Anyone else had this through, they want us to pay £1.60 to carry on using their email services, which they know most people don't want to lose if its their main address as everything on the internet is registered through it! Absolutely scandalous, I'd ring to complain but I don't fancy being on the phone for hours-Absolute Joke of a company!!!

they only charging you £1.60 if you dont have bt broadband tho!

They should charge if a person no longer pays to use their ISP yet uses their email services.

I don't think that it is "scandalous " at all. Why should BT's other customers subsidise you?

Been with them for 23 yrs and the standard of service is utterly appalling, technical assistance is a bunch of clueless idiots in India reading from a script.

Last night I got a shock after doing a reset of the vision box their way, poor infinity 2 speed which causes buffering and I'm not entitled to the gift voucher because I'm not a new customer yet it was on their site that customers new and old were entitled to claim it.

Was a happy customer until this year and I just cancelled Vision, I'm out of contract with the landline so when they cannot fix infinity 2 to at least 51 Mbps instead of the lousy erratic speeds currently enjoyed they will have to release me from contract, so Friday its cancel everything BT.

An I utterly hate they employ foreigners with a poor grasp of knowledge as technical wizards, reading from a script does not make the intelligent. I was on the phone to them for over six hours yesterday and near four today, that's not customer service that's taking the piss.

I presume you are no longer a BT customer but want to keep your BT email address, if so then charging you to keep it active seems fair, the alternative is to delete it and any emails contained with it, with some ISPs you don't get a choice, you leave that ISP they delete your email account

If you no longer have your broadband with them, this is normal commercial practice. I've done it for over 10 years with another Company I once had broadband with. Email services are paid for by either some other service you have with the Company, advertising etc., or a fee.

But for nothing, you usually get nothing.

Assuming you don't have BT broadband, I'm also struggling to see what's scandalous about being asked to pay for something that you are using.

Yeah me too, if you are not paying for their bb service they are not going to give you an email service for free.
I have just joined BT from O2 & luckily my O2 email account is still active (and free) because I have a mobile contract with them.
Just change to an online email service (gmail or yahoo), then change all your registered internet email addresses to the new one. A bit of a long winded operation, but if you don't want to pay BT that is the only way.

I'm not seeing the problem here unless the email address is associated with a business that does a lot of business by email and the email is on product brochures, adverts, vehicle livery, etc.

Like Maccadanny says, just use a gmail email address or suchlike as your main email address. It takes a wee while to update your details on various websites, but it's no big deal.

I had a Pipex email address that I used for years, but changed to a gmail account when I moved to Be, since they didn't offer their customers ISP email addresses.

Thats the problem. They try and do everything on the cheap. They mucked up moving my dial up email to the broadband when that became available and gave me a silly, and then a less ideal email address, and claimed they couldn't sort it out and give me the right one - as I already had it. I have used the dial up one and never touched the superflous one since. The dial up one refers to me and the new broadband one addresses to the account holder - just to add to potential confusion.

Now they have sent out a warning to link the the two addresses with a link/form to fill in. Fill it in and you will get an email back it says. Filled it in - but no email comes back. No indication of when it should - they suggest you fill in the form again, but not how long to wait for . Followed up the contact link, and, low and behold its BT India........The chances of BT India getting this sorted out are not very good.

I'm more annoyed by this because I am losing my @talk21.com email address which was never part of any ISP.

Just tried to pay the £1.60 through their syste,

The site had an "invalid security certificate"

Tried going through my old bt.com account

"Due to a system error we can't display your product information. We are working to fix this for you as quickly as possible"

It's just a pity that there isn't any neat and efficient way to import email from an ISP email account to say Gmail for example like you can import email from Hotmail to Gmail etc!

I tried to sign up to the 1.60 thing, but I can't as my father owns the main account and I'm no longer on speaking terms with him.

So I'm going to lose over 70,000 emails, all my press releases, gonna be deleted from every press list I'm on :/

Why don't you use an e-mail client like Thunderbird, and download all your e-mails to your PC, then when your e-mail account changes, you'll still have the archive of e-mails.

I recently left BT Broadband for Sky – much better service, no dodgy bills which claim you owe them for services you may not get for 3 months and a big saving. This is just another change which highlights why I was right to do so.

Until recently the terms and conditions were very clear that even if you left BT your email account could be retained indefinitely as long as you logged in once every 30 days. Now they send out an email in mid August – peak holiday time – saying people’s email accounts will be closed in 30 days if they do nothing. It would be easy for people to miss this at this time – and then find out they lose their emails entirely!

Frankly its just another petty charge from BT which no one else charges when you leave them – but it’s a lot less appalling than the £1.50 charge per quarter for a paper bill i.e. they are charging you to send you a bill to pay them!

I suppose they have to pay for all their BT Sports presenters fees – as no one seems to be watching their output.

PS I also wonder given their systems – I had to speak to five different people when I left in one call to sort out my final bill – if they will make huge mess ups during the transition and cancel people’s accounts in error who have premium email or BT Broadband?

I don't understand why people rely so heavily on a single website to hold important/personal emails.

I have always used an email client to download my emails to my pc. Then back them up every week. You then have 3 copies of your emails.

Do as tellytart1 has suggested to SnowdoniaDonut & install an email client such as Thunderbird or Windows Live Mail, or if you are using a pre-Windows 7 machine, you will already have Windows Mail, or Outlook Express installed.

You can then link this to your BT Yahoo! mail account & download all your emails.

I have yahoo mail apps installed on my mobile phones. Whether it's a BT Yahoo, Virgin Yahoo or Sky Yahoo mail account you can access the mail anywhere.

Can you change it to a yahoo.com e-mail address before you leave your current isp if it's one you can access through yahoo?

I access my nokia e-mail accounts on yahoo on my laptop and samsung smartphones.

You don't even need to use a bt.com or sky.com e-mail address for all your e-mails.

Why doesn't the OP just keep BT broadband?

I agree with the OP, I just got the same E-Mail today and have a month until they shut down my E-Mail account. No way I'm paying to keep this account so I now have the hassle of changing my E-Mail address with all the companies that have this address..

Or pay the £1.60 a month and get a cheap provider for BB. What appals me is that BT have started this process in mid August when many people are on holiday so may miss the email. That really is bad practice as surely they could have waited until early September to contact people and give a proper months notice.

I have a talk21 account which has basically been my primary address since the "open..." days (so over a decade). It would be a major hassle to go through all the various emails and websites making sure people arent going to be still sending to it, as well as mailing friends and family to tell them a new address. Not something that I could really do in such a short timescale, so for the sake of £1.60 I'll cough up for now.

Initially I thought I could get round it all by tieing it to my parents BT Infinity account but it looks like they wont do it for business users

What a bizarre business decision, one months notice of total obliteration of fairly important stuff.

It will just make people even more wary of trusting important documents to the "cloud" concept.

And needlessly antagonise many people against BT.