I have had my t21 address for over 10 years and have had no email from BT saying it is going to be ending if i don't pay.

Does this mean that I have been let off or just that they have not informed me.

I don't want to bring it to there attention but also don't want to risk loosing it.

What to do.

An advice greatly accepted.

I've had my talk21 account for well over a decade! I've decided to pay the £1.60

I'd not wait until the 16th September! Even tho I'm now premium I have a feeling that on the 16th my email will stop working??

Don't leave it too late...

Ironically, last week I too decided to pay £1.60 just to give me more time to make alternative arrangements after having a 'talk21' address for 15 years, and having over 30,000 emails in it. I had to laugh, on trying to sign up to their 'premium' service, I got an error message saying that 'this is not your primary address and we cannot proceed with your order"!!!

Anyway, it seems that BT have had further thoughts on the matter, and have extended the deadline by a full year.

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/6...s-painful.html

Yep my btinternet email address is still working fine after the deadline. What a surprise.

Shouldn't be a surprise at all - they made an announcement that they were relinquishing their decision for another year. The nice surprise would be that if they just quietly forgot the whole issue, and set up a spare server somewhere in the huge BT conglomerate to run 'talk21' emails - the money involved is very small beer for BT...

No you've misinterpreted me.

It's no surprise as in when I received that email last month I expected something like this to happen - going on how shoddily-run BT is these days....

Yes, I did indeed misinterpret you, sorry. Although I must confess, that I've always thought BT were poorly run, and as soon as their monopoly was taken away from them, I left!

I have migrated all my T21 emails to a Thunderbird folder so they will still be there if and when the system does actually stop altogether.

A point made by the OP however is what about Flickr accounts which are linked to my T21 email address?

Fortunately I use a domain name for serious email but it is a pain nonetheless!

So I decided to pay for the Premium Mail reluctantly in September and I found out that I should be getting 12 months free!

The 1st month they took £3.20 then on the 28th October they took another £1.60.

I know it's small amounts but I emailed BT to ask for my 12 months free as it says on the website...

"And don't worry if you've already placed an order for BT Premium Mail, you'll still be eligible for the 12 months free offer and we'll be in touch shortly with more details for you."

This is the email I was sent back

Hello

Thank you for your e-mail,

I am sorry that the timing of your agreement meant that you missed out on the release of a free deal on the Premium mail

I appreciate your frustrations and I am sorry that there is nothing BT can do to now revise the services you agreed to and are paying for. Within the services we provide, deals, discounts and offers routinely change over the course of a year. We explain the terms of each deal to a customer before they accept it, and are not able to change that if a new deal comes along 6 months later. I am not saying this just to make you as one customer unhappy, or to make you feel that we are taking liberties; I am simply explaining the rules that BT has to adhere to set out by the regulators and governing bodies. I am sorry that I have no way to give you what you have asked for, and your complaint will be recorded on our complaints system that is routinely audited by the Ombudsman for exactly this reason

Thanks for getting in touch.

Best wishes,
Andrew Jones
BT Digital Care

I'm not too sure how to react

I do - BT are bas***ds which is why I left them over 10 years ago. At every opportunity, tell everyone you know they are cr*p. Of course, it will make no difference whatsoever, but it does make you feel a tad better

Ha ha! My Mum was recently with them and charging her extortionate bills! When I questioned this it turns out she was on a Talk plan that they ended 15 years ago!

Anyway I switched her to Sky so the Premium Mail is the only service of BT my family have.

As a Football fan I'm gutted they have got the Champions League as I may have to bite the bullet and sign up?

Though I have 18 odd months to decided

The guys over at BT Care Community Forum can usually sort these matters out - they have for me in the past including getting refunds
http://community.bt.com/

Cheers!

Tho having done a search there I found other people with exactly the same problem and they have yet to be rectified

They just spent £1 billion on Sports perhaps they need to spend some £ on customer service training...

well said...

So I've got a reply to my 2nd email!

You will have to read it to believe it!

I'll post it later...

I got 2 emails and this is the first! Check out the "In Summary" part... I almost punched the wall after I read that

Hello

Thank you for your e-mail,

I am sorry that the email offering you a free 12 months was sent to you, and this has now made you feel like we are not honouring the deal you have now seen.

Your account and contract was agreed and supplied before this new 12 free month offer became available, and as a result would not be able to be changed to this new offer. The line you have quoted “And don't worry if you've already placed an order for BT Premium Mail, you'll still be eligible for the 12 months free offer and we'll be in touch shortly with more details for you." refers to orders placed that have not been processed yet.

Again, I am sorry that we are not able to change you to the newer deal just because you are not happy with terms of your offer in comparison to the new deal.

In summary:
• The contract and price of the deal we offer was advised to you in advance
• You agreed to these terms, and this was applied in good faith
• After the split from Yahoo was finalised, a new deal became available
• As a result anyone now asking for the upgrade to Premium mail now has a different offer available

Best wishes,
Andrew Jones
BT Digital Care

Then I replied basically asking whether this could be sorted or should I just bite the bullet and cancel my account... HE replied with this....

Hello

Thank you for your e-mail,

I am simply saying there is nothing I can do to give you the answer you are looking for, and any decisions that are made after I have given you these details and apologised for how these changes have come to be, is your choice as an individual. I wish I could give you the 12 month free offer, but the terms that were agreed were clear at the time, and we did not know that the Premium mail would become free after we added this to your account.

I have no other information available to change this decision, so in the interests of keeping things simple for you, should you still want to cancel the Premium or email services, you would need to speak with my colleagues at the Customer Options Team. They can be called free from a land line on 0800 800 030 from 8am to 8pm Monday to Friday, 9am to 6pm Saturdays and 10am to 5pm Sundays

Best wishes,
Andrew Jones
BT Digital Care

The only real reason I wanted to keep my talk21 account was for sentimental reasons! I now think it's time to move over to gmail or outlook/hotmail as I have 1st choice email addresses for both!

Good grief - I'd have been furious at that.Glad I procrastinated over deciding to get 'premium', and even when I decided to get it, BTs site through up an error message telling me I couldn't proceed as the supplied email address I gave was not on record as being the 'primary' email address. Thank goodness they were crap!! Otherwise I'd be stuck in a 12 month contract too - feel for you mate, bad luck...

I'm gonna get out ASAP! I'm then gonna give the £1.60 a month to the RSPCA

What I'm mostly pi**ed off about is that we were given a date to sign up to Premium mail or lose our address? Now they have changed because of negative feedback but I still get punished with this bulls*it!

I'm gonna give them a call at some point this month after a few beers and let rip

The email offering it for free may vary the contract you had agreed to. if they vary the contract later, as I understand things, a first contract may well fall. The problem may the dating of the offers, and the wording about placing an order. They seem to want to split hairs and distinguish between the obvious meaning of "placing an order" and "placing an order and it being put in place"

The problem is that to prove the issue, you would have to take them to court, or at least talk to someone who actually understands the law - or to make BT worried enough that they had varied the contract and were on dodgy ground. As they probably have lots of people in the same situation, they might take some pushing.

There is of course the newspaper option - this may be the sort of issue that papers like to take up in their consumer protection pages.

I've not actually decided what to do? I'm probably gonna cancel my Direct Debit & then let them chase me for the money.

I've sorted my email so if they stop me accessing it I'm not really in too much of a bad situation.

Has anyone that still has their 'talk21' account had any issues accessing it in the last few days?? About 70%of the time when I try to log in, I get a failure page saying the server is not online, and occasionally just a 2 x word error message saying, "server hangup".

I've tried emailing BT but you gotta laugh, they keep sending me an auto response saying that I'm not using the original email address I did to make the complaint in the 1st place, so eff off (OK they don't tell me exactly to eff off, but that's the effect!)

I just want confirmation from somebody that they too are having similar issues?

(I should also add that we have a few 'talk21' accounts, all with the same current login issues, and we've used Google Chrome, Firefox & IE, in addition to 3 x different computers, so all points to server issues rather than local fault)

All fine here mate!

Tho I am paying for it

So after paying £1.60 for Premium Mail for the last 4 months I just checked my account & it's still set as basic mail???

So BT have literally been charging me for nothing

I don't think im being charged for my BT Internet email that I only use now and again but im to be moved over to BT mail by the end of this month as an old BT Yahoo email customer it says on there log in page.
Hotmail has always been the main email that I have used.

Darren