Cox once had aspirations to provide all-encompassing cloud services to their customers. I dimly recall a storage offering that was quickly deprecated.
This transition by Cox is a welcome thing. Yahoo! has been operating top-tier Internet-focused email services for a long, long time. They have got really good at what they do, and yes, it's ad-supported, because this is what the market will bear.
You're insightful to notice that Cox will reclaim a lot of resources and budget by shutting down their email service. It's cost-intensive to run, it's a complex system that needs a lot of daily attention and on-call support. And across the industry, admins are admitting that in-house email service is no longer feasible. All the universities are outsourcing it to Google or Microsoft, et. al. Corporations have moved to those or Amazon. Even government entities are enjoying cloud service outsourcing.
Some of us noticed the hand writing on the wall years ago. I have hundreds of online accounts linked to email addresses. I transitioned all of them off Cox, because the future was uncertain.
One enormous advantage of the transition is that you won't need to pay Cox in order to maintain those addresses. Word on the street was, if you disconnected your Cox service, then you'd immediately lose access to email, and that's a catastrophe these days. With Yahoo! you can rest assured that your email will be accessible as long as you check in and actively use that account, and stay within the Terms of Service.
Cox billing never presented a line-item for email. We were never charged separately for it. It was included with the Internet services. There are plenty of perks and features we enjoy today that are included. It's a prudent business decision, and consumers should be informed and prepared for when these changes come about.
