I wonder if they asked via email, in which case I think we're 100% sure there will not be a response..
TalkTalk says WalkWalk if you've got a mouldy Tiscali email address, or pay £50 a year to keep it
TalkTalk will start charging £50 a year for its legacy email accounts unless you sign up as a broadband customer of the breach-scarred telco. And if you don't pay, it'll delete your account. Presumably sick of ex-customers with ancient Tiscali and TalkTalk Mail addresses talking to The Register about why TalkTalk customer …
COMMENTS
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Friday 4th October 2019 12:49 GMT JimboSmith
At least they're telling people this time. Talk Talk killed Homechoice off and failed to mention it. My folks discovered this had happened only when email stopped working on their phones. There wasn't a pay £5/50 option either despite them sticking with Balk Balk for broadband. Trying to find out what had happened was "fun". No one had told the staff in India that Balk Balk owned it through their ownership of Tiscali who had slurped it themselves. So denials it was anything to to with them rang out loud and clear despite that being bollocks.
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Friday 4th October 2019 13:11 GMT sbt
In this case...
...since they're giving fair warning in advance and an option to pay for continued service, I don't see anything scandalous about this move. I wouldn't expect any ISP to provide free e-mail services to non-paying subscribers. It's better than doing a shoddy job of it to minimise support costs where there is no revenue to offset, creating the previously reported hijack issues.
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Friday 4th October 2019 14:17 GMT sbt
Still IT news.
Yes, and very much of interest, particularly to anyone with an e-mail address subject to the change. Also another opportunity to reinforce the dangers of relying on your ISP for e-mail; they get great lock-in value from a pretty cheap offering.
I guess I was make a comparison between this particular action TalkTalk have taken vs. their general customer service reputation. I was almost pleasantly surprised.
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Friday 4th October 2019 16:03 GMT JimP
Re: pipex
Only recently?!
They haven't managed to fix my pipex email address since I reported it back in 2012. They haven't told me they're dropping it either. Their broadband "service" started becoming increasingly narrowband recently having been stable for a number of years. They blamed my router for not being a talktalk one, which given I tried two different ones, one brand new, to establish my router wasn't the problem I was not happy about. Anyway, they sent me a new talktalk router and the problem did not go away as soon as I plugged it in as promised. I had to ring their "support" up again (at great expense as I don't have a talktalk phone from which it would be free, and you might be getting an inkling that I won't be getting one anytime soon). This time the heavily accented person at the other end stated, as per all the previous calls, that there was no fault on the line, turned up the wick and bingo, it miraculously recovered to the sort of performance I had been consistently getting for years. The smell of rat is strong on this one.
Anyway, I wanted to get the email going again because my other option to do support was through "MyTalktalk" on the web, and I can't sign into that or even get a password reset because the "solution" they used back in 2012 to get my pipex email address back to half working (I could send email to anyone, but only receive it from talktalk?!) meant I had no chance of signing in to deal with them free of charge. They are still looking into this, but are having trouble with my response when they ring me up. The conversation goes like this:
"Hello, this is talktalk"
me: "how are you going to prove that given you could just be yet another of the thousands of talktalk scam calls I get thanks to you failing to keep my details secure a few years ago"
So I doubt that'll get fixed. I did try ringing them back, but the support line droids told me they were not allowed to talk to the people in Manchester who were actually dealing with my problem.
Also, I was paying ~£19/month a while ago, then the sent me a letter saying I'd gone over the limit on my (as purchased from Pipex) unlimited internet package. You sort of assume that that would apply only to months you went over, but no, it's now up to £29/month every month and no cheaper than a decent internet service.
The final laughable chapter in today's saga is I asked them if I could get fibre as my line has never managed the soon to be mandated 10Mb/s. They did offer me an option to upgrade to 11Mb/s, but refused(!?) to tell me what technology they were going to use to do that. It finally resolved itself because one support accent must have left a note to say to check with the customer if they wanted the O2 4G modem and another accent actually asked me that on a subsequent call. The idea that they think they can get 11Mb/s out of O2 in my location where 2G and 3G O2 reception is negligible is hilariously stupid. Anyway, I'm now waiting to see if their new router stabilises in the 14 day training period at something acceptable or whether it continues its slow plummet back to where I complained to them about it being slow again. One more strike and they're out, which is a pity as it used to be cheap enough that you could put up with an MTU of 1432 which their network somehow failed to pass on though any router other than their own.
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Friday 4th October 2019 13:58 GMT Doctor Syntax
"Way back in 2010, Tiscali actually ranked second in the UK behind BT on broadband subscribers, before a 2009 merger with TalkTalk. Its corporate parent killed the brand the following year."
If by "killing the brand" you mean discontinuing it, OK. From my PoV their behaviour in "traffic shaping" killed it even quicker then although in my case it was Nldram which had been gobbled once prior to Tiscali's swallowing it although Tiscali's damage to customer support hadn't helped.
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Friday 4th October 2019 18:51 GMT Norman Nescio
Another ex-Nildrammer here
My Nildram e-mail account, which soldiered on after Pipex, Opal, and Tiscali into TalkTalk never worked properly with the TalkTalk 'customer service' web portal. I had several sites connected up using Nildram, and TalkTalk completely mucked up the account, and I never did get the billing sorted out*. I finally left with TalkTalk owing me money, which I did not chase, regarding myself as lucky to get away without further trouble.
*I had less patience than this fellow:
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Friday 4th October 2019 22:05 GMT Doctor Syntax
Re: Another ex-Nildrammer here
As I recall when Pipex took over Nldram they reckoned Nildram's support system was so good they rolled it out over the entire business. It went downhill when Tiscali took over but with few problems it wasn't an issue. Then TalkTalk tool over Tiscali and the combination of the two was the end of the line as far as I was concerned. I realised the best way to keep flexible for the future was to separate mail from ISP and even better to use a personal domain to separate email address from MSP should it become necessary. That last step hasn't in fact been necessary although moving both from one provider to another was.
ISP provided email is a trap. Use it as a short term measure if absolutely required but no more.
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Friday 4th October 2019 14:07 GMT Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse
Plenty...
Plenty of decent free email providers out there that don't charge a bean - just use a mail redirect. I'm with GMX primarily who are ok, but I also have couple of Protonmail ones that I'm holding for future use. I'll put my sad sorry hands up and say that I also have a legacy Gmail one - but I'm slowly running that down, with the upside being that once I have I never need to log into ANY Google service ever again.
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Friday 4th October 2019 14:10 GMT mark l 2
I guess charging a fee for none Talktalk customers is better than just closing the accounts, but £5 PM does seem a lot for just an email address. Especially when there are several free webmail services available.
If your privacy conscious and worried about having a Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail etc then as others have mentioned, you can buy a domain name and setting up your own email and you have full control over it and it would be cheaper than even the £50 annual fee with Talktalk.
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Friday 4th October 2019 14:16 GMT joeW
"provision of a free email address years after one stops being a paying customer is rather generous in this day and age."
It certainly is. Although here in Ireland, I still have an @eircom.net email address that's active - 17 years since I was last a paying customer of theirs. They've been through a name change since then too.
I generally use it as a throwaway address to register for all sorts of shite, and maybe check it once every two or three months.
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Friday 4th October 2019 19:14 GMT PM2
Better than EE with Freeserve
At least Tiscali e-mail holders have the option to keep their e-mail addresses. EE didn't give Freeserve e-mail holders that option. I only found out when I got an email from a company who had my address asking for a replacement prior to Freeserve's closure. It took most of day letting holders of that address that it was about to die and to use a replacement.
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Friday 4th October 2019 19:35 GMT TRT
Thankfully they fixed the login issue I was having...
which allowed me to go in and change the password and autoreplies etc.
The account got pwned because their servers only accepted plaintext POP/IMAP/SMTP login credentials for years and years and years. Probably still the same, actually.
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Friday 4th October 2019 20:17 GMT Hollerithevo
That ticks one job off the list
Last year I spent about five months going back and forth with Talk Talk to get them to close an old Tiscali email account of mine. They finally said that they could not find such old email accounts on their servers, even though I was able to supply them with info fromt he time I had an all-singing, all dancing Tiscali account.
So they will be doing me a favour without any more back-and-forth by shutting off these accounts (I guess they'll find mine).
Who knew I'd ever say 'Yay Talk Talk!"
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Saturday 5th October 2019 10:10 GMT Anonymous Coward
Breathe takes its last breath
Anyone else remember early-00s ISP Breathe's offer for "free freephone-dialup Internet forever* for a one-off £120 (ish)"?
*Forever = Until we realise we launched a wholly unstainable product and get slurped by Tiscali.
Another legacy e-mail gone. No flowers please.
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Monday 7th October 2019 06:47 GMT Securitymoose
Tiscali.co.uk
I dropped them when they went to TalkTalk, and moved to another supplier, but have kept that Tiscali address since. They recently changed the mail system, and I lost reliable mail for several weeks. Their customer service was abominable, and these factors have added together to ensure I never ever deal with them again. I put a redirect on my mail when I got it back and have been advising those I want to know, and am ignoring the spammers.
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Monday 7th October 2019 09:14 GMT YetAnotherLocksmith
Toucansurf?
Literally yesterday I was asked by someone on TalkTalk about how they could migrate their Toucansurf email if they leave TalkTalk. Sadly, this article contains the answer - they can't, really, any more, they'll have to start paying for it!
The old chap asking has, as you can guess, had that email since the dawn of Internet time, and it's known around the world.
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Monday 7th October 2019 15:23 GMT Roldec
Great - they are closing the email they leaked to the world.
I was with tiscali for a few years and as someone has said 2nd to BT for service (Though Im not sure that BT service was really No 1!)
Maybe number 2?) Anyway moved on as Talktalk seemed to just asset strip the best bits from inter alia Tiscali
I kept the emails (2) thinking they might improve and I might give them another go. They "managed" to go downhill from then on including getting one account on a spammers listing. Gives me hours of fun on spamcop and pinterest reporting images.
I read all the stories of LIneone Tiscali and other "customers all being frozen out when their password suddenly "failed"
They could only reset it by going into their online TalkTalk account and resetting , which of course they couldnt do as they didnt have an account. A few months back there was a sort of amnesty for a while where a lot of us had to change our passwords and were allowed to see the "New" Talktalk site. Presumably to lure us back. The password change seemed to go quite well
but I cant understand why they went to the bother when a few months later they are closing the accounts down.
Writing was on the wall however and I have moved what I need so will untill closed will just use their resources to report spam to them. Not that I think they do anything - I have criticised their poor spam filtering despite emails arriving after almost half a page of TalkTalk "handling"
Not sure what I am going to do with all my spare time..LOL.
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Tuesday 15th October 2019 18:14 GMT jjhow
It is my understanding that when Tiscali took over BT broadband accounts they were required to maintain the free lineone.net domains and email accounts without charge to customers, when TalkTalk took over from Tiscali what was in the agreement? Did that clause remain in place?. Is TalkTalk now in breach of their legal obligations stipulated within the takeover agreement?