MSE News: Got an Orange, Freeserve or Wanadoo email? It's shutting down in May

Dank

What I find annoying is that I only heard of this by chance on radio.

Neither I or my brother who also uses old FS account have received any warning. He uses his account for business so has lot of work to do to update things.

Never had problems with fsmail unlike Yahoo and Talktalk

Abe64

I have been with Freeserve since it was founded and made extensive use of its services as will be explained. If a company provides a good service - as each takeover company had, then I would remain loyal to the end and have done. With this chain of buyouts I saw no reason to change as I have never had major issues of any sort nor reason for serious complaint.


As such I have divided the mail into slots for family, gaming, business, educational areas and more.


Having have stayed with this one provider since it setup, this creates a massive problem for me, I have registered with hundreds of sites with my primary email alone so this will be a massive headache for me.


Add to that game company sites with alternate names for security, in those games sites I added extra security with passwords of random letters/number/characters of 16+ making it harder for hackers to get my game accounts. The same level of password security was applied to business and banking areas where required.


Critical Sites I have kept track of every password, but others I rely on the ability to come back and change the password if I forget it - which will only work with the emails that those accounts were set up with. Once that's gone, password recovery will be impossible and I will not be able to re register with another email as there will be an existing account with matching details. The end result will be that I am locked out of how many sites? It would be impossible to count if I were honest - in some cases I used a few pre-set passwords, others are as I listed above with added character protection.


I have been helping with important business with a company on behalf of family. When my primary email storage goes - what protection will I have from any such companies declaring that any emails I present are fabricated or attempted fraud as the name doesn't exist? This situation is not alone by any extent and I have no doubt that others out there would be in a similar situation.


I have of recent years been on painkillers which exacerbated this situation by affecting my memory, so recent material is not going to be an issue. But older sites I wish to return to - what do I do?


Change my name?
alter my birthdate?
alter my home address?


Lets make it clear - were I to do that, it will again have the potential to open me up to possible charges of attempted fraud, as it would potentially seem to be someone trying to access my account. Just how many times am I going to have to explain what situation EE have dropped me in by removing its email servers? Will I even be able to access some sites at all, in many cases I would say no for all the above reasons.


I've been trained as a test engineer for many years and as such have joined many forums, company sites, educational areas or monitor sites with information relevant to my field of skills with my primary address. Could anyone recall all the sites and details they registered with over a 20 year period? not likely, like me they would rely on the fall back of forgotten password/registration which would allow them to reset details with their email address.


Before this news came out, I was about to upgrade my service from the 40 to maximum speed available. I would imagine many like me are now going to look at what other companies offer as the TV box is nothing special. EE cut costs and get more servers to cope with bandwidth or other business while on the other hand get grief as a result.


Yet for all that, any cuts in the costs of services ... no, not even a mention in any way.