EE UK Botches Customer Emails After Domain Renewal Fail

Customers of telecoms provider EE, specifically those who still use an old Freeserve (fsnet.co.uk) email address that dates back to the days of dialup Internet access, appear to have been left without working email after the operator apparently forgot to renew its own web domain.

Related users began complaining of problems with sending and receiving email on fsnet.co.uk addresses at the end of last week and a quick domain check suggested that the registrant (Orange) allowed the domain to expire.

Some website hosts usually allow a month or so of grace to resolve such problems, but EE appears to have taken a bit too long to correct the issue and this left users without a working email address.

Fsnet.co.uk Domain Check Report

Lookup failed: fsnet.co.uk Host not found

Network IP address lookup:
Domain name: fsnet.co.uk
Registrant: ORANGE HOME UK PLC

Relevant dates:
Registered on: 04-Aug-1999
Expiry date: 04-Aug-2015
Last updated: 29-Jun-2015

Registration status: Renewal required.

*** This registration has been SUSPENDED. ***

Naturally users were less than pleased, with those posting on a related forum topic or two describing it as an “absolute disgrace“, while another said he was “Absolutely furious having spent all morning trying to sort out connections“. Apparently those who contacted the ISP to complain were merely told that it was a “server issue“, albeit one that would be resolved.

The good news is that EE did finally get around to correcting the problem and email has now returned to normal. As a quick history lesson, Freeserve was a very popular dial-up provider during the late 1999’s and they became Wanadoo in 2005 (part of France Telecom), which only a few years later was rebranded again to Orange and then the merger with T-Mobile resulted in the brand changing again to EE (Everything Everywhere).

As ever we usually recommend that broadband subscribers try to keep their email and ISPs separate, as otherwise it can be harder to switch providers in the future. The market is chocked full of dedicated email providers, many of which are free and some will even allow you to use your own domain name for a small fee.