ATTENTION users of VERIZON email, HOTMAIL, BT and Orange mail services, inc Fsnet & Wanadoo

This is important information for users of the Hotmail and Verizon email systems.  Most of the latter are in North America, but Microsoft has Hotmail users all over the world.  Your services are changing and it is important that you take action soon.  

• In particular if you change your email address you will need to change your personal and contact details on our online webshop if you have registered with us. 

• If you download our Checklist you can do so with a new email address, but it will be very useful if you tell us that you have changed address so that we can remove your old address from the system before messages start bouncing.

VERIZON recently announced that it is leaving the email business and that soon verizon.net email address will cease to function unless you specifically indicate that you wish to keep your verizon.net email address (which will then be serviced by a different company even though it will still be a verizon.net address).  IMPORTANT: If you do not either specifically choose to keep your verizon.net address or migrate to a different/new address, your verizon.net address will soon cease to
function. As they say in the FAQ:

• What will happen if I decide to take no action?
• You will no longer be able to send or receive email using your verizon.net email address. In addition, you will lose your current contacts, calendar(s) and email. Also, after 180 days of inactivity we will delete the account.

Please see the details here:
  https://www.verizon.com/support/residential/email/migrations.htm

HOTMAIL (Microsoft) announced in 2012-13 that it would be discontinuing hotmail.com addresses and shifting over to the use of outlook.com addresses.  The change-over has been gradual and most U.S.-based users who have not migrated to a different address have not seen any problems... yet.

However, hotmail.com users in Europe are starting to have difficulty when they send emails to other parts of the world.  Microsoft is no longer maintaining some features of their email services that allow authentication of emails coming from Europe, thus some of those emails are now being blocked by recipients' servers and are being returned to sender.   Below are links to two articles that discuss the subject and discuss options of what you can do.

You also can do further Internet searches to learn even more.  However, most importantly, it has now been more than four (4) years since the process of shutting down hotmail.com started and there are still many users that don't seem to know about it.  Because it takes a long time to inform all your correspondents of your new address, change your stationery, update your websites or blogs or advertising, etc., you really need to deal with this very soon.

  http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-hotmail-phase-out-whats-a-user-to-do/

  https://blogs.office.com/2012/08/03/upgrade-from-hotmail-to-outlook-com/

BTinternet users (UK).
While I'm writing about changes to other systems I'll mention BT internet email services which come under various guises (btinternet.com, btopenworld.com, btconnect.com - there may be others).  Like many service providers BT have robust systems in place to filter out spam emails.  Unfortunately as BT's popularity has grown so have spam-filter problems.

Any company sending out customer information emails in the UK ought to have many BT users.  If emails are sent to more than 15 contacts with BT accounts, BT will prevent those emails from passing to their customers believing that they are spam.  They don't dump them in the user's spam folder, as far as I know, they simply block them, and bounce the message back to the sender. 

This causes problems for us as a business.  With several hundred email addresses in our address book we had, when we tackled this, nearly 40 BT addresses.  To ensure that our message got to those customers we had to create 3 new mailing lists just for those customers, limiting each one to 14 addresses! 

So if you have a BT address AND another one, I would urge you to use your other address to deal with us and any large organisations to ensure that you get all the information that you have signed up for.

Orange Email
"We have therefore decided to close Orange Email on 31 May 2017, so you can move to a better email experience, and we can focus on providing our customers with the best possible products and services."
The addresses affected by the closure are:

• Orange.net
• Orangehome.co.uk
• Wanadoo.co.uk
• Freeserve.co.uk
• Fsbusiness.co.uk
• Fslife.co.uk 
• Fsmail.net
• Fsworld.co.uk
• Fsnet.co.uk

"Are you offering an alternative email service?
Many of our users already have an alternative email address with another email provider. However if you don’t, and need to create a new address, we recommend Google's Gmail. Gmail offers a whole host of benefits such as access across different devices, 15GB of free storage and a simple email address format, ending with @gmail.com"
See more at Orange here. 




What other alternatives are there? 

I was hoping that the Zdnet article might suggest other alternatives but it is really aimed at hardcore Hotmail users.  Judging by some of the comments on that article, the new user interface of Outlook is awful!

A lot depends on whether you download your emails and store them on your computer or leave everything on the webserver.  I always did the former, and have emails going back to my first forays onto the internet back in 1998.  They were on my Windows PC, and we imported all emails to the Mac which I've been using for many years.  So it might be possible to download all your Hotmail and Verizon emails and transfer them to a completely new system: seek technical advice if necessary and at the very least look on the web for other solutions to the Verizon and Hotmail changes.

As well as the norvic-philatelics.co.uk and norphil.co.uk address we also have a Gmail address provided by Google, and everything is routed through the gmail account.  I don't imagine Google abandoning email services anytime soon - although I expect people said that about Hotmail at one time (and Google abandoned mobile app support for this blog service). 

But like Orange, I would recommend Gmail as a suitable service which you can access either on the web or download to an email programme on your computer.  Instructions on how to create a Gmail account and import emails are in that Orange link above.


If you are a business, you really ought to have your own domain and use that to handle emails.  You can still route those through Gmail and choose to reply from either your Gmail account or your own domain email address.

---