I have been with AOL/TalkTalk for 12 years and have finally decided to change to BT as I pay a year up front for my telephone service. There will be a quite a saving in the first year. Despite what I hve read on here about problems with the change over, at the moment things seem to be going smoothly -- BT are liasing with AOL and the change over takes place on Monday - let's hope the problems don't start then.
One of the reasons I've stayed with AOL for so long is because of the email account. I have never fancied having to change my email address for all the sites I belong to. But AOL tell me that I shal lose my email address on switchover. How have others dealt with this? Does it mean that I will no longer be able to access sites that I currently belong to?

Responding to myself!
Wish someone wiser than me had responded to tell me to create a separate email account! I am now with BT and have also created a separate email account in which I will keep all my regular sites so that whoever provides my internet access in the future, my emails will not be affected.

I suspect that most of us in the techy sections of DS are so used to the concept of having an e-mail account that is not tied to any ISP that we cant conceive of anyone not knowing that. It is just something so obvious to most of us that we probably don't think anyone should need telling.

Well I'm a bit techy and I've used the same email account for inward emails for nearly 20 years and I left that ISP 15 years ago! Outward ones go through whoever my current ISP is (or my website host). My old ISP allow this to continue subject to an annual £15 fee, peanuts and well worth it for me. I also have 'portable/disposable' emails available with google and hotmail, naturally.

O/P it's worth checking your old ISP to see if they offer a paid or unpaid email-only service, either full, or limited like mine, for their old customers - if only for a limited period of time. Some of them do and it can help with changeovers like yours.

I haven't been with TalkTalk for a few years but the email still works.

Changing to BT broadband? That's novel.

I went to BT broadband, apart from the near laugh on the phone after they promised me some "excellent speeds" (I came from Virgin, so 21mb didnt seem so excellent after 100mb!), theyve been absolutely fine!

Was that 100mb your monthly allowance?

I was happy to find that at least all the email addresses are still viewable, although I had already saved them to my hard drive. But nothing else works. Not much point in keeping the old email address as I won't receive any emails after using it, except perhaps where DS is concerned, as I haven't received any feed back of any kind for a couple of years.

Presumably you still access the email account on a frequent basis then? I believe that if it is not used at all for 6 months it is made dormant. I'm thankful I left Talk Talk after the last hacking feasco and would never go back, or use their email service again.

Lol!

Read a post on here the other day about everyone being advanced users so don't need basic stuff explaining.

I meant 21Mb/s and 100Mb/s

It wasnt an allowance, it was unlimited (apart from the usual throttling that they "claim" to know nothing about)

OK, I now understand. Mbps, you were referring to your speed and not a data cap.

Anyway, millibits is an odd sort of unit to use.

Interestingly, aol on my old desktop is split into internet access & email, so I clicked on email and found that email is still being received into all my email accounts. Had to go through about 150 in my main account. But good to see that any info I might need is still there.

As said in post 10# you have to log in every 6 months to keep it alive.

Use an Apple email account or Google/Microsoft.

Biggest mistake I ever made.
Moving from Talk talk to BT. I'm on Infinity and its 43mb day and offpeak soon as it hits 7pm its down sub 6mb. I'm getting endless calls from bogus BT operators the last even knew I just had a replacement router. When we move I'm done with them Talk talk CS's was terrible but the service itself was brilliant compared with BT.