As the headline says, does anyone know if BT are going to charge you if you are just paying £1.60 pm for retaining your e mail with them?

I would not have imagined so, because we left BT over a year ago when moving house to somewhere with no BT land line and no offer from BT as to when they could do this. So we moved to Virgin as this was already fitted to the new house.

But we retained our e mail with BT and after a free year from them have started paying monthly.

Then the other day we got a phone call from a recorded message that was half way through playing when we picked it up. This appeared to be from BT telling us that we would be charged £5 pm for BT sports from some date soon (though how they had our new Virgin phone number I would not know).

Of course, as the start of the message was missing I don't know more than this.

Our old BT landline/broadband account is still up on the My BT site, showing last payment took from us a year ago and the next bill due in 2024 (???!!!) When you click on it it shows no services linked to it and no charges. So - whilst surprised it was still on there at all - I just assumed BT kept it open in case we ever went back.

But surely they cannot just use our direct debit to add £5 pm to watch something when we only have an E mail service with them?

They certainly can if they are supplying you with BT Sports, otherwise I wouldn't have thought so.

Simply cancel your email account with them - and don't use ISP specific email addresses (which are crap addresses anyway).

Agree with your first paragraph but not your second, that depends on the ISP. I've had the same ISP address for 15 years, and I left them as my ISP 12 years ago! They charge me £15 a year for the privilege, peanuts.

Sounds pretty pricey to me - and presumably not a 'good' email address either?.

However, I've still got a fully working Freeserve email address, which hasn't cost me a penny for a GREAT many years.

We have Virgin XL and get BT Sports that way. Previously we just watched it on line via our BT broadband. But we have not had BT Broadband for 13 months now and have not been able to access it that way since it was cancelled.

Indeed we do not even live in the same country let alone city where we were when we had it in 2014.

I guess I had better tell BT that we don't want BT Sports and stop them charging then. I just don;t get how they could contemplate charging for a service we don't even get in the first place.

But thanks to you both for the advice.

I did not want to lose my BT E mail address that all my contacts have and linked to years of back e mails that I can access. That's why I was happy to pay £18 per year to retain the convenience.

Just an update. I went on Live Chat and copied the conversation. BT confirmed I only had an e mail account and the other was closed. Will not be charged for BT Sport. The phone call was a sales pitch that seems to me to be aimed at scaring people into calling BT for fear of being charged if they don't and when they will presumably get offers to try to come back to BT.