I am not a BT broadban customer (used to be once) so till day I've paid them £1.60 per month but today I get email its going up to £5 in may :-/

How much of my bt email I can keep if I don't keep this "premium mail" thingy ??

I left BT internet five years ago and my @btinternet address is still working fine. Never paid anything for 'premium mail'.

Just don't pay. Mine works fine too but I only use it for lower level mail.

Just don't pay, move everything over to a new address.

I did, it does take ages and ages, going through the inbox, listing all the places your address is registered, and then going on them and changing the email, but its worth it.

Thanks folks.

Looks like time to stop paying.

You can pull it all down to your own computer using Outlook or the free Thunderbird mail client. Then buy a cheap domain name from 123Reg or similar company.

Seems like extortion to force you back to becoming a BT broadband customer.

Given it's unlimited broadband long term costs nearly double Sky a month - who aren't the cheapest - why would you put up with the BT customer service.

I've been paying this £1.60 ransom for them to not delete my account. I've never been a BT customer other than the free Talk21 service from many moons ago. Ideally I would have transitioned everything by now but given that it was my primary account for best part of 15 years that is easier said than done

What really takes the piss is that despite it being upgraded to "Premium" it has the exact same web interface including the ads (blocked anyway).

Is everyone supposed to have had this e mail as ironically I have paid the £1.60 pm for 2 years since moving to a house with no BT line and no e mail has appeared yet!

I checked my on line BT account and no reference there to a price rise.

When is this coming in?

Certainly not paying more than triple for a worse service as the spam filter has been terrible on the Yahoo system and around 100 + a day are coming through and every week or so they keep getting into the inbox for a day or two.

It has been like that since Christmas.

The price rise comes in on 6 May. I expect they are sending the emails out in batches.

Well I have spent all night trying to get into my e mail account. It lets me enter my address and password but then freezes and I cannot get past the entry page.

Maybe that is how they will stop anyone discovering the e mail informing of the rise.

Never had this happen before. If it is not working in the morning then I will just cancel.

Is there any way to save all your old e mails before leaving I wonder?

Some of them are work related so need to access occasionally.

i've had my email address since the 90s and it's one of my main ones. it worked for about a decade for free without me being a bt customer (i stopped in the 90s apart from a PAYG dialup account that allowed me to keep the email). i thought £1.60 wasn't much, but £5 is £60 a month and a joke considering it's a crap service, but the hassle of changing so many things, including many i'll forget about is a lot

i don't need any premium service, just pop3 so i can download my emails. i just want to keep the address. i'm surprised some people never paid the £1.60 and kept the account. do those people have any bt services at all?

I completely switched email addresses about 4 years ago in order to reduce junk emails (which it did successfully). I now have three different accounts: one for important/friends, one for general stuff and a 'junk' account for signing up to things.

The only thing you need to consider is where you have an email address saved for accounts that you don't remember your password too. There are a few things that I am permanently locked out of - mainly old betting accounts!

I tended to use my BT account for most things, I have a few other accounts that I'm not so dependant on. I don't really email, it's more they are tied to online shopping and forums and having used it for nearly 20 years to have it cut off now would be a PITA

the other thing may be if I did lose the account, would someone else in future then potentially be able to get it and possibly get emails intended for myself

I phoned them and in a quick simple call they fixed the price at £1.60 for a year and said call back in 12 months and see what they could offer then or it will to to £5 a month. I just told them I was with virgin and sky and no phone so wasn't interested in their offers

What number did you call on, please?

We are in the same position - no BT line to the house - which is why we paid the £1.60 pm, after moving from a house with BT.

Though they charged us for a month after we sold the house because we were still under contract - even though we were paying for having no BT line at all.

i phoned the number on the email

This biggest issue I see is that having been using my BT email addresses for nearly twenty years I have subscribed to numerous sites using them I can't remember them all. I could move away and save the five pounds as I use PlusNet (owned by BT) and could have as many email addresses as I want.
The problem then arises is that once you close your Premium Mail your BT email address does not die and cease to exist. After a period which I believe is as little as 90 days then your email address becomes available again to anyone who wants to use it. This potentially would allow others to access accounts that you have created but subsequently forgotten about. So for piece of mind I suspect I will just cave in and pay the fiver or try and negotiate the reduction back to £1.60.

I remember a number of years back, the emails current/past BT yahoo customers used to receive on a tri-monthly basis to the effect of you will lose your Account if you do nto pay £1.60.
Many of us ignored the letters and emails one after the other and the accounts remained active. Ahh, those were the days.

when i called i got through in about a minute, including the press this and that and do the hokey pokey bit. i said i got an email that said what the mail header said and gave the email address and my name and i explained i had it for nearly 20 years and it used to be free for about 10+ years then £1.60 and now they want £5 which i thought was a bit much. they asked if i had or was interested in the other BT stuff and i told them i was with virgin and sky and didn't want to move and in she just said she would keep at £1.60 for 12 months then i should call for another offer or it would go up. whole process took 5 minutes and wasn't even a negotiation. it was easier than getting a sky deal. i said i didn't send emails normally and it was just a long term address used for online shopping etc. so i wasn't using the "premium" stuff like online storage


are the accounts still active though?

We have not had the e mail so I don't have this.

Or, if we have, it went to Spam along with the 100+ per day other Spam e mails BT Yahoo create - including loads allegedly from BT about your account but in reality con tricks by someone trying to steal your details. I have told BT about them for years and they could not care less.

Got the e mail today giving us four weeks to cancel if we do not like the more than 300% price rise!!!

Then try to justify it by alleged improvements we will have noticed recently.

Except it has got worse not better with the spam being vastly inferior (and posts on the BT forums show it is not just us).

Plus I find the new way of messages and replies all being lumped together confusing.

So I attempted to set up a Mozilla Thunderbird account to save my inbox and it packed in less than a quarter of a way through saying it is full and now will not respond.

So that will not work sadly as a way to save my old posts before I cancel BT.

Anyone have any other ways to save your inbox before it is lost for good?

It's called conversation view and appears to be enabled by default on a lot of email systems now despite it being horrendous. First thing I always do is turn it off.

If you are on the Yahoo system, click the cog in the top right corner, choose settings and then untick "enable conversations".

Thanks I will do that. Had no idea it was possible to switch off.

Still trying to figure out a way to save my e mail in box before leaving BT, assuming they do not offer me to keep the price at £1.60 when I call to cancel. If they do I will stay as it is not paying to keep the e mail address that I find wrong - just a 300% + rise that no company on Earth could possibly justify in one go and seems clearly designed to just get rid of non broadband customers having a BT e mail address at all.

try windows live mail to download everything to it. you should find instructions online with easy to follow instructions

however when i called i just said i had the email, didn't mention cancelling or anything and they offered the 12 month deal pretty easily so i imagine it shouldn't be too hard to do. if you don't get what you want, don't cancel and just call another day and you will probably get someone else

it was easier than negotiating a sky or virgin tv/internet deal, and those are pretty easy