What is an ISP coming to when, in other to solve its own users e-mail problem, it has to rely on a rival in order to give the correct solution? That's the question Freeserve should be asking itself.

Remember THIS? Well, it would appear as if the only reason this news keeps on running is simply because Freeserve often fails to advise its customers of the correct solution.

Several days ago one of our readers (Mark) passed us this little message, which is of course something we've seen before over the past month or so:

Hi,

I'm a Freeserve Broadband customer who's e-mails have been blocked to AOL addresses and thought you'd be interested to know that I've just contacted Freeserve Broadband Tech Support to get my e-mail settings changed to the correct ones (as stated in latest news item) in order for me so send e-mails to AOL addresses and they told me there is nothing they can do and advised me to get a Yahoo! or Hotmail web e-mail address and send them from there!

We're unclear what Freeserve has been smoking (metaphorically speaking, of course), especially since the ORIGINAL item suggests (see AOLs reply) that they should already be aware of what to tell customers.

Since then the news has appeared once again, this week in fact, with the exact same problem of e-mails being blocked between the two ISPs.

As Freeserve appears somewhat inept at correcting its own customers, we decided to get the general solution from AOL instead:

AOL are working closely with Freeserve to ensure the delivery of legitimate mail. You may experience difficulties sending mail to AOL if using a different account over a Freeserve connection. To avoid these issues you should ensure that your outgoing SMTP server setting in your email client software is set to a Freeserve server (smtp.freeserve.com). If you need help with these changes please visit http://www.freeserve.com/help/connection/freeservesettings.htm

Result? One happy Freeserve customer, helped by AOLs customer support:

Have changed my SMTP server from smtp.freeserve.net to smtp.freeserve.com and sent a test e-mail to my AOL account and it got through!! Brilliant, thanks so much for your help.

Don't know why Freeserve couldn't have told me that!

Nor do we Mark, nor do we.