The new owners of UK broadband ISP Breathe Internet (Breathe Networks Limited), which was purchased in a surprise management buyout last week (related news here and here), have been accused of blocking access to a former partners website and thus unfairly preventing customers from accessing their old email history.

The business in question - Spider Networks - provided the old [BREATHE] company, not including ZetNet, with hosted webmail services. Spider revealed to ISPreview last week that it had not been informed of the buyout by the administrator; they added: "As a creditor of the old Breathe company Spider Networks has a significant claim." Naturally the new owners quickly denied that any such claim exists.

It's believed that the new owners of Breathe Internet, headed up by Managing Director Steve Kaye, chose to take a different path with its new email platform and not work with Spider Networks, perhaps because of the above mentioned claim. Understandably customers quickly complained about the significant loss of their past email archives.

Mercifully Spider Networks stepped in, offering ex-users of the email service access to their old accounts, free of charge for the next few months, with an annual subscription fee of £19.99 GBP beginning October 1st 2009. Details can be found here: http://www.spider-networks.net/breathe.html .

Unfortunately Breathe's remaining beleaguered customers quickly found themselves unable to access Spider Network's website, though using a non-Breathe ISP brought the access back.


Spider Networks informs us that the new owners decided to migrate their email users to another provider on July 18th, without informing them and without cooperating with Spider. As a result Breathe does not have access to this past email history and thus will be unable to provide it to users.

So it appears that users who would like their old emails, folders and address books will have to login via another broadband provider to get access. Many would perhaps call this an excessive and deeply unprofessional abuse of power, one that highlights the dangers of wrongful censorship. We contacted Breathe for comment yesterday but they have not yet responded.