Do BT have the right to withhold my Emails

Barney_B

BT are filtering my Business Emails & they are withholding important business email messages.

Can anyone help with this matter, maybe a solicitor? I would like to take on BT over this!

My Business has suffered an immeasurable amount of damage by BT's Spam Filters and I want to make them suffer for their arrogance.

Here is a brief bit of detail (explanation) of what has gone on so far.

Back in July 2009 we moved business premises and choose BT to provide our broadband service. We started to notice some odd happenings with our emails and because our website was hosted elsewhere we decided to move the hosting of this to BT too in the hope that a domain hosted with them would have its domain related e-mails treated more favourably.

From then till now we have constantly had fault cases open with BT relating to missing email.

We know about and report cases of missing mail as and when we are aware of them which has always been when we are both the sender and the recipient e.g. mail from one employee to another or from a personal email address to a work address or when my daughter says did you get my e-mail today?

I have strongly stated my concern that potential customers could be sending us email that we are not receiving! We would be none the wiser as the sender is unlikely to telephone us to follow up their enquiry. They will just think we are another one of those couldn't care company's that just couldn't be bothered to reply. I'm sure they may even mention this to others.

I can just imagine comments such as

"that useless company they have really gone down hill, they couldn't even bother to reply to my email, it wasn't difficult, a simple yes or know would have been nice"

This is however not the case. We are a company that has always bent over to please both potential and existing customers.
We really have to as we are a small company and every customer is really important to us.

Everytime I have had a missing mail case open BT end up tweaking their servers to allow mail from the sending address to get through, one of the latest examples being my BT blackberry device. Every time I sent myself a little reminder email etc it was going missing, in the end they did the tweak and I now get my mail that I have sent from my blackberry address.

Now at last I have evidence of a customers e-mail going missing!!! Luckily this customer telephoned on Wednesday and said, I know you are usually so reliable so as you haven't called me I assumed you didn't get the e-mail that I sent you on Sunday.

I got the details about the email from the customer and put these details to BT as a new missing mail case, they then found the message in one of their filters on one of their servers and released the message for delivery to me. It was finally delivered to me Yesterday.

BT say the message was classed as SPAM, but it was a simple plain text email message, just like all the others that have gone missing in the past. They cant tell me why these messages get classed as SPAM as the Algorithm is set by Microsoft and BT apparently can't change or have knowledge of how it works!

Yes fellow BT customers BT actually filter your mail with a Microsoft algorithm that they cannot control or explain the logic of!!! Worse still and much more concerning is the fact that this same SPAM filter allows about 40 spam messages to get delivered to my mailbox every day and a similar amount to my colleagues mailboxes.

How many existing and potential new customers have I lost as a result of BT withholding my mail? Quite a few I would imagine, we have a website which encourages customers to contact us by email, if they are that way inclined then they are not going to telephone us when we don't respond to their email, they will find a company that can in their eyes show them some interest, courtesy and generally good service.

When I suggested that BT didn't have the right to withhold my e-mail they said that they did under their terms and conditions, fundamentally this is what I want to challenge. Do they have the right?

DUTR

There is a lot of tosh there, calm down, mail from certain domains do get classed as spam, hotmail used to be one of them.
the missing mails often end up in your spam/junk mail box, select the not spam box and you should be good to go .

Barney_B

DUTR wrote: »

There is a lot of tosh there, calm down, mail from certain domains do get classed as spam, hotmail used to be one of them.
the missing mails often end up in your spam/junk mail box, select the not spam box and you should be good to go .

Thanks for your input, but I dont think you fully read/understood the tosh as you call it. This issue has been going on for a long time and I have learnt a lot about BT's mail system along the way, which I am trying to share.

These messages don't get delivered to my mailbox at all. They get stopped by BTs IMF Spam filter and/or their CTB Spam filter. In other words they stop it being delivered to my webmail or mail client.

This mail therefore doesn't get a chance to get into my spam folder.

kwikbreaks

If you don't like the way BT handle email then buy a third party email service using your own domain name. If this is a business email then you should be doing it anyway as an ISP email used for business shouts amateur one man band.

KillerWatt

As kwikbreaks says, if you are serious about your business then you'd be running your own mail server rather than relying on a 3rd party.
You can have your own mail server for as little as £25 per annum if you want a 3rd party to host it while you still regain full control, or if you have a spare PC kicking around then you can run your own mail server from home (although i wouldn't recommend that if redundancy is an issue for you).

Gimp0r

Hi Barney.

I am a little confused with a few things,

You have a domain like barneyscompany.co.uk which you did host somewhere else, did you not have the email hosted in the same way so maybe something like barney@barneyscompany.co.uk?

Or did/do you have barneyscompany.co.uk hosted somewhere else (now with BT) and always bt email like barneyscompany@bt.com or whatever?

To be honest either way BT can be a nightmare to deal with for things like this, My advise would be to transfer your domain and email hosting to someone else and if you have to bite the bullet and change your email addresses to whatever@barneyscompany.co.uk then its for the best as atleast you will have control in the future.

you would probably be better going with a real business isp aswell. Bt are okay but they are not in the same league as some, especially for customer support. We use aaisp at work and there customer service is awesome, they actually try to get things right and seem to care when things are not working, obviously the price reflects this tho.

Good luck with BT if you do try and get them to fix it

bris

You know there is a problem but you insist on still using BT, why? If you think it is affecting your business wouldn't it be more business like to leave. I think I see a "How much can I sue them for lost business" coming next.

asbokid

KillerWatt wrote: »

As kwikbreaks says, if you are serious about your business then you'd be running your own mail server rather than relying on a 3rd party.
You can have your own mail server for as little as £25 per annum if you want a 3rd party to host it while you still regain full control, or if you have a spare PC kicking around then you can run your own mail server from home (although i wouldn't recommend that if redundancy is an issue for you).

Yeah, good advice! Take the domain away from BT and put it with 123-reg.co.uk for £3 year.

Set the primary MX (mailbox) pointer in the DNS record to point to the old PC running exim which you've got tucked in the broom cupboard.. But also, in the event of failure, set a secondary MX ptr so that if and when your exim server goes down, mail is sent instead to a google.mail account.

Mark_In_Hampshire

No spam filter is perfect and any such filter will occasionally catch and discard genuine mail. This is inevitable.

What's also inevitable is that a certain amount of spam will still get through. Only the recipient can really determine whether it's spam or not, the filters just work on a set of checks and rules and probabilities.

Most mail providers will let you turn the spam filtering on and off with some sort of webmail control panel. So if you don't ever want genuine email canned as spam, you need a mailbox without any filters. You could then optionally control the amount of spam mail that reaches your inbox by using rules in e.g. Outlook or your mail software.

However most people do run their mailboxes with some sort of filtering and it's usually pretty effective at getting rid of most of the dross.

oldwiring

Just interested, but my ISP allows me to make a white/black list and set the filter strength. Do others as well?

Nilrem

oldwiring wrote: »

Just interested, but my ISP allows me to make a white/black list and set the filter strength. Do others as well?

I don't think many residential services let you set the "strength" in more than a fairly imprecise manner (IIRC Virgin let you choose whether to stop it, let it through marked as spam or stop it), but for more options you tend to need to sort out your own hosting/pay for business packages.

It's one of the reasons most of my emails go through a personal domain, I got fed up with various messages intermittently going missing.