BT Broadband barr outgoing emails

tenacious_p

BT "Total" broadband have barred outgoing emails from any non-BT email accounts.

Their solution, use their BT email account! That's all very well but I've been using my email address for around a decade and don't see why I should have to change it. I also need to use multiple email addresses on outlook express for work.

I certainly won't be renewing my contract with BT and I'm looking into whether they are in breach of contract, as this doesn't seem like a "Total" broadband service to me.

What's more they don't appear to have made any attempt to warn customers that they were about to do this.

Has anyone else been affected by this?

PaulK_3

A lot of ISPs do this as they prefer you to use their SMTP/ POP servers and there is also a risk of relaying occuring. You should be able to just specify the BT SMTP servers and still pick up from the other POP servers if you have access to them.
And no they won't be in breach of contract as no doubt the contract states that they only supply internet access and use of BT email system.

Browntoa

I just sent an email via gmail servers on my Btinternet account ??????

PaulK_3

Gmail isn't provided by an ISP, a lot of this kind of issue is traffic movement between providers. Google has it's own mail servers and pays for the traffic through its servers.

DonnyDave

tenacious_p wrote: »

BT "Total" broadband have barred outgoing emails from any non-BT email accounts.

Their solution, use their BT email account! That's all very well but I've been using my email address for around a decade and don't see why I should have to change it. I also need to use multiple email addresses on outlook express for work.

I certainly won't be renewing my contract with BT and I'm looking into whether they are in breach of contract, as this doesn't seem like a "Total" broadband service to me.

What's more they don't appear to have made any attempt to warn customers that they were about to do this.

Has anyone else been affected by this?

I found this the other day. Instructions on how to resolve this are below.

The outgoing mail server is the BT one, mail.btinternet.com. That's like the post box for your email. When you send an email, your email client (eg Outlook Express) will be configured to send "from" a particular address (in the same way when you write a letter, you put your "from" address). In theory, you can send from any email address (just like in the real world) and "post" your mail into your ISP's mail server.

That is frequently how spam is sent - from false addresses. That's the reason they have changed it so you have to verify you "own" the email address you are sending from.

You could try using your non-BT ISP's email server from your BT connection, but it's highly likely that they won't allow that for the same reason - because of the likelihood that it could be used for sending spam. This is probably the reason you are using the BT server for your non-BT address in the first place.

When you try sending from your non-BT address via the BT server, the following message pops up:

The message could not be sent because the server rejected the sender's e-mail address. The sender's e-mail address was '<your non-BT address>'. Subject '<subject>', Account: '<account name>', Server: 'smtp.btopenworld.com', Protocol: SMTP, Server Response: '553 From: address not verified; see http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/original/manage/sendfrom-07.html', Port: 25, Secure(SSL): No, Server Error: 553, Error Number: 0x800CCC78

This message says to visit this page: http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/original/manage/sendfrom-07.html



To summarise those instructions:

1. Go to mail.yahoo.com and log in with your BT address and password.

2. Click Options (top right).

3. Click Mail Accounts on right hand list.

4. Click Add.

5. Step 1: Enter an account name, eg John (Tiscali)

6. Step 2: Enter your name and the non-BT email address you wish to send from.

7. Step 3: You can skip this step if you are just sending from your non-BT email address with a mail client like Outlook Express.

8. Send verification. This sends an email to the non-BT address which contains a code which you must enter. This prooves that the non-BT address is yours and works in much the same way as many websites when registering. The email may take a while to come through and once you've entered the code, it may take 10 or 15 minutes before you will be able to send emails.


Once you have done this, you should be able to send emails from your non-BT address(es) as you could before. If you have more than one non-BT address and you wish to send from an email client like Outlook Express, then you will need to follow the same procedure for all those addresses.

djohn2002uk

There are numerous threads running at the moment relating to this problem and ways of overcoming it on the BTBroadband Support newsgroup.
BT are not the cause of it, it is Yahoo. Suposedly done for security reasons with no notification to the customers. It also appears to be a worldwide problem insomuch that it affect other ISPs that are signed up with Yahoo around the world.

tenacious_p

Thanks DonnyDave,

That's brilliant, worked a treat. I had tried to use the web address on the error message before but couldn't get that page up, I may have copied it wrongly first time.

I am gob-smacked at how incompetent and apathetic BT technical call centre staff were. The only response I could get from them was that all other accounts were now barred and I would have to use a btinternet account. When the solution was so simple why on earth have they left myself and I'm sure many other customers in the learch?

Rant over, thanks again.

miss_pepper

oh thank you thank you for posting this, i've recently moved to bt broadband and the phone support have not been ale to deal with this issue for me