All of a sudden I’ve lost eMail contact with lots of friends who had verizon.net eMail accounts as Verizon abandons their landlines in three New England States, and Fairpoint takes over.

There is an official site provided by Fairpoint which will help people transition… but it is for Windows only. The site checks to see what your browser and operating system are, and if you have Windows XP or Vista, and are using Outlook 2000 or later, you can download a little program (ActiveX control) which will change your settings.

If you don’t use Internet Explorer, the automatic setting won’t work. The manual instructions are on the next page of the web site. I had a friend go through this with a technician, and this is what he came up with.

User or Account Name:
Your new myfairpoint.net email address
Example: ([myusername]@myfairpoint.net)

POP Server: mail.myfairpoint.net (i.e. incoming mail)
SMTP Server: mail.myfairpoint.net (outgoing mail)

Account name – on incoming mail server
[myusename].myfairpoint.net

Check My Server Requires Authentication
Settings next to it. “Use Same Settings as Incoming Server”

The technician also suggested that you change the outgoing mail port change from 25 to 1025 (WTF?)

I do have Fairpoint phone mail, and this no longer picks up when I’m on the line. Sigh.

If you have anything non-windows, and non-IE (Linux, Macintosh, Safari, FireFox) , you have to use the manual instructions.