BT email - am I stuck with it?

a_fierce_bad_rabbit

[Deleted User] said:

It is generally best avoiding using ISP provided email accounts anyway as some don't allow continued usage when you change ISP so it does limit options and becomes a pain when you do change supplier. 

I suppose you don't want the likes of Gmail / Yahoo for privacy reasons, they will use your email content for advertising purposes so the likes of Proton Mail is a great alternative for privacy, reasonably priced and is a long time player in the market. You can even have a customised domain which could be good for your business account.

You may also want to try to understand why your accounts got spammed so quickly, I have some old Btinernet.com accounts from when I was a customer over 10 years ago and receive very little spam on them and what I do is all moved to a spam folder by BT.

You may find exactly the same problem when you set up the new email accounts if you haven't found how your email address is leaking to spammers.

Having said that, my main email accounts are Gmail and I have no issue with unwanted spam on all except for 1 account that was leaked in a 3rd party data breach and has now turned up on spammers lists - again these are all neatly moved to a spam folder by Google so don't cause me an issue.

Excellent info thank you!
I will certainly take a look at proton.

Do you mind if I ask - if I have a fledgeling website and my own domain name, could I set up a private email connected to that? If so I have no idea how to go about it but could learn.

And would a gmail account feel legit to customers regarding business transaction and PayPal? Would proton be any better?

I do wonder about the spamming. The tow accounts that attract it have very simple, one word names, as opposed to my others, which are a bit more wacky and creative. One of them, now deleted, was 'celeste'. 

a_fierce_bad_rabbit

Swoosh84 said:

Gmail are the most popular provider out there, my main email is with Gmail and have never had any issues. Also have a secondary email with them which I use for forms such as this one. But I see your point regarding having and @gmail address for business purposes as it does not look that professional, but I would also consider BT to be the same as its just a free basic account.

If you are looking for something a bit more, 123-reg.co.uk have packages for 99p per month which will offer you an email of your choosing. so you can pick something like a_fierce@bad_rabbit_ltd.co.uk. 

J

This is kind of what I want, something trustworthy and professional for business and finance, and maybe a couple of gmails for friends and family.

J_B

a_fierce_bad_rabbit said:

I don't have much experience with gmail, but hear it doesn't get taken seriously/trusted with business related or PayPal stuff?

Can't agree there, sorry. Get your own domain, that sounds much more serious/professional?

onomatopoeia99

a_fierce_bad_rabbit said:

And would a gmail account feel legit to customers regarding business transaction and PayPal? 

About as legit as an ISP mail account   I wouldn't treat them any differently.

I'd expect an established business with more than a couple of employees to have its own domain used for website and email, but not necessarily a sole trader.

If you have purchased a domain through a registrar like godaddy (other registrars are available), e.g. example.com then you can have email heading to anything@example.com.  You will need to configure it and likely pay for it to be hosted, but that goes beyond the scope of a few sentence answer on a forum.  

a_fierce_bad_rabbit

Thank you, again.
I have set up a few gmail accounts in the meantime for non-professional use and will be setting up a business email via my domain.
Can't say I shall be sad to say goodbye to BT email!

Supatramp

I've been using Yahoo mail for my PayPal account for several years, with no problems.

I've had 2 Aol accounts from the good old days when they were an ISP,  never had any problems until I heard rumours about they were going to close the accounts.   Opened 2 Gmail accounts, one for business, no problems at all, switched people from the AOL accounts, everything working OK. 

Had communication from Aol about having to verify the accounts, for some crazy reason, did that, and still have 2 Aol accounts though very little comes through them now.

Quite frankly, think you should ignore spurious rubbish about Gmail etc.  Access all my accounts via Thunderbird, have the occasional well documented scam e-mails, but that is all.

fiendishlyclever

The only catch with some of the larger providers is the potential spam if you have a common name. I've got my full name at GMail and it pulls in about 300/400 spam emails a month plus the odd spam in my inbox that the filter misses. I don't use this for anything important because of this (and people thinking they own my email address opening accounts too) 

I use Google Workplace and the spam filtering is excellent (same as Gmails). I've got Outlook and that's got a pretty similar feature set (although if you want to consolidate email addresses Gmail is probably the service for you) I've also got Protonmail - that's a bit fiddly due to their encryption system. You are probably going to see ads unless you pay - but I've never found these too intrusive.

flashg67

'Do you mind if I ask - if I have a fledgeling website and my own domain name, could I set up a private email connected to that? If so I have no idea how to go about it but could learn.'

I did this very thing via 'freehosting.com'  You have to pay for the domain name (usually v cheap though) and set up your email such as  sales@badrabbit.com or whatever. You don't need to use the website hosting , just use the email if you want.
There's guides and help available 
If you already have a domain name, you'll probably find it's very cheap to add a related email address

a_fierce_bad_rabbit

Thanks. This is all really helpful:)

[Deleted User]

You can use Gmail with your own domain too.

Arrange to have your BT mail forwarded to Gmail or pick it up via there.