BT Yahoo! customers: Why! can't! we! grrr! delete! our! webmail! accounts!? BT customers are unable to delete BT Yahoo email services - despite an exodus of users seeking to leave the security-challenged webmail biz. Since allegations arose that Yahoo built an app to enable it to scan all of its users' emails at the request of US intelligence, many users have sought to delete their email accounts. …
You missed one - illegal.
I am not sure that "we cannot delete your data upon your request sir" stands to data protection act scrutiny.
Sure, we know, BT will do a good backhand revolving door deal with the government so that no prosecutions happen exactly as in the Phorm case (thank you Snowden for providing us belatedly with the real reason for that strange anomaly) and many other cases.
This does not make it any less illegal. A company _MUST_ upon a request by a DP subject remove any data it holds on the subject with the exemption of specific cases related to law enforcement. Or so the DPA says.
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" A company _MUST_ upon a request by a DP subject remove any data it holds on the subject"
Can you show us where the DPA says that? There's a requirement to make available any data on a subject to the subject via a standard process, but I've never heard of removal. What would happen if I asked my bank or building society to remove any data they hold on me?
What if one of my employees contacted the company I use for payroll and asked them to do the same?
I think you're mistaken.
Data Protection Act 1998 (as amended):
(1)Subject to subsection (2), an individual is entitled at any time by notice in writing to a data controller to require the data controller at the end of such period as is reasonable in the circumstances to cease, or not to begin, processing, or processing for a specified purpose or in a specified manner, any personal data in respect of which he is the data subject, on the ground that, for specified reasons—
(a)the processing of those data or their processing for that purpose or in that manner is causing or is likely to cause substantial damage or substantial distress to him or to another, and
(b)that damage or distress is or would be unwarranted.
I would suspect not processing and deleting are different things...especially if you brought in other legislation such as security orientated acts.
The weak PR response from BT shows they consider this a side show of irelevance...so it's unlikely the ICO will do anything beyond shuffle some data...in analog that's paper.
OHHHHH! and then some.
Just changed from BT to S**T, can't still be a virgin after all this time? Although it is rather ugly.
So a speed test at my last abode was at best 3.5 Mbs ish and now I am on 50 Mbs ish, so why does El Reg take the same amount of time to refresh the page when you upvote someone?
Umm maybe bandwidth is not a limiting factor? Clue might be in that you did not find a 3.5Mbit connection fast enough, then 50 is unlikely to improve much. What it is I don't know - the Regs infrastructure, maybe rate limiting, maybe your own raddled desktop? - ask them. After all the data required to display a refreshed page is not exactly huge.
Everybody else except for Kingston Communications has to buy from them - competition is only in the reseller market.
And Kingston Comms are a monopoly in their region.
And Virgin is a monopoly for cable TV, voice and Internet.
Mobile cellular voice and data are the only non-monopoly communications provider in this country.
>If that were true, the other three wouldn't exist. The word monopoly has a rather specific meaning.
Go and argue that on behalf Widgets Inc in front of the US DoJ, you'll get short shrift, the dictionary meaning and the legal meaning are two entirely different things. The EU definition will be pretty similar but I'm too lazy to Google the link for you:
https://www.justice.gov/atr/competition-and-monopoly-single-firm-conduct-under-section-2-sherman-act-chapter-2
Pedant alert fail, downvoted.
>That's one thing that I never understood... just HOW is the law allowed to define words differently than the dictionary? That is deliberate entrapment
It's not hard at all to understand, to have powers so great in the market place as to be a def facto monopoly.
http://definitions.uslegal.com/d/de-facto-monopoly/
Are people round here just thick by not being able to absorb facts or lazy by not bothering to seek critical information, alternatively a combination of both ?
>Given that you've just listed three alternatives it seems to me that that word doesn't mean what you think it does.
Who owns the exchanges, fibre interconnects, poles, copper, cabinets and ducts. Two of the above use one of the above's network infrastructure as they have little or none of their own with cost of installing new being a barrier to entry.
Honestly ! Please do think something through before you post next time or do you work for BT or collect a BT pension ?
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And that is the problem with cloud email - you are at the mercy of somebody else & their purdy compoota device.
Hosting your own email will allow you to chop and change things as you see fit, but then you are responsible for MX records, backups, storage, spam filtering, and all those fun things...
"Hosting your own email will allow you to chop and change things as you see fit, but then you are responsible for MX records, backups, storage, spam filtering, and all those fun things"
The halfway house is to get an email service from a domain provider like 1&1 (others are available etc. etc...) and pick it up using POP3 or IMAP. That should be portable between providers, independent of your ISP.
And you don't need to worry about MX records (they take care of it) and presumably they back it up too, although of course you should have your own regime. Experience varies on spam but I use "popfile" to identify spam when picking up mail, prior to storing it in my own IMAP server with a webmail interface.
CAUTION if you are thinking of using 1&1 or their parent Godaddy .......... I used to have my mail with them on their US servers, when they migrated my account to their EU operations it didn't complete properly (the migration changed the file date for every email on the server so when i downloaded it to my outlook client it was now in a random chronolgical order!! I was .... concerned, they thought it was fine!!). Naturally I expected them to be able to recover it from backup as I had notified them almost immediately that all my mailboxes were now unintelligible. Oh boy how naive I was ....... They didn't have a structured backup policy that they could use and further, they had no record of where my mailbox was originally situated in the US so that wiped out any prospect of any local intervention. In total they managed to trash nearly 4 years of my business email. Now its not just the technical issues here that cause concern, I mean lets face it, everybody is entitled to make mistakes, the real concern was that they felt there was nothing wrong with having all my mail scrambled. I think this attitude dirives from the the things that Buba and his Rednecks get up to in the woods, if you know what I mean.
On a more positive note the day after this screwup became permanent I moved my mailboxes to a company that shall remain nameless but with their absolutely FANATICAL service I have never looked back
Another tip that I have found invaluable is to keep my own backups One using Mailstore (Free GNU but punches above its weight when it comes to recovery) and another backup using mailsteward (which is great for searching and analysis).
Hope this didn't sound as if I was to put out by the appalling service I have described, I guess my expectation was that if someone was acting as a custodian of my data they would behave in a professional manner, even if spelling it is to challenging :-)
Generally I'd view BT as being a complete shower...but then so are the rest of the ISPs, so much of a muchness. I'm not in too much of a hurry to defend them, but I will day one thing in their defence...
I use them for home BB (fast enough, and seems reliable having made the decision to ditch the HomeHub for something better). I have an @BT email address and keep an eye on that account in case they ever send me anything important about my account. I never gave that address to anyone else and to date (been with them a few years now) the only stuff that comes into that mailbox is from BT themselves, so at least it looks like they haven;t sold my details on to anyone.
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BT never, ever give any feedback on anything. When issues are cleared in the forums, they never give the reason so that any future similar problems have to be dealt with as if it's a new one.
Their website contains no page dates, so hard to tell how relevant the information is.
This is not the way to behave, but it seems that management either don't care or do it deliberately.
I know its not fashionable
BUT
If you want a good email service that is free of Adverts is not subject to the whims of the supplier then you need to PAY for the service,
you then get what you pay for POP, IMAP, Webmail etc and can use a program like outlook or other client to download a copy of your mail to your machine to keep a backup and to keep your online storage down. and can move it where ever you like no lock ii or limitations to protocols supported like free Add funded services.
I do pay for email. I pay BT/Yahoo! The account was converted to 'premium email' when I gave up BT as my ISP, as I'd used my BTInternet address for so much that it was (is and will be) inconvenient to try to get all those contacts to use some other address.
I have had auto-forwarding to another address in place for all incoming emails to the BTInternet address, and auto-deletion from the BT server, for several years. This worked fine, and I wasn't obliged to use either the appalling webmail interfaces they invented from time to time nor their insecure SMTP. I discovered by accident the other day that although the auto-forward is still working correctly, emails are no longer being deleted from the BT server - and there is no setting interface at all for changing either the auto-forward or the auto-delete. So the 'inbox' is steadily filling up with old messages.
After wasting hours digging around on the BT web pages, I found a 'contact us' web form for problems with email. But it refuses to let me send any messages without being given my BT account number - which I do not have, as I have no account with BT.
You can check out, but you can't leave.
"You can check out, but you can't leave."
You can but you obviously didn't. In order to check out from ISP and other service provider email services you need your own domain. That, and the email service, can then be shifted to providers other than your ISP as you find fit. It involves making sure that everyone who needs to email you is told to do so at an address on your domain. If you'd done that you'd have both checked out and left.
More important than the money stream... the selling price. Verizon now wants a $1B discount. If everyone who wanted to leave deleted their accounts, the lights would still be on but no one would be home except those accounts that have been abandoned or taken over by the miscreants.
"The customer said BT/Yahoo! had also made it impossible for BT customers to configure the forwarding of emails to a third party address from their BT Yahoo addresses."
If you think all the emails are being read, then exactly how do you think configuring a forwarder is gonna help you?
The mind truly boggles.
@Clive Galway
If you think all the emails are being read, then exactly how do you think configuring a forwarder is gonna help you?
Probably you are 100% correct, however a lot of people like the placebo effect fingers in their ears... For those people, use a feckin mail client to forward the messages, don't piss around with a web gui.
But to be fair there is a difference between 'someone' reading your mail, and an algorithm scanning them for key words.
Next, we'll find out the Adobe Flash based BTWholesale speed checker (Broadband performance test) allows malware payloads to be placed on PCs. Why are BT still insisting that users install Adobe Flash to check their lines FFS, when it will soon be blocked by Google Chrome and Firefox by default.
"BT see email as a free add-on"
This seems to be the new thing. Cheaper broadband by not providing any services. I've been a happy Demon Internet customer for 22 years. Their current owner, Vodaphone, notified me that their 'improvements to service' meant I would no longer get my 'free' email - strange as it has been a fully supported service for 22 years.
So they now provide ADSL and ... well nothing apart from a 2Mbps connection for £25 a month, so I will have to pay someone else for a mail service, pay for web space, pay for anything bloody else. Needless to say I've told Vodaphone where to shove their lack of service and now have a much cheaper 32.5Mbps connection.
At the same time I changed from BT to another cheaper land-line company ... BT were desperate enough to send me a letter saying 'oh dear you are leaving BT and you will lose <blank space> services', didn't even bother to offer an alternative service to keep a customer. Says it all really.
Anyone using an ISP for their email or Yahoo is a complete 'kin idiot anyway unless they are old and don't know better and don't have kids who can help .. deserve what they get .. they are all useless ..
Either put up with being the product and having your mail scanned by gmail or msoft if you want it free or pay for proper mail hosting or host or your own.
Zero sympathy for idiots that continue to have email with bt or talk talk or yahoo ... don;t they read the news ever and know how crap these companies are .. yahoo won;t even exist in a few years - they are toast when verizon rights off the purchase value to nothing and shuts most of it down.
"My folks are old, I know better But they won't Listen."
I feel sorry for them having such off-spring. But maybe it is their fault - they should have brought you up better.
I am old and know better. It's my daughter who won't listen. Actually she does know she shouldn't be on TalkTalk mail but just doesn't do anything about it.
"Anyone using an ISP for their email or Yahoo is a complete 'kin idiot ..."
That kinda depends on who your ISP is, doesn't it?
if you were here in NY, USA, you could sign up with some grotty local like BestWeb. No problem with the NSA snooping through your email, because the ISP doesn't have anyone even capable of reconfiguring the system tolet the NSA in, and the NSA would never be able to figure out the early 90's pile of unmaintained crap the system has become. Just don't mind that 99% or more of the mail that comes in will be spam.
You'd probably think I'm old. So is my BTInternet email address; it dates back to dial-up days in the last century. When I wanted the internet, I had to get a new-fangled plug-in telephone socket instead of the hard-wired sort 'everyone' had at the time - so I had to get a new telephone too. I waited in all day for the BT engineer to come and do it all - they wouldn't let just anyone mess around with their wires.
"they wouldn't let just anyone mess around with their wires."
Shhh.
When we moved here the master socket was located in the hall as was common but with no power anywhere near. The telephone cable comes into the house below ground so I knew it came up the wall from the below floor cavity.
When we had some building work done before we moved had the spark put a socket in the porch cupboard next to the meter. Se we drilled a hole though the floor of the cupboard, disconnected the master, pulled the cable back, threaded it up through the hole and reinstalled the master in the porch cupboard. The original site of the master was connected as a slave. So now the master socket sits well located next to the power for the cordless phone, the router and the VDSL modem and any other kit I want to put in there.
Well, you would insist on Brexit. Now your email doesn't work and you've only got British British Telecom workers on the job. Probably "waiting for parts".
Ah, takes me back to the GPO of the 1960s. Party lines and lizard-hide insulated twisted pair. Six month lead times. Them were the days and no mistake.
And, never Look back would be my advice. Or continue using it for what it was, a place to deposit such SPAMY refuse al-la Hotmail. Funny thing is with the rise of these Web Mail Outfits Yoohoo, Hotmail, or Gmail, It seems the ISPs arent into providing an @ISP address anymore. Then again, I suppose it could just be my crappy ISP, that never allowed my an otherwise ~secure~ personal email addy. In any case I'm more or less happy with Gmail. Even if I know they're probably even slimier then Yoohoo. At least I believe I'm protected from such hacker attacks. The NSA, and Co? Not so much though.
It's plugged in too. :)
I only use it for forum registrations or other throw-away purposes, but the vast majority of emails never get through. Even test emails from other (non-BT) accounts just vanish into the aether. They don't bounce back or show up as spam, they just vanish into a black hole.
About half of the accounts are still with Yahoo. Migration was halted over two years ago. No reason has ever been given. The support teams have no clue what they are saying as they give wrong information because there are two systems.
Openwave deal with the server farm, but pass through non Openwave accounts directly to Yahoo.
This must be costing BT a lot of money having two mail suppliers.
There needs to be an investigation to find out why BT stopped the migration.
Of course you can take your email and website addresses with you. Just buy a domain name and use a domain hosting service to support it, configuring its e-mail and http redirection services to point to whatever ISP provides your e-mail and webhosting services. Job done, and for not much money: domain name hosting and redirection services cost me under a tenner a year.
Want to switch ISP? Easy. Just reconfigure the domain host's redirection services to point to your new ISP, which takes 10 minutes or so. I've been using this set-up for nearly 15 years now and am currently on my third email and webhosting ISP, but still using the same domain host. My e-mail and web addresses haven't changed either.
"Just buy a domain name and use a domain hosting service to support it, configuring its e-mail and http redirection services to point to whatever ISP provides your e-mail"
It's one way but for whatever time you're with them you're still stuck with whatever quality of hosting service your ISP de jour provides. Given that they almost certainly see their prime business as shuffling bits between yourself and their up-stream that aspect of their business isn't given much attention and may well have been outsourced - which is the entire point of TFA and this thread.
The better alternative IMV is to select a service that sees mail and web hosting as its primary business with the domain registration as a part of that.
I am amazed that people think that this is an issue. I have been a BT and TalkTalk customer on and off since broadband first appeared in the village where I live. Before that I had BT dial up. The first thing I did was find an third party e-mail provider (unfortunately that was Yahoo at the outset) but over time came to rest on Hotmail (although I am thinking about walking away from them. I have never used my BT or TalkTalk e-mail for any real personal mail simply as an address to feed in to the e-mail box on various websites. So theft of my details simply means I stop using the address and delete any mail I still have in the various folders.
My hotmail account is my primary mail but I will probably start to migrate from that in the near future as it too has started to receive spam (after many years of not being impacted) and will look at another supplier. No one should use their ISP mail simply because one day you will change suppliers.
If you need to move all your email to a new provider, this tool is fabulous: maildev.com/msgextract-email-migration I used it to migrate an IMAP account from an old service to a new one. The tool is available as a trial and then, to my mind is very reasonably priced. I don't work for them or have any financial interest in them. Very easy to use GUI. It also has a backup facility for backing up the emails as files and extracting attachments. Non-proprietary backup format.
See also: http://imapsync.lamiral.info/ - but I haven't use that
Corporations are being treated more and more like people with rights, everyday! Now, we must excuse bosom buddies BT and Yahoo their foibles, because of some unknown reason that they can't get their act together. End of September is a promise, and the corporations broke that promise, but we must excuse them, for they are only "human". This society is sick because of the way corporations are treated, quite often, as more important than any one person. Money causes people to do things their consciences wouldn't normally let them do. Ripping off millions of customers is just one of those things. Betraying their confidence is another.
So, I get an email from BT/Yahoo telling me that because of their data loss I should change my password. So when I tried to do that I get a browser error because their SSL certificate is more than a year out of date.
Security is clearly important to these people....
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