Now that's service: TalkTalk customers enjoy a Friday morning free of pesky emails TalkTalk's email service clearly had a big night out on Thursday and has spent Friday morning lying down in a darkened room. While no longer the most complained-about broadband provider, the company demonstrated that it still had what it takes by borking email for customers unable or unwilling to use an email service not bound …
I never use the ISP supplied email anymore after moving broadband provider and loosing access to a email address I had with NTL and them Virginmedia for over 10 years.
I am with Talktalk after taking up their recent offer of £19.99 PM for FTTC for 18 months. So far is has been working ok for me with no downtime since I switched 2 weeks ago. 2 weeks uptime is much better than the ADSL I had with Origin which would go down every nearly evening for a few minutes at a time.
I am surprised that anyone still use an ISP supplied email any more.
The service is usually less than sparkling because most people choose their ISP either because it is cheap for its alleged speed, or has lots of football games bundled with it, and email service quality isn't even considered. Personally, I pay for my email from a specialist company, partly because my paranoia knows no bounds, and partly because I am happy to pay for reliable email, but most normal people I know use gmail or something similar.
Plus, email addresses are very hard to change - if you have any online presence you know you will inevitably be left locked out of a zillion accounts that you forgot the password for and didn't change to your new email address in time - so you are effectively left locked into the ISP forever.
I haven't paid for my old ISP provided email for about 10 years (it's with tiscali, that's how old it is!). It still works. TalkTalk have just upgraded it so it works in their new front end.
So while it's easy to snipe it looks to me like their front end is running against a number of disparate ancient email services and munging them all into a single consistent ui.
That's quite tricky imo so maybe they're not complete bastards......
Yes, but that is because it is an email client, not the SMTP connection. As far as I know, all general purpose email clients such as Thudermail, Outlook, etc, will let you send from any email address and set up mail to allow you to configure multiple email addresses on a single PC.
The problem is not the email client, but rather that the outgoing SMTP server you use may place restrictions on the email addresses it allows you to use. Your ISP doesn't want to be seen as an open relay and doesn't want their customers sending out mails with forged sender addresses, so they may put restrictions on what you can send through their connections. When using BT as my ISP, I had great trouble convincing them that I should be allowed to send email using my own email address on my own domain, and not the btinternet.com address they had assigned me as part of my broadband package, and I had to use a clunky authentication mechanism to show I was entitled to use my own domain.
I don't think this is unique to BT. I think ISPs in general expect that if you are savvy enough to have your own domain, you should be savvy enough to have your own SMTP service as well. Added to that, the auto-config options built into many email programs assume you are using the same domain name for both incoming and outgoing email connections, and don't offer any option to use your local ISP-supplied SMTP, even though it might have far-better performance, virus scanning, etc, than the token SMTP service supplied with cheap domain names.
Indeed yes. When Virgin Media moved to Google mail, Google decided this practice was no longer allowed, no matter what you configured your mail client to do and what authentication you used.
There was some big clunky authentication thing you could do but Google/Virgin slapped (essentially) a massive "youraddress courtesy of ouraddress" on the outbound mail so made it completely useless - in terms of covering up and/or providing easy migration from an ISP related address.
Then they migrated back off Google anyway. Complete PITA and a lesson in how Google likes to completely break standards just because they're big enough to force enough people to put up with it that it looks like it's accepted.
People with no experience of using TalkTalk love to knock it, journalists included. For several years I had broadband and an email address with BT. The broadband was flaky and slow, and the email address they supplied was broken more times than it ever worked, and for my last four months at BT it didn't work at all. Tech support was useless and pointless. Every ISP, not just BT andTalkTalk, has some users who can dig up horror stories, but I don't see journalists rushing to criticise BT with the same gusto they have for bashing Talk Talk.
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If you look at the adverts for broadband services these days, not just TalkTalk, pretty well all of them, they don't include email addresses or mention email in the list of things they supply as part of a broadband contract. There was a time when the only way the average person could get an email address was to use one hosted on their ISP, but Hotmail changed the game, and these days I reckon Gmail rules the roost. TalkTalk is correct to say that email wasn't included in the bundle that people paid for, and they supply it to their own customers as a courtesy, not an obligation.
Similarly, I'll provide my customers with advice, maybe its talking them through how to do something complicated in Word, even though I didn't supply them with Word and what we do sell them doesn't include support for third party software. Its just a courtesy, my customers know its a courtesy, and if I cannot solve their problem, they don't demand a refund. If someone who isn't a customer phones up and says "I've heard you do free tech support,..." they are not going to get much help from me.
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