Before I toddled off on my jollies, I put instructions on 2 of my email addresses to forward all incoming to my hotmail account as that's the one I access via my phone. Just prior to take off on the return home, I removed the instruction. I received email while on holiday. 10 days after my return, I found that I could no longer forward or create email from those 2 accounts. It turned out that I was on a blacklist. The reason being that 300 or more mails had been sent from each of those accounts within a 30 minute window. They were all emails that had arrived during my holiday and NOT been forwarded for some strange reason. I have no idea why they were all forwarded long after my return.

I asked my ISP how to get off the blacklists. They sent me a URL. That led to a site where you can have them monitor your email address for free. To do anything else costs $129 a month for one package or there's the top of the range for $399 a month. As a private individual, not really what I'm looking for.

I explained this to my ISP and they sent me 3 more URLs, each one from one of the lists I had found myself on. I registered with all 3 and looked at the instructions on how to get yourself delisted. Guess what? All 3 said that I can't delist myself, my ISP has to do it.

I have now sent copies of the relevant pages to my ISP and await their response.

I've been with this company ever since we got cable to replace ISDN which is a long time. They've been my TV provider for 32 years. Their service has been very good. TV outages over that period are around half a dozen and Internet outages are maybe 2 or 3. Over all I've been very happy with their service. This latest escapade is poor, very poor. Not sufficiently bad at the moment to look elsewhere but if they don't sort it soon and to my satisfaction, I will reassess things.

I can't wait for the customer dissatisfaction form