholic.org email address, but alas, this is not to be, at least not for now.

Also cited in the decision to close the service was the activity of hackers and spammers. Over 80 percent of the traffic into the webmail server is spam, which has become harder and harder to filter out. Large-scale spam filters are expensive and Catholic Online receives no revenue to offset this cost from users. The servers are also just one more point of entry for hackers who commonly attack Catholic.org because of our religious affiliation.

For a hacker to bring down Catholic.org or to possibly breach its security would be quite an accomplishment worth bragging about in their illicit communities.

We are very sorry for this inconvience.

Users of webmail will have until July 31 to transition to new email services.

Thank you...

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