Anyone have experience of BT Yahoo Premium Service?

TennisFan

I'm thinking of moving away from BT Broaband but I don't want to loose my '.......@BTinternet.com' email addresses. The answer seems to be to sign up for the BT (Yahoo) Premium service, which from what I've found out so far costs £1.60 per month. Does anyone have experience of switching to this service? Did it all go smoothly? How quickly was the switch achieved? Is it a reliable service? Did any mail got lost during the transfer?
Many thanks

poppasmurf_bewdley

Why don't you want to lose your current email address?

Why not go with a gmail.com address which is completely portable and you can keep no matter how many times you change internet provider.

And it's free!

TennisFan

Because at the moment we have several @BTinternet.com ids and telling friends, family and our business contacts that we've changed to another email address would be a nightmare at the moment.

It's not ideal I know and with the benefit of hindsight I'd have done it differently, but it is what it is.

JJ_Egan

Does this email Yahoo service be part of the BT service and may be better answered on the BT community forum .

sauvignon

I think you deserved a longer reply from someone who actually has left BT Broadband. I had been a long time BT customer, perhaps for some 20 years or so, when their broadband was the most expensive on the market. Like you I was reluctant to change providers, the only reason being the potential email hassle. It turned out to be impossible to save all my emails dating back many years. When I started having problems with my BT email and wasn't getting any real help from their India-based call centre and saw reports in the press that BT wanted to cut its ties with Yahoo because of lacking security, I did change to a much cheaper provider with excellent support, but only after BT assured me that I could keep my email for a small amount which I agreed to. The payment was never taken from my account, but I was assured I could keep using my email, now called BT Yahoo Mail, free of charge. Having recently lost all of my Inbox email I started researching if my account had been hacked and that's how I came to contact BT after many years again. It's difficult to get proper technical support if you're no longer a BT customer as BT Yahoo is not supported as such, but I was offered to sign up for what is called BT Premium Mail for £1.60 a month which I naively did as it was suggested to me that then my email would be restored. I also assumed that by doing so I was coming back to BT as an email customer. In reality, nothing has changed (except I'm now paying). It's the same call centre as before and BT Premium Mail uses the same Yahoo platform. The "switch" - it's actually no switch at all - was easy if you allow them to connect remotely via your landline (one false start on their part using the wrong website) and just input your details. No emails were lost (but none were restored either).
My advice for anyone - as you have probably made your decision - would be the same: change ISPs and start using Gmail. There is advice on the web how to move BT emails to them.