Orange suspends old Freeserve accounts

ICONIC FREESERVE was a market leader in the early days of the UK Internet scene. But the ISP has been sold on and become part of Orange/Wanadoo. So your email account might get suspended.

The INQ was alerted to this problem when a reader's email address suddenly stopped working. Well, suddenly is a bit of an exaggeration. He hadn't used it for something like 17 days.
The upshot was that downloading and sending emails via Microsoft Outlook stopped working even though the facility had worked for years.

The reason is simple. Our reader had grown tired of the service offered by Freeserve/Wanadoo/Orange and migrated to Talk Talk.
So, in effect, he wasn't paying a sausage to Orange. Naturally the company take umbrage at such outrageous behaviour and cuts off access to your Freeserve email account.

The INQ has looked this up and officially Orange says it will cut former Freeserve users off after 219 days.

But don't despair. There's a way to reactivate your Freeserve account. If you go onto the Orange Uk home page, you'll see a menu marked 'Your Account'.

Under that is an option marked 'restore Internet account'. It's very easy to use this facility to restore an old Freeserve account if it's been disconnected.

There's only one problem. Your Freeswerve email address will now only be accessible as web mail so you can't get to it via Outlook, for example.

You can't blame Orange, though. If you've given up using its broadband/dialup service, it is – in effect- providing you with access to your old Freeserve address for free. µ