Quite an odd question so i dunno how it will read as such but here goes – if it sounds stupid it’s because it prob is….

I have recently changed from using BT for my broadband and line rental to EE as i’ve getting pissed off at how much BT has been charging me every quarter (£96.96 for broadband option 3 unlimited and £50.97 for line rental/calling plan) and i’ve not made a call on my landline phone for over 10+years so their line rental costs have been a joke at £16.99 a month for nothing, not to mention the add on weekend plans etc… Conversely my new EE bill for an entire year of line rental and unlimited broadband is only £162 as i’ve paid my line rental a year in advance so that’s £132 for a year upfront then i pay just £2.50 a month for unlimited broadband.

Humph!….i was paying BT approximately £600 a bloody year…**** idiot 😯 …..and they have the cheek to send me a bill today for £158 and they want another £30 for stopping my broadband. Do they honestly think i’m gonna pay that?

What you’ll pay
You’ll need to pay about £30 for stopping your BT services. This includes:
Charge for stopping your broadband – You’ll need to pay about £30 for stopping your broadband. You can find out more about this at bt.com/ceasecharge

The problem is i’ve always used my bt email address for everything, in fact that’s the only email address i have and apparently BT in their gracious overlord master benevolance will give me 30 days grace before they completely close the email account including all my contacts, see copy/pasted info below

free BT email – you’ll be able to use your BT email for 30 days after 05 Mar 2015, but then we’ll close the account and permanently delete your emails, contacts, calendar and notes. If you’d like to keep your BT email account, you can sign up to BT Premium Mail for just £1.60 a month (which you’ll need to do before we close your account). With BT Premium Mail you can keep using your @btinternet or @btopenworld email accounts no matter who provides your broadband. Find out more at bt.com/keepmyemail

So the question is this…should i just pay £19 a year for the convenience of keeping my BT email address which every single website and contact person i know uses or is it worth the hassle to try and contact every person and change my details on every website that i use to another email?.

It seems i have answered my my own question as attempting to change everything over to a different email address is a herculean task that i imagine will take far more than 3 hours which is roughly how long it would take for me to earn £19.

Hmmm, it seems i’m gonna end up paying the BT fee for continual use of my email address but i may open up another email account and gradually change things over as they pop up in my email account over time, so what email service would you recommend?, i’ve been a mac user since the very late 90’s but my old mac.com email address is long gone (sob….)

Advice gratefully received, and i’m also fully open to ridicule for putting up with BT and their inflated pricing structure for far too long, in my defence i regularly change my electricity suppliers to the cheapest and i’ve always bought my phones/iphones outright and selected the best sim-only monthly plans.

Open a gmail account and gradually move everything over. Only tell folk who you still want to have your email address though. It’s a chance to drop some spammers 🙂

£19 a year will easily pay for hosting your own mail service on a slice of cloud somewhere, you just need to register a domain name that you like, then you can be theboss@thatsomafunkdude.com or whatever you like. Don’t ask me the details, mine is still with aol! (but they are happy to keep it going forever, for free for ex ISP customers).

Buy somafunk.co.uk for 6 quid a year
Redirect it to whichever email provider you want eg.google,bt,hotmail etc.

How were you paying BT £600/year? – that is £50/month so after your line rental £33/month?

I made the mistake of using an ISP address but moved to gmail. I reviewed the emails I received over a six month period and updated those senders that I wanted to keep.

In your shoes I would keep your BT email account for a year and move everything over then cease it.

I pretty much never get spam email to my BT inbox as it all automatically gets dropped in the spam box – that’s one saving grace for the BT service i suppose, I set my parents up with a Gmail email account when i bought them iPads a few years ago so i may just do that for myself.

One of the Grrrr elements regarding keeping the BT address open is the fact that BT could continue to increase the price whenever they like.

Gmail works for me, wouldn’t go near a hotmail account ever again.
Always open 2 accounts one for your personal emails and one for purchasing or sharing emails with people your unsure with.

Gmail or own domain to gmail (though you pay twice for that)

use gmail or hotmail, then if you move ISP your email stays the same. Plus they’re both good at filtering out spam.

At the very least, setup a Gmail account at the earliest opportunity. Start using it… Eventually you’ll realise you don’t actually need the BT one anymore. Might take a little while to get to that point…but the sooner you start, the better.

Or you can just dive in and grit your teeth. Be done with it. Who needs BT anyway.

I quite like the idea of having my own email address as @somafunk.com or @somafunk.co.uk – that’d be sweet!,

Cletus see pic – yep…a fool and his money is easily parted yadda…yadda…..etc…etc…., 😥

I’m away to Cyprus in a couple of months to visit a mate who’s just moved out there and plan to either spend a few months attempting to cycle home from Cyprus or i may just bugger about the Mediterranean and get happily lost on the bike and fly home when i’ve had enough so i sort of wanted to start a blog or a wee simple website or suchlike.

I’ve heard a lot about squarespace from listening to podcasts as they seem to sponsor just about everyone and the site and the work involved in creating a simple website or blog looks easy enough and quite cheap – would this be a suitable way to get a somafunk.com site that i can update daily so my mates and parents can check to see if i’m still alive and also get a somafunk.com email address? – bear in mind that although i’ve been using macs for years i have absolutely zero website creation or suchlike experience.

Own domain. That way you are never tied to any email provider and can swap any time you want.

[mikewsmith – Member
Gmail or own domain to gmail (though you pay twice for that)

POSTED 7 MINUTES AGO # REPORT-POST

Nope never had any additional charges]

When I was setting up my own domain (have to pay for that) and to use gmail to be the mail client for that Google want to be paid (was setting it up last year)

How have you set it up? I have mail forwarded to my Gmail account and when sending mails from Gmail I can select what address the mail is sent from – can be automatically set to the one the mail was sent to. No Gmail cost for that.

No Gmail as the client not forwarded so Google do the mail server, my domain owner wanted paying for running the mail server part on top of the domain registration fee’s.

I’ve used my own domain for years, have been through five or six ISPs, number’s never changed. I’ve also had the same mobile number since 1994 (except when they changed the dialling code from 04xx to 077xx 🙂 ).

Tried to set up a new iCloud account? It’s one way.
Own domain is what I use plus a paid for email hosting. £10 a year for the email hosting and buttons for my domain name.
The plus of your own domain is you can sign up to services with their own domain as the email address to see who is selling your details on.

No Gmail as the client not forwarded so Google do the mail server..

Is there much advantage to doing it that way mike? I just have my domain’s mail servers set up to forward to my webmail and my webmail set to send with the “From” field set to my domain email address. I don’t pay anything extra for that and it seems to work okay.

the hosting I was using did charge extra so I chose to pay google instead. Means I don’t have to forward and don’t have to choose who to send as (as when that happens one day you pick the wrong address to send that quote from)

sandwich : I don’t use iCloud despite owning two iPads, macbook laptop, iPhone 5s, i don’t trust the cloud for storing stuff and my download speeds were previously pathetic (couldn’t even stream iplayer etc) but they’ve updated the local exchange in town and all the lines/ boxes so i may just sign up soon, using broadband speed checker i now get a giddy download speed of 15.1 Mb/sec and an upload speed of .28Mb/sec. Previously i used to get 2 to 3Mb/sec download speed and prior to that it was even worse, never got above 1Mb/sec, the entire neighbourhood of 10 houses all fed from the one pole were just as bad – BT wouldn’t do anything about it despite our collective moaning for months so someone took a chainsaw to the telegraph pole and thankfully a good samaritan reported it before it fell over.

The own domain looks an idea but i’m a luddite when it comes to that stuff so i’m gonna have to do some homework.

Cheers for advice peeps – I’m taking it all in.

I’ve always planned to do this really powerful trick for GMail but never got round to using it, but this could be put to good use:

Use Variations on Your Gmail address to Preemptively Filter

Gmail actually ignores periods that are inserted into your email address, and cuts off anything that appears after a plus sign. So if I sent an email to examp.le.a.d.d.ress@gmail.com, it would be delivered to exampleaddress@gmail.com, instead. It’s similar with plus signs: If I send an email to exampleaddress+test@gmail.com, the email is delivered to exampleaddress@gmail.com.

There are hundreds of valuable uses for the limitless number of email addresses that Gmail gives you, but one of my favorites is using the faux Gmail addresses to automatically archive unwanted messages.

For example, say a site requires you to subscribe to their daily newsletter in order to use their service. You can simply provide the address exampleaddress+unwanted@gmail.com, then create a filter that looks for to:exampleaddress+unwanted@gmail.com and automatically archives any of those incoming emails.

You could also use this strategy for clothing stores that ask for your email address at the register in exchange for a discount. Give them the address with an added period, like example.address@gmail.com, and again create a filter that archives messages to that address. This has the added benefit of saving that store’s promotions without them jamming up your inbox—that way, if I’m shopping for a new pair of Nikes, I can still search my Gmail archives for coupon codes and deals.

sauce

Own domain, any day.

Anyone except Yahoo.

19 quid a year to keep an email address that’s probably been used to register so many things you can’t remember.. Paypal? online banking? etc? that when you try to update you find you can’t because the registered email address is now non existent or somebody else’s.

That’s the problem I have with Yahoo. Gmail didn’t exist until a decade later, and even after a massive purge of accounts all over the place, and about 3 personal domains, Yahoo is still my busiest email addy. And they know they won’t lose users like me so can **** about with their service as much as they like knowing that the only users they’ll lose are those that chop and change everything every 6 months anyway.

I’ve had my own domain for about 15 years, costs something like $15 / year to rent. I use https://www.hover.com/

My email is the real name equivalent of foot@flaps.com

Footflaps, me too – back from when it was Domain Direct. It replaced my Compuserve address. Those were the days…

Always open 2 accounts one for your personal emails and one for purchasing or sharing emails with people your unsure with.

Rather than that, have a look at 33mail – you can create unlimited email addresses (so one per shop/site if you like) and they get forwarded on to your mail account.

You can then switch off the ones you don’t want if they get spammy – and if you’ve used one per site, you can tell which site is giving away your details.

Looking at your BT bill, why were you paying for calling plans when you didnt even use the line to make calls?

Open a gmail account and gradually move everything over. Only tell folk who you still want to have your email address though. It’s a chance to drop some spammers

This.

I stopped using a tied in email address a few years ago an it makes life so much easier. No problems if you want to swap providers and with gmail it’s really easy to access it anywhere.

It seems like the vast majority of you’s out there use your email a helluva lot more than i do, all this talk of folders, separate accounts for incoming mail, Gmail tricks.

As an example at the moment i have zero folders, my inbox has 3 emails in it and that’s all there is – absolutely nowt else – i never get spam email in my inbox folder as the spam filter is quite good at automatically placing it in the spam folder – i empty this when i remember to click on the dustbin symbol and my daily life is not that important to worry about missed emails or suchlike so i never look at the spam folder.

All the bells n’ whistles of some of the above mail services would be totally lost on my simple life as an email comes in and i either delete it or reply to it and that’s it – to be honest i’ve only sent/replied to 10 emails since the start of February.

Looking at your BT bill, why were you paying for calling plans when you didnt even use the line to make calls?

Yeah?…I was asking myself the same question?

blimey.
purged my yahoo down to about 1000 emails when they started screwing up their email client.
but it’s not so much the number in the inbox, but the number of places I’ve used that address. many are sites I no longer care about (forums, etc.), others are important sites (Paypal, bank). trying to remember all of those is a nightmre.

that’s one reason i purged not just the inbox, but also accounts elsewhere. Strava, Mapmyrun, Ski Club of GB, and a whole load more. Total purge, and not just a deactivation, so that address is no longer present in places I don’t care about or forgot.

Own domain definitely. Yours for life (so long as you keep paying. Usually £5ish a year for a .co.uk).

Also means you can use different addresses for each site you sign up to and block them as they end up on a spammer’s list.

Ideal is to have the domain linked to the mail service provider, but yes Google charge for this now if you’re thinking of using Gmail as the mail provider. As said you can just use forwarding instead. Depends where you get the domain though as to whether they provide this service. I get my domains from 123reg and they do this.

1000 emails?…..is that in your inbox or in all your folders? – that would annoy me and my minor OCD leanings, i recently had a purge of all my incoming newsletter type emails from various sites so i unsubscribed from any that i’m not bothered about and it’s a very rare occurrence to get more than 10 emails a day into my inbox.

Anyway i’ll check back later after work, got to make 500 easter eggs t’day, i really should’ve been into work an hour ago but i had a new delivery of coffee beans this morning so 3 experimental espressos later and i’m fired up for the cycle to work…Bzzzz…Bzzzz…..Bzzzz 😀

EDIT : all the talk of different addresses for each site then being able to block them etc sounds like too much work – i couldn’t be arsed to do that, spam email is never a problem for me.

I’ve just moved from BT to EE and discovered this charge too. However, when I asked the man at EE if I could keep my BT email address, he assured me I could. Then last week I noticed the £1.60 per month charge, so I rang EE and explained to them I had been told I could keep it, they (EE) have now credited me for 1 month of my contract, approx £40, that I can put to the BT charge ~ effectively 2 years of BT email.
Having read the above though, I will be moving to Gmail/similar once we’ve got some building work done as the builder/bank/finance people etc all have the BT email address.

folders now, because of the way Yahoo changed their client.
it used to be pages of “N” emails per page, most recent first. so call it 20 you care about and 980 “archived”.
then they changed it so 20 display, and if you scroll down it expands by another 20, and another 20, and so on.
so yes, impossible to manage. either never ever need to find anything, or do a delete all (except delete all only deletes those that are presently visible, and you don’t know what’s last since every time you scroll to see what’s last it appends another 20 🙄 )

so now…
lots and lots and lots of folders, purge as much as i can in a ruthless manner, and file anything interesting with a personally selected 100 emails per folder limit (including inbox, but that’s been neglected a bit recently).
then I can find anything easily for reference.
loads of newsletters, my entire amazon/bike24/etc. order history.

sure I could just do ctrl-A delete on the whole thing, but I have needed to go back to old mail, and do.

Don’t take this the wrong way, but you can’t blame BT for your own incompetence.

We’re on BT (both phone and broadband) and pay barely half what you do – and that includes BT Sport (for MotoGP), and next to-no-phone use.

I’m sat here exporting the mail from work prior to a server upgrade. There’s 35GB of the stuff!! I have colleagues who won’t de-clutter. Mail back to 1995 for god’s sake, what possible use is that?
Home has a yearly purge to keep it all manageable.

I stopped using a tied in email address a few years ago an it makes life so much easier. No problems if you want to swap providers and with gmail it’s really easy to access it anywhere.

Except now you’re tied into Google instead. One day they’ll do something to annoy you: start charging, make their interface awful, drown it in pop-up ads, sell all your data, or whatever, and you’ll want to move away, just like several people on this thread won’t touch Yahoo with a barge pole.

Getting your own domain is sufficiently cheap that it’s a no brainer, even if you just forward it to gmail – at least you’re in control.

Don’t take this the wrong way, but you can’t blame BT for your own incompetence.

I understand your point and yeah….I should’ve checked sooner so i’m a dick (hands up – i admit it) but this should lead to a broader argument about arbitrary pricing structures that penelise repeat/continual customers – they are the ones who treat us like a commodity to be milked dry.

Anyway, i called them t’day and told them to swing for the bill.

On a more upsetting note my buzzard has been killed 🙁 …. 👿 , it wasn’t a pet buzzard but it used to sit on the fence post near to a turning on the road i take to get to work – pretty much every morning for the past few years it has been sat there and over the years i have gradually been able to stop the length of the farm gate away from it and it would just stare at me then carry on surveying it’s fields below, amazing to get so close to it and the bird wasn’t bothered by my presence in the slightest.

On the way to work this morning some **** prick had recently hit it (there was a dead rabbit on the road near to it so i guess it was scavaging) but this area of road is open so you can see for a few hundred yards either way – there’s no **** excuse for hitting anything on this section of road. I found it flapping about the junction with only one wing moving and as i got up to it i saw the impact had knocked it’s eyes from the sockets so i had to kill it 🙁 . I’ve felt so much contempt for the driver all day at work that it is just as well i never saw who did it as i believe i’d be spending the weekend in the cells.

It’s all shite……I used to stop and talk to it on my way to work, not that it understood in the slightest (obviously 🙄 ) but it cheered me up on the crap mornings.

Sigh……… it’s going to be a whisky night and a toast to my feathered friend..