On April 1, 2026, SBB shut down email addresses on the @sbb.rs domain, and Orion and Sezampro users tell us they are getting shutdown notices for their old addresses too. If you received a message like that, you are not in trouble yet — but the clock is ticking. This article lays out the exact order of moves: how to save your mail and contacts, and how to avoid getting locked out of your bank, eUprava, and every account tied to that old address.
Why provider email addresses disappear
An email address from an internet provider feels like something permanent, but it isn’t. Email is not the provider’s core business. It is a service that costs money, requires maintenance and servers, and fewer and fewer people actually use it. When a company merges, gets sold, or trims its costs, the email service is first on the chopping block. That is exactly what happened to @sbb.rs addresses during the integration with Yettel.
The second problem: that email lives only as long as your contract does. Switch providers to get a better internet price, and the address leaves with it.
That is why we repeat the same rule to every client in the shop: important accounts should never be tied to a provider email. Your bank, eUprava, health services, social media, business correspondence — all of that should sit on an address that you control, not your provider. In practice that means Gmail or Outlook.com, and for businesses, your own domain.
The migration plan, step by step
The whole job has five steps. The most important thing is to start while the old address still works — every step is ten times easier while you still have access to the old mailbox.
1. Open a new address (Gmail or Outlook.com)
Create an account with a service that won’t be shut down. Gmail and Outlook.com are free and work on every phone and computer. A few tips from experience:
- Choose a serious name, e.g. firstname.lastname@gmail.com. Avoid nicknames and birth years — you will be giving this address to your bank.
- Enter your phone number right away as a password recovery option, and turn on two-step verification.
- Write the password down somewhere safe. Most of the jobs we get start with the sentence “I don’t know my email password.”
2. Pull your existing mail off the old address
Messages from the old account won’t move on their own. Two proven options:
- Import directly into Gmail: in Gmail’s settings there is an option called “Check mail from other accounts.” You enter the old address, the password, and the provider’s server, and Gmail pulls the messages over to itself. This works while the old server is still alive.
- A local archive through Thunderbird: you install the free Thunderbird, add the old account over IMAP, and let it download the complete mailbox to your disk. We recommend this to anyone with years of correspondence — you get an archive that stays with you even after the server is gone, and we can move it wherever it needs to go later.
If you have thousands of messages and attachments (invoices, contracts, photos), do both: import into Gmail for everyday use, and a local archive for safety.
3. Transfer your contacts
In your old provider’s webmail, find the address book and the export option — you usually get a CSV or vCard file. You import that file into Google Contacts or Outlook. If you kept your contacts in a program on your computer (old Outlook, Thunderbird), the export happens from there. Don’t skip this step: the addresses of the people you’ve been writing to for years exist nowhere else.
4. Set up forwarding while the old account still works
If your provider offers forwarding, turn it on right away — everything that arrives at the old address automatically goes to the new one. If there is no forwarding, set up a regular check of the old address in Gmail as described in step 2, so the messages still reach you.
On top of that, send a short message to the people you correspond with regularly: “From now on, contact me at my new address.” It sounds trivial, but it saves months of confusion.
5. List the accounts tied to the old address — then change them one by one
This is the step everyone skips, and it’s the most expensive one. Grab a sheet of paper and go through the old mailbox: look for messages with words like “registration,” “verification,” “account confirmation,” “invoice.” The list usually looks like this:
- Bank and e-banking — account notifications, statements, payment confirmations
- eUprava and government services — eID account, tax office, health care
- Social media — Facebook, Instagram, Viber backup, the Google/Apple account on your phone
- Shops and subscriptions — online shopping, streaming services, airlines
- Utility bills — electricity, phone, cable (electronic bill delivery)
Log into each of these accounts and change the contact address to the new one. Yes, it’s tedious. But while the old address still works, each change takes two minutes — because the confirmation code arrives at your old email. Once the address is shut down, the same change can take days.
What if the old email is already gone, and something is still tied to it?
It happens — SBB addresses no longer work, and people are only now discovering everything that was tied to them. Not all is lost, but it’s harder:
- Reset by phone: most services offer account recovery via phone number or SMS code. If you entered your number earlier, you got off cheap.
- Bank: go to a branch with your ID card and change the contact details at the counter. No drama.
- eUprava: if you have eID sign-in through the app or an ID card reader, you change the email in your profile settings.
- Social media: a recovery procedure without email access exists, but it takes time and requires identity verification. Start right away, not when things get tight.
- Old mail: if the mail stayed only on the provider’s shut-down server, it is realistically probably lost. But if you ever used Outlook or Thunderbird on your computer, a copy of the messages often exists on the disk, and we retrieve it from there — that’s a classic job for our data recovery.
And one warning: scammers love situations like this. Fake emails are going around along the lines of “your account is being shut down, click here to save your mail.” A provider will never ask you for your password through a link in a message. If you have already clicked on something like that, change your passwords and have your computer checked — we do virus removal and scans regularly.
No time or patience for it? We’ll do it for you
We’ve been handling this migration for clients for years — for pensioners with a single account and for companies with ten. The process is simple: you bring your computer or laptop to one of our three shops (two are in New Belgrade), or our courier picks the device up from your address and returns it when we’re done. We open a new address if you don’t have one, transfer the complete mailbox and contacts, set up forwarding, go through the list of linked accounts with you, and set up the email on all your devices — computer, phone, tablet.
Get in touch through our contact page or by phone, describe what you have (which provider, how many accounts, which devices), and we’ll arrange a time. We also handle urgent cases when the shutdown deadline is near.
Frequently asked questions
Can I somehow keep my old @sbb.rs or @sezampro.rs address?
No. The address belongs to the provider, and once they shut down the service, the address ceases to exist. That is why the only permanent solution is an address with a service that doesn’t tie your email to an internet contract — or your own domain if you’re a business.
What happens to messages someone sends me after the shutdown?
The sender gets a notice back that the address doesn’t exist, and you receive nothing. That is why setting up forwarding and notifying your contacts is important to do before the shutdown — afterward there is no net to catch those messages.
How long does transferring the mail and accounts take?
It depends on the volume of mail and the number of linked accounts. A typical home account we finish the same day or the next; large archives with tens of thousands of messages take longer because downloading from the server is slow. For an exact cost, check our price list or ask us with a specific description.
Gmail or Outlook.com — which should I choose?
Both are reliable and free. If you already have an Android phone, Gmail is the natural choice because your Google account is on the phone anyway. If you’re used to the Microsoft environment and Office, Outlook.com will feel more familiar. More important than the choice is turning on phone recovery and two-step verification — that’s what makes an account secure.