A month! What on earth could take one month to move?

If like me they may never have had a BT Broadband account or dialup my talk21 address goes back to sky digital's Open..... service where you could email using a giant blue keypad.

It's not so much about moving the emails, its about notifying everyone that matters of your new address as well as working through the various websites and other logins that will be setup to use it.

The real business agenda is the Broadband war with Sky. All BT want is to encourage more people to take their Broadband. Talk21 has always been a free service and never was dependant on you having other BT services.

I have various other free e-mail accounts which I will be using in the future, but one month is too short a period to ensure that all those people who use my Talk21 address are aware of the change. I think my own answer to this is to pay for a couple of months while I notify everyone.

I left BT last March and had my email address since then which I wasn't expecting as I expected it to stop as soon as I left. My own fault for not updating my details but have a month to do it. No complaints from me, fair play, why should they pay to keep the address active?

Yes its up to BT if they want to give a free service but remember many of these accounts were given as free email accounts in the first place as an email available through your Sky box.

Yahoo isn't ad free and I would think it would make more sense if more rather than less people see this advertising for both advertiser and BT.

I have a GMX account that started out as ad free but adverts are now appearing but that doesn't bother me at all as the service has to be paid for in some way .

I still have to sign up to every press list again, which is very time consuming as I might not even get accepted again.

I won't go with hotmail, it just bugs me

The talk21.com domain has been owned by BT since 1997 in the days of the dialup service.

Owned by BT yes, but never part of their ISP. If you were to signup for internet you would get a btinernet/connect address. Talk21 was a completely standalone webmail service and many of the users on it will have registered back when it was accessible via Sky Digital.

Is it only BT that do this ?
I used to have a BT email address but I've no idea of the log in details as its been so many years since I was with them and I'm sure it must have been closed a long time ago.
I left Talktalk 18 months ago but the email is up and running and according to them (mod post on forum) it will remain so while it is being used .... I log in once a week to read emails, apart from that I don't use it.
Two Hotmail/Outlook, Sky and a Gmail address, I'm spoiled for choice ..... no I don't want to pay.

At least BT customers are being given a choice.

When I left Virgin Media I had no option to continue with their email service, whether I paid or not. It was just cut off at the same time my internet service expired.

Not that I would have wanted to continue with it!

The original BTopenworld address also seem to be still working - some evidence that hackers are using one of mine, but I have no idea what the passwords are or how to acess it now.

BT seem to be culling the dial up email addresses - though they don't seem to know if you have a broadband address as they do it.

i don't see why a fee is necessary - it costs them nothing much in the way of capacity or electricity, and any costs for dealing with problems could be covered by advertising on the BT site.

I remember they tried to do the same thing years ago, and nothing ever came of it. Now It stated in the email that my address ending with btinternet.com will stop working (nothing mentioned about the @btopenworld.com ending, which also works).

So even though, I'm accessing my email through Yahoo, it's going to stop?

I just checked my BT Account profile, which is still active after all these years and this is whats displayed:

Thankfully this was always a latent e-mail account for me which I only gave out to peeps I didn't wish to hear from e.g. BT...

Same here. They have a total mess because BT accounts were set up when most people had dial up. They then made mistakes transferring the dial up email addresses to the broadband. In my case, the BT account talks to the old dial up address in my name and the later broadband addres talks to the account holder and is never opened at all. My email tells me I have dialup under its account details , but it gets emails to it telling me I am on broadband.

I have asked on theri form for the working email address to be linked to the phone number and finally got an email back noting the request. But still no sign of the email they say they will send telling you when its been done........Snafu approaching, or are thy on the schedule they have not told us ?

Ah, the OP didn't mention that he was no longer a BT Broadband customer. If this is the case, then I agree; why should we pay to subsidise him? If he wants to keep the email address, £1.60 per month, isn't a lot. I thought, when I read his post that I, as a BT customer, was to be charged for using it, on top of what I already pay. Misleading. If you don't want to change your address, which most people accept you have to when you go to another ISP, stay with BT, or pay the money.

I'm enjoying the last few days before cut off by replying to all the spam. So far I have inherited 500 goats from Ghana. £60000,000 is on its way to my account from Senegal. I have sixty Russian Princesses visiting me next week and I've lost count of how many trial prescriptions I have been offered. I'll be able to do my own car boot when I get all the gear.

This is the last of BT tricks for me. I have been with them since the old dial up when they gave away free Pop3 accounts which they then started to charge for. And now this. I am just glad that there are other people who can provide my land line at a cheaper cost and thanks to the many free email providers.

Home goal BT.

Just got the following email from BT

Hello,

We wrote to you recently about some changes to your email service that were due to happen on 16 September 2013.

We won't now be making those changes on 16 September. Due to the high volume of demand we've had, we've decided to extend the time our customers have to choose their options. We're also taking the opportunity to make this process quicker and easier and we're sorry if you've had trouble getting through to us.

In the meantime, your email will carry on working. (Even if you haven't done anything.)

Don't worry, we'll be in touch
We hope you continue to enjoy using your email and we'll be in touch again when we need you to do something.

Already given us your choice?
If you've already told us how you'd like to keep your email address, don't worry, your email address is safe.

If you've not already heard from us, we're working on your request and we'll email you to confirm.

Thanks.

Warren Buckley
Managing Director, Customer Service

Hi, I have just read the email from BT - it went to junk. I have till 16th to pay £1.60 per month.

I have several email addresses with BT going back years and they are all active. I have no choice but to pay up as I don't want to loose the address as I have CV's sent out that hopefully will respond.

Would anyone know if the £1.60 would just cover the one address of would it cover the sub accounts as well. I have so far logged in with the primary account number but I can't find out if I just pay the one off fee or have to pay individually.

Thanks for help

Important update about your email account

Hello,

We wrote to you recently about some changes to your email service that were due to happen on 16 September 2013.
We won't now be making those changes on 16 September. Due to the high volume of demand we've had, we've decided to extend the time our customers have to choose their options. We're also taking the opportunity to make this process quicker and easier and we're sorry if you've had trouble getting through to us.

In the meantime, your email will carry on working. (Even if you haven't done anything.)

I've paid for it - it does cover the sub-accounts

The problem here isn't BT, it's people using ISP specific email addresses in the first place - why not just take out your own domain name?, which doesn't cost a lot of money, and keep that for your emails regardless of your ISP.

I decided to do that way back in the early days of Internet in the UK, so have never had any such problems.

Quite...


Anyone in their right mind would be wary anyway... It is at best only good as secondary backup IMO.

I hope to God no one would be stupid enough to use it as their sole copy.

oh dear. The second email that acknowledges your request to keep the email address promised an email when the linking was complete. But being poorly thought out, it didn't say if they were linking after the cut out date on 16th sept, and saving the email addresses people had indicated they wanted automatically while they were doing it. So it wasn't clear if the third email should arrive or not before the 16th saying it was safely linked.

Now they seem to be wading through a heap of requests and have put the date off. However, I now haven't got your email above - which could mean anything.........

Its September 17th and I still have my email