BT Business - Closed my email address for last 5 weeks without telling me!!!

rhymeswithcluckingbell

Yesterday, a customer (I own a guesthouse) telephoned me to say that an email she sent had been returned to her.
I thought this was odd, so began looking into it.
I tried to send an email to my business account from my personal and sure enough it was returned.

Contacting BT, they said that on April 1st the email account had been closed due to "abuse".
This address is used purely for customer enquires and booking confirmations. Nothing else.

The issue is now sorted, but I am furious that having paid all bills, they have the balls to close my email address for 5 weeks and not say a word. No letter, no email, no telephone call...nothing.
God knows how many customers have gone elsewhere, as they must have thought they were being ignored.

Any advise, please, as I would really like to spank BT.

steveE2

As a business you really should have independent email.
Register a domain with someone like 1and1 for appx £7 for 2 years and forward emails to your current email or better still have a dedicated mail server for appx £10 pa
https://order.1and1.co.uk/xml/order/MailInstantMail;jsessionid=625D759DB5D0FE96646B5CF8373CC823.TCpfix155a?__frame=_top&__lf=Static

rhymeswithcluckingbell

I have my own website.

I have a dedicated email address which is for business enquires only

I have 6 domain names linked to the website

Mark_In_Hampshire

On a minor point, you can be spanked in the search engine rankings for linking 6 domain names to the same (identical) website.

There's no reason to have your domain name and email with your ISP all bundled in together. Indeed there are a number of reasons not to. It's worth picking the best for your website hosting and email, and that's not going to be BT.

If you want to exit, you'll need to first set your site up elsewhere on a hosting package, configure your email addresses then change the DNS servers to the new host. Should not be any downtime if done in the correct order.

Have had my own independent email and hosting for years and I've never experienced a problem like this.

rhymeswithcluckingbell

I have my own website, which is NOT WITH BT

The domain names were also bought from another company, NOT BT.

The email address shown on my website and all other forms of advertising is FROM BT.

I have BT Business Broadband, which is where the email address comes from.

My issue is that they cancelled my email address without telling me.

Mark_In_Hampshire

This is the bit that puzzles me. If you bought a domain name then you can have email on that domain name e.g. www.myholidaycottage.com and [EMAIL="enquiries@myholidaycottage.com"]enquiries@myholidaycottage.com[/EMAIL] for example which looks more professional than [EMAIL="user725432@btinternet.com"]user725432@btinternet.com[/EMAIL] or whatever.

Is it the case that your domain name hosting arrangements permit only email forwarding - to the BT account - and that's where it fell down?

As ordinarily the mailboxes would have nothing at all to do with BT, they would either come from the domain name company (bundled with the domain, additional services etc) or a separate company and your mail servers would not be e.g. pop.btinternet.com but pop.hostingcompany.com

No need for the forwarder, the email doesn't have to go anywhere near BT.

rhymeswithcluckingbell

No.

This has nothing to do with my web host.

It is purely the email address I use for guests to contact me. ie the one which is on all my advertising.

Bt cancelled this on April 1ST and failed to tell me, so for the last 5 weeks anyone sending an email would have had it returned to them.

Mark_In_Hampshire

That's it. In which case, why not get your own email set up to work with your domain name, removing a tie-in with BT which would sting you if you ever wanted to change ISP since that would result in the loss of that btconnect email address anyway.

If you log in where you registered the domain name: do they offer some free mailboxes to work with your domain name? If not, can you buy some as an add on? How about the hosting company (for the website) - can they supply email too?

That way you get a more professional email address which is owned by you and is truly portable.