"will my freeserve email address disappear"
Probably
they used to state they would be killed off after a certain period following the end of contract. 120 days comes to mind, but thats just a vague memory.
In practice some accounts seem to be ceased quickly, others carry on, while others continue to receive mail but not send. Part of this variance may be due to the terms on which you left - those who moved at contract end seem to have a better result than those who moved due to contract problems, breaking the contract early
Its also worth remembering that Orange/Freeserve are a bit funny about allowing e-mail to be sent from "other" networks - they block some of the commoner ports to stop spam, you have to work around that
Best to start making moves to a different e-mail account some time before you make the ISP switch
As to the costs of Orange vs BT - Orange did go a long way down the route of unbundling exchanges to reduce costs, but gave up around two years ago and sold their backbone network to BT. All they offer now are retail versions of BTOpenreach services, so theres unlikely to be any price advantage in using Orange. They realised they were simply too small a player in the UK
Last edited by Milo Minderbinder; 7th September 2012 at 15:06.