THE UK based firm Velnet which offered pay-as-you-go Internet, web hosting and related services, decided to discontinue its free e-mail offering due to the abuse by spammers.

Sometimes, having a geographical domain in your e-mail address helps. For the last few years, for instance, this scribbler used a @velnet.co.uk e-mail address which proved handy to get in touch with UK firms and it surely got more attention from people in Blighty than when I used a more common GMail account.

Velnet offered free e-mail as POP3, IMAP and even featuring its own webmail interface. Customers in Blighty could also get pay-as-you-go dial-up or even ISDN internet access. But in my case I just accessed the mailbox over POP3 from my existing broadband connection, and it worked flawlessly for years. Velnet's main appeal was the .co.uk domain name and the fact that it was run by a hosting company. So needless to say, I had a bad surprise a few days ago when my Velnet mailbox suddenly went dead.

Tech support has always been easy to find, as the company offers e-mail, text message, voice and skype based support in adddition to its web based support ticket system. So Velnet support replied to my support ticket filed on Saturday the next day, and promised to "investigate the issue". No big deal, I thought, "probably just scheduled service maintenance ". But the sad truth came on Monday, when the support representative told me that services for @velnet.co.uk email addresses "are closed".

The representative informed this scribbler that: "The email server provider decided to shut down the servers. If you'd like to create another email account with us you have to register a domain name and buy a hosting package. We can offer you a free hosting package if you buy the domain from us." On Monday, and after my insistence on keeping the old account, even for a fee, I got further clarification from Velnet tech support: "Unfortunately you can't keep your email account. user@velnet.co.uk are not valid anymore. If you buy a domain with us www.mydomain.co.uk your email account would be user@mydomain.co.uk."

Fortunately, the INQUIRER got in touch with Mr. Temi Odurinde, founder of Velnet and also the owner of the Haabaa.com web directory, who kindly and politely explained the situation. Odurinde told the INQ: "I am pleased you enjoyed our POP3 services and quite sad we are not able to provide the once very nice services we used to offer free of charge. The problem has been spammers, we have [had] problems with bigger players in the email industry because of some very very bad users who abuse the free services we offer, especially the SMTP services, they have been using our email addresses to spam."

He said that free e-mail services might return sometime in 2008 after the service is redesigned to prevent abuse by spammers: "We have decided to go back to the drawing board and see if we can resume providing the services again sometime next year" he said, adding that "sadly, in the meantime we are not able to provide it any more because we get and awful lot of complaints which we do not have the resources to cope with. You will probably notice that unlike other providers, we do not place adverts on our services, hopefully next year, we will come back with a more robust service that will be more difficult to abuse."

The company's head honcho also said that the shutdown of services was announced one year ago, although it wouldn't have surprised me if SeaMonkey's Bayesian spam filters caught such "service shutdown" notice along with the dozens of fake "service problem" phishing messages which arrive daily on all my mailboxes. But I didn't see this coming, and that I hope that the firm is able to continue offering velnet.co.uk e-mail services, even if it requires a small account creation fee. A company like this -which replies to tech support requests on a timely basis and even during weekends- is hard to find.

Of course, one solution for the Spam problem would be for it to request a small one-time account setup payment from users, either by credit card or Paypal, as a means of customer "validation". Another additional measure is just to offer POP3 and IMAP, but not outbound SMTP service. Just let the users use their own ISP's SMPT -Google's GMail for instance allows users to configure third party e-mail accounts for use with GMail's SMTP.

These suggestions were e-mailed by this scribbler to Velnet's Odurinde, who welcomed them and promised to tell the INQ when and if free e-mail services are restored. It would make sense, as free e-mail is a form of free advertising of the company's web site and services, -provided it's not abused by spammers, of course.

In the meantime, Velnet is focusing on its other services like UK Domain Names registration, which the firm offers from £4.99 per year and its web hosting business. µ