TELECOMS giant EE has come under fire after deciding to shut down Freeserve for good.
The company, now part of the BT Group, has announced that Freeserve, along with Orange and Wannadoo email accounts will be shut down.
It will mean the final name in the coffin of the Freeserve brand, which was launched by high street electrical chain Dixons as one of the first free dial-up internet services on September 22, 1998.
But the decision has angered those loyal Freeserve, Orange and Wanadoo users who still use the email accounts with some suggesting legal action to stop the closure.
Freeserve's email services became familiar to over a million in Britain mainly through free CDs handed out by Dixons to help new users access the internet.
Within six months, Freeserve had a million subscribers, and other ISPs were scrambling to compete.
By the summer of 1999 it had become Britain's first dot com to float on the stock market.
In the spring of 2000 it had two million subscribers - compared to BT's 400,000 - and it entered the FTSE 100.
At that stage Freeserve was making big losses but its value climbed to an extraordinary £9bn - more than its parent company Dixons.
But as the dot.com bubble began to deflate, Freeserve was taken over by Wanadoo in 2000 and then later by Orange. Then Orange and T-Mobile merged to become EE.
EE said it decided to close Freeserve email from May 31, 2017, giving users the chance to "move to a better email experience".
"Unfortunately it will not be possible to retain your Freeserve email address after the service closes. If you do not save your emails before 31 May 2017, you won’t be able to access them anymore," EE said in messages to users.
"They will be deleted from our servers. You will also no longer be able to send or receive emails from your Freeserve Email address. Our terms do let us withdraw the service.
Accounts affected are Freeserve.co.uk, Fsbusiness.co.uk, Fslife.co.uk, Fsmail.net, Fsworld.co.uk, Fsnet.co.uk, Orange.net, Orangehome.co.uk, Wanadoo.co.uk and new.labour.org.uk.
There was outrage from some users over the news.
John Lacey said: "This is a terrible thing for people who have built businesses around this email address. We only hope that enough people threaten legal action to stop this.
"If you have created Facebook, Amazon, EBay, HMRC accounts using these addresses. You will have no recovery options unless you add new addresses before May."
One user Geoffrey Hurrell was more nostalgic, saying: "RIP Freeserve - Orange have finally put it out of its misery, but it is an end of an era for those of us who used it to send their first email back in the black and white days before the new millennium."
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