Got an email yesterday to tell me my talk21 account will close from 16th Sept.

It isn't my main account and doesn't get used much but I also have a Flickr account linked to that email so its a bit unclear if I will lose that as well .

But guess what there are 3 things you can do to save your email account

1 Sign up for BT Broadband

2 If you already have BT Broadband link your email to that.

3 Pay £1.60 a month to keep your email address .

I've never had BT Broadband and don't plan to after years of paying them 3 times the amount I pay now for phone services.

Talk21 is the first email address I had when we first got sky Digital you could start an account through OPEN and use the Giant blue keypad.

This is the third thread about the same subject,.
Maybe the mods could combine them?
See also
http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showthread.php?t=1875265
http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showthread.php?t=1873916

Yes, same here, i work out i've had my email for around 15 yrs, very very angry. There's one thing, i wont ever use a bt product again !!!

No biggee for me.
I have BT Infinity 2, just a simple linking process on the email they sent.

As for BT's prices (for fibre esp) they are very competitive as far as I am concerned & the service has been very good after a little teething troubles (largely down to my previous ISP....and which BT nicely compensated me for).

The email only talks about the
yourname@talk21.com email address but you sign in as yourname.t21@btinternet.com .

Will it only be the talk21 address that we loose .

No both!

You need to have a BT broadband account - or one linked to it - or sign up from BT premium email at £1.60 a month.

Otherwise at the end of September your email account will be deleted by BT.

Me too!! I also have had my address for 15 years, originally signing up through Sky, when you had to log on using the remote control on your TV! I am more than angry. It's my primary address, and after 15 years, has been used to register everything, probably over 100 web sites, including home banking, ebay etc. etc.

They are thieving bastards and I'll never, ever, EVER buy another BT product.Geeze, they think bankers have a bad name, BT just surpassed them!!

To be fair I think you're getting a tad hysterical over £1.60

That's the equivalent of almost £300 for the time I've used the address. Its the same con that retailers pulled when they started charging for petrol in liters - The £5/Gallon passed many by because, sure its only £1.10/liter!!

Sky con many people into thinking £45 is OK/month - ask the same folk if they'd fork out nearly £550/year for TV and they'd tell you to get lost...

I wonder if this means BTs new email platform wont place ads in the webmail interface. If so, £1.60/month is entirely reasonable - if not, it's atrocious.

Perhaps people should count themselves lucky they have the option to keep the address at all - new signups for talk21 email addresses haven't been available for over five years, if I remember correctly. Anybody relying on an email address where the provider has already signalled they aren't interested in providing the service any longer by disabling signups is playing with fire.

You've had use of a service for 15 years, that you haven't paid for, which would have cost you nearly £300. I cant see how after 15 years of free use being told to pay a fee or loose it is anything unreasonable.

As for the petrol analogy, no, it's nothing like that at all, not unless you were getting petrol free when it was sold by the gallon.

But you didn't pay a penny for it during that time. They aren't forcing you to pay now.

Personally I will be paying the £1.60 for a few months until I am satisfied I don't mind letting it go.

Where you do think the money came from to run the service as part of their bundled internet service?

They didn't have it as part of a bundled service. Talk21 was free, like Hotmail et al., so the money was came from advertising. However, that requires scale, which a service which was basically closed over five years ago wont have. And their new platform might not even show ads anyway.

I can assure you that the 'talk21' platform is exactly the same as all BT/Yahoo addresses - it is littered with blinkin' adverts!! So scale has nothing to do with it as I get all the same shit ads that everyone else gets...

I know, but they are getting a new one which I suspect might not have ads.

I could be wrong, but cancelling talk21 accounts would make no sense if the new platform has ads because ads need eyeballs to make money.

Weird thing is I've been getting this email account closure warning for the last 4 or 5 years. But I've always ignored them and my btinternet email address is still there.

Is this definitely official or a clever phishing attempt? The links in the email look very dodgy to me...

Oh, it's definitely dodgy, but unfortunately it is legitimate. You gotta laugh, I was going to pay for one month whilst I get alternative arrangements set up.

On going through their premium email order site, it refused my order as it says, "unfortunately your ***@talk21.com is not your primary email address, so we cannot continue with your order"... honestly, BT, for a comms company you really are super shit.

Try changing it to****.t21@btinternet.com and see if it lets you in.

That sounded a great idea, though I've just tried it & it didn't work

It might still mean a name change but there is a great opportunity for Yahoo here to come up with a way of mopping up all the disgruntled T21 users.

I have simply set up a new Yahoo account, pruned the old one and forwarded all the emails that I want to keep. Not very tidy but it works. Ebay, amazon etc now work with the new account.

Talk21 was never part of BT's internet services. It was a standalone (ad-supported) webmail service the same as hotmail etc.

Hello all. Newbie with a first post here, following an email from BT about the closure of Talk21, unless I link my address to BT broadband or pay up. I've been with Talk21 for almost as long as some here, so not overjoyed at either of these two options. Admittedly not a lot to pay, but it is ad-supported. TeeGee's post rang bells with me on both points made there. But how do you go about doing as described in 2nd para? Bearing in mind T21 is the only email address I've ever used, and techie I ain't. Any pointers / guidance gratefully received. eg I'm guessing I'd have to have a new email address, so do I have to inform all correspondents of this??

Yes, thats all i've been doing , every night this week, changing email on facebook, forums, banks, credit cards, loyalty cards , insurance etc, etc, . i guess there are about 50 or so organisations / companys that i have had to change.... starting th think the £1.60 pm option would have been a better option !!

Aargh! Even if migrating to Yahoo! mail? And I'm guessing mail can't be forwarded in bulk... or can it?