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ISP's and email

Yet again I have spent a goodly chunk of my weekend fixing people’s PC’s. The last round was trying to clean all the spyware and adware off machines. This time it has been ISP’s.

My local village has just got Broadband (good old BT) and so my ex wife, kids, parents etc have all been keen to enjoy the advantages of the higher bandwidth etc. I have been recommending the Belkin ADSL modem / router / Hub and Wireless box which performs really well and is a snap to set up.

In terms of ISP supplier however it has been very much up to their usage patterns which the best package is and so they all have signed up with different suppliers. In some cases I have done the installation and so all has been well however in other cases they have followed the ISP’s instructions and disaster has struck.

Actually in order to use an ISP you don’t need to load anything onto the PC but the ISP’s all ask you to load up their software. This then goes and rebrands IE, Outlook Express, sets IE’s home page to the ISP’s portal and then, worst of all, changes the default email to that supplied by the ISP.

I don’t mind the brand changing, can change the homepage back again quite easily (although many people struggle with this) but the email thing is a nightmare for non PC literate people.

What happens is that they cannot find their old email (as it is no longer the default) and when they send email it goes from the new email address which confuses everyone. They then try to switch things back and the whole of the email system gets fouled up so the cannot send or receive anything. Its actually quite easy to fix if you know what you are doing but when they phone the ISP the ISP help line keeps setting them up on the ISP email system. If they try to set themselves up on Hotmail (for instance) then the ISP says that it’s Microsoft’s problem and gives them a Microsoft call centre number. If you phone Microsoft then they say that it was the ISP who fouled up the settings (true) and they can fix it but will charge a one time assistance fee, which doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. Needless the user doesn’t see why they should pay when the system used to work.

Clearly the reason the ISP is doing this is so that the customer uses their email system and so gets locked into that ISP. They then are as difficult as possible about using any other email supplier.

Anyway I fixed it without too much of a problem and now tell everyone my law for hassle free PC usage:

Don’t ever install any programs either from the internet, from email or from a CD without trying to do whatever it is you want with just the operating system. Then if it doesn’t work use the operating system to install what it needs from the CD’s rather then just letting them run.