Breathe internet access and emails – update 23 July

Customers with internet access and farmersweekly.net and fwi.co.uk email accounts provided by Breathe are understood to have encountered difficulties with their service.

Click here for a more recent update on this story.

Farmers Weekly understands that over the weekend of 18th and 19th July Breathe moved their customers’ email and internet service to a new provider.

This morning Breathe have emailed the customers with the following statement:

Dear Valued Customer,

You will hopefully have already found that we have moved your email to new platform; this was for a number of reasons.

We have found that a large majority of our long-term customer base did not find the old interface very customer friendly and a bit slow too use.

To combat this we have polled our customer base to see what they really wanted from a mail platform. We have found that you want everyday tools to make your life easier, simpler and faster.

We are therefore currently building one of the most advanced email platforms for you to use soon.

Unfortunately we have today received an email that has been sent to you trying to solicit you to ‘BreatheWorld.com’. This is not from the Breathe team and therefore a security risk for you if you do go there and log in. Please simply delete this email if you have already collected it and do not click on the link enclosed.

Thank you for your continued business

Steve Kaye

Managing Director
Breathe Internet

Farmers Weekly is still trying to establish whether the new Breathe platform will continue to allow customers to have access to their email history, address books and email forums via webmail. Customers who were previously using Outlook to connect to their emails are likely to have their email history and address book within Outlook which would be stored locally on their machine.

We are also continuing to receive reports that where customers can access the new platform it is extremely slow. 

On Monday the former internet platform provider which Breathe had been using – Spider Networks – emailed all fwi.co.uk and farmersweekly.net customers offering them the ability to access their old interface (including their email history, address books and email forums via web mail) by logging on to a new web address using their existing username and password.

Spider Networks’ email says:

“If you choose to do this you will have a new email address and will continue to use the Spider Networks solution. This will allow you to use your new email address as before, access all of your previous emails and address books and participate in our discussion forums.”

More updates can be viewed on this forum thread. Customers are posting their concerns/ latest position here.

This story will update as we receive more information.

• Breathe supplies customers with email and internet access using the fwi.co.uk and farmersweekly.net domain but is a company entirely independent of Farmers Weekly. Customer contracts for email and internet access are with Breathe and not Farmers Weekly
• For Breathe customer contact details please visit this link
• Farmers Weekly is doing all it can to help deal with customer queries where possible
• Spider Networks Ltd is a company independent of both Breathe and Farmers Weekly. Customers should satisfy themselves of the terms and conditions they may be committing themselves to before accessing the Spider Networks platform 
• Advice can me sought from Ofcom