How do I get rid of BT?

Neil_Jones

HaroldWren5 said:

 I thought BT and Yahoo were using the same platform at one point.

Yahoo were providing email for BT, until Yahoo has a security breach:

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2020/02/isp-bt-trials-uk-email-platform-migration-away-from-yahoo.html

They had attempted to move away from Yahoo in 2014, for all the good that did as it either never finished or never happened for whatever reason.

PennyForThem_2

Feel your pain.

I was on freeserve and it went defunct so I HAD to move.  Sons had been telling me for ages to to move but too daunting.

BUT it is worth it - moved to gmail and now does not matter what broadband provider I decide to contract.  gmail comes to all my devices so all good there.

victor2

jesslover said:

Please, please, please, can someone please help. My wife and I have been with BT for...well....forever and want to change our broadband provider.

I know there are loads of other suppliers but the main issue are our email addresses.

Every time I ask BT if we can keep our email address the answer is "Yes, of course, if you have our broadband package. Or you can pay £6.99 (?) a month to keep it"

REALLY? £7 a month just to have an email address? All our 'life' accounts are linked to these addresses and it would be such a pain to change them all.

Please, can anyone tell me how to get out of these shackles with BT but still keep our email address without paying best part of £100 a year?

Yours

Mr Sad and Mrs Depressed

Start by getting a new non-ISP specific email address, as already suggested. Put a forwarding rule on your current address to your new one, so that you always reply to messages from the new address. Put an automatic signature on saying that you now have a new address. Change all your logins to use the new email address. Setup new passwords at the same time to be safer, and consider using a password manager.

It isn't easy, and takes time, but if you start while your current email address is still active, the pain is lessened.

If you are prepared to pay for your own domain, consider that. You can have multiple, meaningful, addresses on your own domain, such as jess@mydomain.com, rather than jesslover2483@gmail.com.

Keruge

jesslover said:

Please, please, please, can someone please help. My wife and I have been with BT for...well....forever and want to change our broadband provider.

I know there are loads of other suppliers but the main issue are our email addresses.

Every time I ask BT if we can keep our email address the answer is "Yes, of course, if you have our broadband package. Or you can pay £6.99 (?) a month to keep it"

REALLY? £7 a month just to have an email address? All our 'life' accounts are linked to these addresses and it would be such a pain to change them all.

Please, can anyone tell me how to get out of these shackles with BT but still keep our email address without paying best part of £100 a year?

Yours

Mr Sad and Mrs Depressed

Before you jump away from BT check that you are not entitled to BT Home Essentials which costs £15 a month for 67mb fibre

https://www.bt.com/exp/broadband/home-essentials

Others have told you how to reduce your dependency on BT, but let's look at how you prepare.

This means starting to use a new email now and using tools to collect email from BT and do things with such email.

You can setup a holiday response so that if anyone emails you they get sent an automated message. 

You can either give them your new email or give them a temporary email you use to filter out the spammers.

Alternatively your holiday message may say

"I have stopped reading mail to this account due to spam overload, please contact me via other means".

Choose one or more of the providers below based on your needs and how you like the web interface.

Gmail is very useful for automation but not the nicest user interface, by automation I mean that you can set it to collect email from BT and store it in a gmail folder that you review, bypassing the inbox.

You can then go to that folder and update the companies that are still using the BT email of your new email address.

You can also setup the BT Account in Gmail so you can send email from it without leaving gmail, but that would not wean you off.

Other mail platforms offer different tools.  For example GMX allows you to setup 10 aliases, you can delete this later so one use might be to give a temp email as mentioned in the holiday message above.

gmx has a simple filing rule and it can collect email from other email services, it can also forward email.

So you could have it collect email from BT and forward it to say gmail or other provider mentioned below.

Even if you stick with BT, get off their email, never use an ISP email, never pay for email.

The main email services are listed below, there are others, some people do not like GMAIL because of all the Google spying in which case consider GMX or Protonmail.  I still use gmail for automation, for example to keep some accounts alive I have it send an email every 15 minutes and the receiving account then delete the keep alive email.

The account below are ones I use and their best features

Gmail.com - mail collection, other google services
Gmx.com - 10 alias emails - mail collection and forwarding
Outlook.com - nothing special but allows other MS Services
Yahoo.com - easy interface not too slow and can roll back to even simpler version
Protonmail.com - Privacy

search YouTube for

best email security

to get other considerations

With all these accounts you might find a password manager helpful, Lastpass.com was a favourite but there are others, look on YouTube for

best password managers

JGB1955

Over the past 2 years I've been migrating all of my email addresses from BT to g mail.  The only BT ones I now get are either spam or from long forgotten/no longer needed senders.  My husband is a bit of a dinosaur, so he's reluctant to change, but has already totally abandoned his original (self-employed) BT address.  It's progress I suppose!

HaroldWren5

Neil_Jones said:

HaroldWren5 said:

 I thought BT and Yahoo were using the same platform at one point.

Yahoo were providing email for BT, until Yahoo has a security breach:

They had attempted to move away from Yahoo in 2014, for all the good that did as it either never finished or never happened for whatever reason.

Ah I see. Can't really trust any of these guys sadly.