# BT internet and Talk 21 accounts (run by Yahoo!) to close!



## John-H (Jul 13, 2005)

I've just had a message that my BT internet email address I've had for donkey's years is to close. Originally, I had a dial up service with them (56k modem) from Compuserve days, then I ditched Compuserve and used the BT internet email. Then BT said it was no longer going to provide email and this was being taken over by Yahoo! But I could keep my BT internet address. Ok, got used to that, then I went with Virgin but kept the "free email" (no POP3) from BT-Yahoo!. I went through a phase of Ypops to keep Outlook Express going with a POP3 cheat via webmail but when that died I adopted webmail completely and now find it really useful for looking up old messages over years of history as Yahoo! give unlimited storage. Fine.

But now BT have said they are closing the free accounts (not that they are providing them - it's Yahoo!). They have said my options are (1) buy BT broadband (No!), or (2) Pay £1.60 a month for "Premium" service.

I can walk away and open a straight Yahoo! account but I'll lose all my data. Surely I own this data and there should be a way of copying this and contacts over to a new account but I can't without POP3.

This is really annoying - BT don't run my current email services it's Yahoo! but their contractual agreement with Yahoo! seems to allow them to delete my data! What about my rights to the data I own to say nothing of the inconvenience of changing multiple accounts as well.

Makes me less inclined to have anything to do with BT :evil:


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## A3DFU (May 7, 2002)

Just pay £1.60/month and have half a pint of beer less/month. Good for your health


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## Pugwash69 (Jun 12, 2012)

Have you ever considered registering a domain name and having email addresses you can control? I was lucky enough to have a rare surname and have the .com hosted on one of my servers. I even set up addresses for my family - makes them a lot easier to remember. 8) 
All my emails are downloaded to a Windows server in my house running Exchange, so I don't lose anything if I switch laptops and desktops.


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## John-H (Jul 13, 2005)

My own domain is tempting but saving all my past emails I somehow need to do before September 16th :?


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## Dotti (Mar 9, 2003)

We've had exactly the same email through, going to go through the link later to be able to keep the email addresses. This is a bit of a pain on behalf of BT what they plan to do as our bt emails are primary emails used for most websites and shopping websites and banking etc. BT are a sodding pest right now. Our Internet has been down the last week and they're service leads alot to be desired. Now they are doing this email change over thing, I am inclined to tell hubby to switch over to sky and be done with it. Not amused by BT [smiley=argue.gif]


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## NoMark (Jul 6, 2011)

Dotti said:


> We've had exactly the same email through, going to go through the link later to be able to keep the email addresses. This is a bit of a pain on behalf of BT what they plan to do as our bt emails are primary emails used for most websites and shopping websites and banking etc. BT are a sodding pest right now. Our Internet has been down the last week and they're service leads alot to be desired. Now they are doing this email change over thing, I am inclined to tell hubby to switch over to sky and be done with it. Not amused by BT [smiley=argue.gif]


Whatever you do don't go to Sky, they are far worse than BT if you have a problem. And God forbid you cancel and try to get money back from them.

in my experience Sky are a bunch of lying crooks that should be a avoided at all costs.


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## John-H (Jul 13, 2005)

NoMark said:


> Dotti said:
> 
> 
> > We've had exactly the same email through, going to go through the link later to be able to keep the email addresses. This is a bit of a pain on behalf of BT what they plan to do as our bt emails are primary emails used for most websites and shopping websites and banking etc. BT are a sodding pest right now. Our Internet has been down the last week and they're service leads alot to be desired. Now they are doing this email change over thing, I am inclined to tell hubby to switch over to sky and be done with it. Not amused by BT [smiley=argue.gif]
> ...


Sky keep sending me emails to my email address about my Sky account and yet I don't have an account with them and never have. I've been trying to get the emails stopped which include someone else's personal details but whenever I've contacted them they say they can't do anything about it because it's not my Sky account and it would be a breach of the data protection act. They obviously don't know the first thing about the Data Protection Act and are in clear breach of regulations themselves. Muppets! :evil:


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## Spandex (Feb 20, 2009)

John-H said:


> Sky keep sending me emails to my email address about my Sky account and yet I don't have an account with them and never have. I've been trying to get the emails stopped which include someone else's personal details but whenever I've contacted them they say they can't do anything about it because it's not my Sky account and it would be a breach of the data protection act. They obviously don't know the first thing about the Data Protection Act and are in clear breach of regulations themselves. Muppets! :evil:


I'm not sure they're breaking any rules there. Someone who has an account with them has (accidentally) used your email address, that's all.

Have you tried going onto the Sky site and clicked the 'forgotten password or username' link. They may well send you 'your' login details if that email address is registered there. If that gets you in, you might be able to change the registered email address to stop the spam.


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## John-H (Jul 13, 2005)

Spandex said:


> John-H said:
> 
> 
> > Sky keep sending me emails to my email address about my Sky account and yet I don't have an account with them and never have. I've been trying to get the emails stopped which include someone else's personal details but whenever I've contacted them they say they can't do anything about it because it's not my Sky account and it would be a breach of the data protection act. They obviously don't know the first thing about the Data Protection Act and are in clear breach of regulations themselves. Muppets! :evil:
> ...


It's my email address clearly and now I've told them several times to stop they are in breach of the e-marketing regulations regardless of a mistake made by their customer. Arguably they are subsequently in breach of DPA regulations since I have informed them I am a third party to which they are sending me their customer's personal details including their name and address and bank details.

I did wonder if it was some sort of scam and my email address had been used to register an account but I think it's just likely a mistake.

I had thought of logging onto the account to change the email but I can't do that.


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## Spandex (Feb 20, 2009)

John-H said:


> It's my email address clearly and now I've told them several times to stop they are in breach of the e-marketing regulations regardless of a mistake made by their customer. Arguably they are subsequently in breach of DPA regulations since I have informed them I am a third party to which they are sending me their customer's personal details including their name and address and bank details.
> 
> I did wonder if it was some sort of scam and my email address had been used to register an account but I think it's just likely a mistake.
> 
> I had thought of logging onto the account to change the email but I can't do that.


If all of this hinges on the fact that you think by phoning them up and telling them, they should remove an email address from an account, then I'm afraid I agree with them. There's no way they should make changes to a customers account based on the word of an unidentified caller.


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## Spandex (Feb 20, 2009)

John-H said:


> I had thought of logging onto the account to change the email but I can't do that.


Have you tried? I'm sure I've recovered forgotten Sky logins with just my email address before.


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## John-H (Jul 13, 2005)

Spandex said:


> John-H said:
> 
> 
> > It's my email address clearly and now I've told them several times to stop they are in breach of the e-marketing regulations regardless of a mistake made by their customer. Arguably they are subsequently in breach of DPA regulations since I have informed them I am a third party to which they are sending me their customer's personal details including their name and address and bank details.
> ...


I've emailed them as well and followed that up with phone calls to confirm what was in the emails. The last time they agreed it was clearly my email address and they would remove it (twice). Nothing happened and then the marketing emails resumed including emails with account information demanding payment. I've opted out from the emails but they carry on coming.

Yes I have tried doing it directly and I might try again.


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## Spandex (Feb 20, 2009)

Having just looked, it seems you can recover a lost username using the email address, then you can recover the lost password using the username you just got. I haven't clicked through to see if there are other security questions though, as I don't want to reset my username/password as I already have enough trouble remembering which is my active one


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## John-H (Jul 13, 2005)

Thanks, I'll give it a go.


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## X5TUU (Sep 4, 2012)

I dont know about Yahoo! but I can drag and drop email between inboxes from my gmail to icloud and vice versa no problem at all ... all on my ipad ... I dont know if this is an option (tech wise) you may be able to do it with the webmail windows and would solve your problem instantly (providing you have a new webmail account in which to 'drop' it into!?


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## John-H (Jul 13, 2005)

Well this is a lamentable situation. I spoke to someone at work who just returned from holiday and he told me the email sent out was a phising email scam. I wasn't so sure but on looking at the email the links (which I hadn't previously clicked) go to third party sites - not BT so it does look suspicious. So I did a bit of searching - always good to paste a line of text from the email into Google along with the word "scam" and came back with lots of links revealing much confusion: Customers hanging on the phone for hours trying to get hold of BT only to be told it was a scam and then other customers told it was genuine. There's no guarantee if you get to their call centre that the person you speak to will have a clue.

See this thread on BTCare community forum - it goes on for several pages before it's confirmed as genuine - well some of the emails sent out:
http://community.bt.com/t5/Other-BB-Que ... d-p/957428

... and this one on MoneySavingExpert:
http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/sho ... st62757435

It seems it is indeed genuine about the account closures on 16th September but BT sent the original email dribbling through in chunks of 1,000 emails at a time and didn't follow best practice guidelines of NOT providing click through links to log on, so making the email look like a phising attempt with the third party links etc. Then some scammers jumped on the bandwaggon and started sending out similar looking emails with different scam links embedded. Then the word went round that it was all a scam, various warnings went about and the BT call centre couldn't cope with the calls and hasn't had the correct information communicated to the staff. Apparently if you try and forward the email it gets detected as a threat by the BT Yahoo email filter itself and many people have had it go to SPAM and don't even know they've got it. With only a month's notice and in practice with all the confusion far less, it's a complete shambles!

People have had BTinternet and Talk21 accounts provided "for life", but are going to have them deleted come 16th September. Lots of people have had these accounts for over 10 years and have them linked as primary accounts to bank accounts etc. I think that come the 17th September there's going to be trouble.

Here is a genuine BT link that takes you to a page on their website to confirm the truth of it. This simple URL should have been in the email to avoid these problems:

http://www.bt.com/emailchanges

There is some groundswell movement to involve Ofcom and to email Ed Vaisey MP and complain about the "blackmail" nature of this situation - "give us your money or lose your data". What if all the free service providers were to follow BT's lead and start charging?

Contact Ed
Email: [email protected]

Post: House of Commons
London SW1A 0AA

Telephone: 020 7219 6350

You can back up you emails using Gmail fetch service if you have a Google account but then you're in bed with Google. The BT Yahoo service now supports POP3 on the free account - I don't know when this went back on enabled on a free account but it works again, so I at least intend to retreive my data. Outlook Express limits DBX files to 2 Gbyte however so you may need to split into INBOX1 ... INBOX2 folders etc. Not sure what Thunderbird limits are. Another thing I was going to try was drag and drop from one browser (IE) webmail account BTYahoo to another (Firefox) Yahoo but this may not work.


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## John-H (Jul 13, 2005)

BT's original commitment:



> - talk21, BT's free web-based email service, has been relaunched with a new look created by the London-based new-media company, Deepend.
> 
> Developed as part of BT's commitment to supply everyone in the UK with an email address for life, the site features an intuitive interface designed to appeal to both novice and experienced users alike.
> 
> http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/news/41868


Some interesting comments from various forums:



> Talk21 email address's were provided free independant of any commitment to BT. They are going back on their commitment and there is no one you can complain to.
> Without regulation you have anarchy. Other forms of communication are regulated why not email that is probably the most important system.
> BT can currently remove any email address you have with them and you have no automatic redress. Most other ISPs are similar. There are other issues due to the lack of regulation.





> They are blackmailing me to pay for a service that was set up with Labour Government funding for the New Millennium. British Telecom Free for life email address. Who would trust them in the future?





> I've got less than a month to sort through 14 years worth of saved/sent and received emails, notify 14 years worth of organisations that I have registered this address with and also port all of the emails I need to keep out of Talk21 and into a new provider and I just think it has been very poorly handled by the company.


*Sign the Government E-petition for Ofcom to regulate email providers:

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/48917*

Looks like the general outcry is having an effect already - this announced today but I don't know if it applies to BTinternet.com addresses:
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/6015 ... inful.html


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## Dotti (Mar 9, 2003)

Well, I followed the link BT sent me as we have Broadband anyway, all seems to be ok and I get to keep my email address. Got confirmation back from BT. All seems cotia. Don't really see what all the fuss is about. :?


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## pcrepairmandan (Jul 6, 2013)

A customer of mine came into the shop the other day saying his emails we going to be deleted I presumed it was a scam. I think his was but thank you for the information on this. really helped


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## John-H (Jul 13, 2005)

It's the way BT have gone about it that's caused confusion and led many people to presume it's a scam. I predict there are going to be a lot of upset people soon.

I also think they have defaulted on their marketing promise of an email for life for many customers. Yahoo! were running their email services for them which was just therefore a revenue stream for them from advertising (I presume), so to remove the right to the btinternet and talk21 domain to their customers seems draconian given that they have also said that nobody will be able to use the original email addresses in future for security reasons. I suspect Yahoo! would have happily continued to run those accounts for the advertising, but we are getting into the details of commercial contacts. More reason then that there should be some regulation of emails to protect consumers who rely on some consistency of origin for their identity.


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