I asked Mum to e-mail a file over to me this morning so that I can have a look at why she can’t open it. She e-mails it to my Freeserve address, 2 hours later I still hadn’t got it.

She e-mails it again, this time to my tuxx.org.uk account (I’m not putting the e-mail address here for obvious spam reasons). 30 seconds later I have the e-mail and attached file, so I know my e-mail system is working fine. After sorting out the problem with the file I investigate why my Freeserve address isn’t working. I can’t log in to the web mail system which is my usual test. Not good.

A little history is needed at this point. Freeserve was the first ISP in the UK to give out accounts that didn’t need a credit card and monthly payments, instead you just signed up using a CD and then dialed up a number. They got the money from the share of the phone call cost. The e-mail address was yours for life, so long as you dialed up every 90 days. If you didn’t dial in for 90 days your accounts was suspended and you had to ring to get it reactivated. If you didn’t reactivate your account then after a year it was deleted Their way of keeping the system fairly clean I guess.

I registered for an account around 1998 and started to use it. When living at home it wasn’t a problem to dial up every 90 days or less. When I went to university 4 years later I was no longer able to dial in every 90 days as there wasn’t a telephone line in my room. Instead I discovered that on the Freeserve web site I could use the option to “download the settings for a new pc” and this would keep the account activated at no cost.

Time moved on and even though I had new e-mail addresses I still kept my Freeserve address going since it was associated with a fair few systems. At the same time Freeserve was also bought, sold and renamed and today is now know as Orange. Orange seem to be more on the ball and having a bit of a clean out, when I tried to reactivate my account on the web site it no longer keeps the e-mail going. Even when I dial up it doesn’t reset the e-mail so that I can download them.

Hence forth from today I will no longer get e-mail sent to my Freeserve address. Having slowly moved all the important stuff over to the tuxx.org.uk account I’m not actually that bothered, I had always planned to do it in April anyway (one year from when I registered tuxx.org.uk). Its just happened sooner that I planned.

My spam system will certainly be gratefull, after 7 years of use the number is spam I was getting to the Freeserve account was considerable.