This is the kind of whiny childishness we’ve come to expect these days.
Ofcom says it is concerned some customers are “not being treated fairly” over the amount they are being charged to keep old email addresses.
This happens when customers continue to use an old email address from an internet service provider they have since left.
Many people who subsequently switched have paid hundreds of pounds just to keep using their old address as before.
Ofcom’s investigation was prompted by a Money Box report earlier this year.
Sounds worse than it is.
BT says if customers want to switch provider but keep hold of their old BT email address they’re charged £7.50 per month to be able to access and use their account like they used to, including accessing it using an app.
That’s what happened to Iain Stuart from Cardiff.
He said that first BT started charging him £1.60 per month, “then it went up to £5 and it’s now £7.50.”
“My feeling on it is was [BT] basically had you over a barrel.”
No, they haven’t got anyone over a barrel. You can take out a new email address any time you like. The degree of entitlement is staggering here. If you change provider, you change your email address. Or you could do as I did way back in the nineties and buy your own domain name complete with email address, so it is independent of the broadband provider. I still have to pay for it, though.
What do they want? To have it for free?
“The alternative is to pay £90 per year. I can afford to pay but I shouldn’t have to pay and I don’t want to pay.”
BT says it offers a free service for people to access their old email address – but that has to be done by logging on via a web browser which doesn’t allow people to get emails via apps on their mobile phones.
That free, web browser-only service is also not something that appeals to Mr Stuart.
“I just want to be able to use my email account as I have done for years and years.”
Oh, yeah, that’s exactly what these twats want. He has taken his business elsewhere and the old provider has allowed him to keep his old email account for free providing he uses a web browser to access it. It’s a perfectly reasonable compromise. Given that he doesn’t want to pay them any money for the upkeep of the service, why should they do any more than that? Iain Stuart from Cardiff is a metaphor for the entitled wants-something-for-nothing-it’s-not-fair society in which we now exist. Pillock.
Gmail is free
True, they could use that regardless of what broadband provider they are with and changing would have no effect.
I completely agree and Kevin S has beaten me to the suggestion of gmail or any other number of “free” email addresses that are unlikely to just disappear. “Free” in the sense that they will mine your email for key words to sell to bombard you with adverts.
These people don’t seem to realise that there is a cost with maintaining the infrastructure.
They could also do what I did some 20 years ago and register your own domain and have it hosted with someone who will also offer email as part of the hosting; cost £7.95 per month. That way you are not at risk of losing your email address when you switch ISPs or your ISP gets merged with another one.
The cost of £7.95 per month demonstrating that there is a small but finite cost to the provider.
On a related theme I’m always amazed at the number of people, in particular trades people, who go to the trouble of setting up a website to promote themselves and then use an AOL, Yahoo or similar unrelated email address. To my mind, at least, it looks lazy and highly unprofessional; you’ve gone to all the trouble to have a website and hence a domain but don’t use the email service that they also invariably provide.
Not only the trouble of setting up a website, but also signpainting a van with an AOL address. I also notice a lot of businesses now don’t really use their website; once set-up it is never updated, instead they use facebook etc. so just another way to make your business beholden to a service over which there is no control.
I’ve had my own domain for 25 years, around £7pa. Hosting of both email and web for several domains costs just £60pa. (And I have a gmail address for mailing lists and the like.)
When I first went online 15 or more years ago, with zero experience of computers, I quickly realised that BT e-mail was rubbish and, for no particular reason, set up a free Yahoo e-mail which I still use today. No idea why it is free but there you go.
When I decided BT Connect was a rubbish ISP and sacked them they contacted me threatening me with loss of access to said e-mail, I told them to go fuck themselves.
Adverts is why it’s free. Your relationship with an isp is that of a customer. With yahoo, Google et al, you are the product.
I only use their e-mail, no ads there and zero incoming spam mail in all those years but then I’ve never given the addy to bondage/spanking websites/chatrooms
That’s what I did, probably about the same time as you. I usually redirect my mail to gmail. Occasionally I visit China where Google things don’t work. When I do, I redirect my mail to Yahoo. It works for me.
I started redirecting my e-mail accounts through Yahoo years ago as their spam filters are so good. I now use it as my primary e-mail address with Gmail as a backup.
Yahoo mail politely asks me if I’d like to turn off my ad blocker every few days and I politely decline…