Borrowing an idea from the mobile phone industry, a Limerick-based Internet service provider (ISP) is offering to forward mail for subscribers who "churn", or switch over to another ISP.

Mr Seanie Ryan, the head of Elive (www.elive.ie), which offers Internet services in Limerick and Dublin, said if a customer terminated an account, Elive would keep the email address active and automatically forward email to a new account free of charge.

The prospect of having to change email address can deter existing Internet users from changing ISPs, because usually the only way to continue to receive email sent to a previous account is to keep the account active, which means paying two ISPs at once.

The telecommunications regulator, Etain Doyle, has forced mobile phone companies to put a message in place for three months telling callers when the party they are calling has churned (switched to the another network).

In what may be the first example of an ISP marketing a service to attract customers by making it easier for them to leave, Mr Ryan said he wanted to push this through as an Internet industry standard.