I have a colleague here who may need to change ISPs to one that does not block VPN's

She is currently with Tiscali and has a Tiscali email address she has had for many years and does not really want to lose it. The reason she needs to possibly change is that Tiscali / Talktalk seem to block the required ports for access to our office VPN via a specific client and 2FA and this is affecting a few members of staff.

So, if she were to transfer to lets say Sky I wonder if she would still be able to login to her talktalk/tiscali web based email account.

Or,

is there another way around the port blocking.

Do TalkTalk still offer a dialup service? If she closes her broadband account and keeps the dialup, then that should keep her account "active" and the mail account attached to it. The worry is that she might have to dialup every x number of days to keep it going which means getting a modem and racking up a few pence in calls every so often just so it doesn't get flagged as unused. I would suggest that she takes this opportunity to also get an ISP-independent email address of some sort, and start moving over to it because even if TalkTalk do still offer dialup accounts, how long do you think they're going to keep that going in this day and age?

No easy way around port blocking except a VPN, so wouldn't help in this case.

the email will die after 30days.

I'd set up a gmail and get it to pull and auto respond that her address has changed.

It's a prime example of why you should keep isp and email separate. Mum and dad had the same ball ache issues when they changed isp.

Best to choose a non ISP specific email provider as already suggested like Google, Yahoo or Hotmail. She will have to go through the changed my address pain, but only once and can then change ISP anytime in the future with no problem.

Sky's email is provided by google anyway

Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk

It's not portable though. Virgin Media's is also provided by Google on the backend, but you can't leave Virgin/Sky and move your mail to Gmail seamlessly, you have to export/import like you would with any other provider.

IIRC, Talktalk block VPN on their basic broadband accounts to force you to take a business broadband homeworker account.

BeThere don't restrict VPN use, as I use it extensively. If that helps.

Don't have a lot of time for TalkTalk, on a number of levels.