Here is what happened, I tried to access my email only to find Internet Explore could not find the page and reported that possibly my providers server was having problems, now as I also run Firefox as a alternative browser I tried that too, result the same only different wording.

Wow I thought this is pretty serious, lets try my other email address with the same provider, what a surprise, up it comes no problem, well I thought, I will phone the provider to try and sort out the problem, my provider in case you were wondering is Orange and I live in the UK but I would guess it’s a pretty common problem.

Orange helpline was not very helpful and was also a premium line so it was costing me for their problem, I got through to someone in India (common enough nowadays) and they informed me that this was not the correct line and gave me another one (also a premium line) but I was informed the server was indeed down and my alternate email address was probably not on that particular server, it would be offline for about 14 hours, at last a result.

I left the matter there for a couple of days to be safe and then tried again in eager anticipation, Internet Explorer could not find the server Doh!

Right lets find if this really is a common problem, I googled Orange and found the “Orange users forum”, well I will not repeat what I found but it was not very complimentry and seemed to be quite a long and ongoing problem, the frustration jumped off the screen of my PC.

Well after a bit more googling I found a website called “OPEN DNS” and this seemed to be  the answer, it is a nice easy site to follow and I just clicked on my PC’s operating system and followed the step by step example and LO and BEHOLD it worked, my email came back on line instantly.

My PC is Vista operated as it’s fairly new, so I tried the same thing on my old laptop which is XP and still telling me the server is down even though I am reading my emails at the same time using OPEN DNS, same result, both systems now working, BEST OF ALL IT COST ME NOTHING!

Downside is finding how many emails arrived in the few days I had the problem,  how did we survive before electronic mail! 

Hope this solution helps others as much as it helped me.