from a Verizon email to their internet service customers today:
Over the next several weeks we will be preparing to leave the email business. Effective May 18, 2017, we’ll no longer provide verizon.net email service for your account. Other than this change, your Verizon service(s) won’t be affected.
They typically offered you the email account along with your internet service. I suspect many people never used them as they were doing email through AOL, or Hotmail, or later Gmail.
Back when there were “options” for ISPs (in those heady days of dial up.) I was so glad when Yahoo started giving free email addresses so I could keep a email without being “tied” to an ISP because that was where my email was.