I’ve had my main email with BTinternet literally for decades now. I first got it when I had dial up access with BTinternet many many moons ago. When I stoped paying BT for internet access and went elsewhere I wanted to keep the email address, partly as it included my online moniker and also because I had so many logins and accounts linked with it it would have been a nightmare to change them all. Plus I wanted an email that wasn’t one of the free ones like gmail or hotmail etc.
BT were very obliging. Of course sir you can keep the email address, for the princely sum of £1.50 a month! Bloody hell! Oh OK then. Pretty much over a barrell.
Some years down the line BTinternet seemed to be bought out by Yahoo (more accurately known as Yahell). By this time I’d stopped using Thunderbird for my email access and always used the webmail interface on the PC (also Bluemail on Android later on).
Now I have a Flickr account for photography and they are owned by Yahell too. Even though both accounts are associated with different email addresses what a bloody ball-ache that was. Once I logged into BT email I couldn’t log into Flickr or the other way round, can’t recall now, but I CAN recall a LOT of swearing MANY times due to it. Bloody hopeless. Obviously some cookie setting by one or both of them, but too moronic to deal with logging into to two different accounts.
Despite Yahell telling me that Flickr and BTinternet would be parting ways, this dragged on for about 5 years! Then they ‘allowed’ everyone (when they said you could by email) to associate a non Yahell based email address with your Flickr account. FINALLY free of that.
So BT needed to up their tedium game to make up for it. Ah, let’s whack the monthly fee for NOTHING BUT EMAIL ACCESS to £5 a month. A 333% increase. Seems fair….
Of course by now I have even more accounts associated with the BT email address.
To put that cost into perspective, I pay £3.50 for unlimited web hosting and emails:
Well at least the BTinternet service is good quality right?
Well that depends if you want to actually receive emails. Many other companies are aware of an inability to send emails to BTinternet. They are just rejected. Not bounced, just ignored. BT are not interested in being told about it either. Take it or leave it attitude sucks.
So there I was still enduring the ‘service’ mostly due to apathy and the mammoth task doing anything about it would be. The BT or Yahell or whoever the hell owns them now released their latest ace card. The new ‘improved’ webmail interface. Well what a complete pile of shite. Absolutely hideous font, terrible spacing and a GUI that should be on the Kryton Factor.
Well this ace card bust their hand! This was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I set up a new email address using this domain and I am working through transferring 20+ year’s worth of accounts from BT to my new email.