Soothing noises from Cable & Wireless, which admits it acted misleadingly. 'The service's advertised features have always included webmail rather than the more convenient POP3 e-mail system. However, a lot of customers were given POP3 by mistake,' says a spokeswoman.

In the webmail category alone, the number of active mailboxes has leaped from 18.8 million to 61 million.

WebMail — Research prototype that provides electronic mail functionality from within the Web environment for seamless integration with other Web documents.