The wonders of BT. Technology wizards!

A couple of weeks ago I had a letter from BT saying my contract was about to expire and telling me to log in to see their new offers. I looked but didn't get round to renewing at the time. Looked again today and the price had dropped by over £10 per month. I renewed and a message said I would get an email to confirm. Nothing arrived but a few minutes ago the phone rang and an automated voice informed me it was a text message from BT. I then heard an electronically voiced version of the text. A couple of minutes later the email arrived - 3 times!
You may ask why I stick with BT. The answer is that my main e-mail is with BT and if I move I'll have to pay to keep the e-mail address. It's too much hassle to go through every site and company to change the e-mail address.

 

You might want to look to see if you can access your BT email via googlemail as this would allow you to change over email accounts over time and eventually get out of the “fixed” email trap. In googlemail settings you can setup access to other email accounts and pull in the mail from them into your google inbox. Granted it will still be a bind changing all the accounts, but you at least won’t need to access both. I’d hate to think how many I’ve met trapped by using an ISP email account – something should be done about it!

 

Can you set up email forwarding on your BT email?
If you can, then you could create a Gmail account or Hotmail account (thus freeing you from the ties of BT) and have your BT email forwarded to your new Gmail/Hotmail account.
Once all your contacts are using your new email address you can cancel your BT email.
I had a Yahoo email account that I wanted to close and that's the method I used.

I have several email accounts from different providers and I use Thunderbird to pull all my emails into one place, but you do need to be quite IT savvy about how it all works to set up Thunderbird.

 

I have virgin e mail address, but I've slowly been moving everything over to g mail.
Still finding some companies sending to virgin even though I have changed them over.

 

It's not as simple as informing everybody in my contacts. For example we are registered with our GP, council, utility suppliers, banks, businesses, countless groups both physical and on-line. It's likely to take several years before all those would be spotted.

 

Yeah, you just work through the list, I mostly go in and change the email address whenever I contact them or they contact me, for whatever reason.

 

I agree, it does take time - I still have my old Yahoo account (as it's free) but all I've had in there for the past couple of years is spam. I done as @pete suggests above.
You'll need to bite the bullet eventually..

 

I totally agree, and it might involve having to pay BT in the meantime. However the sooner you start the quicker you get all new accounts under a main email address. I have several old addresses and designed multiple emails for shopping with one off sites. Gmail can automatically log in to these for me and fetch any new mail into one place i.e. my Gmail account. A bonus you also get is the ability to filter out any mail you don't want and leave it there.... I agree you need to be a bit IT savvy, but gather you are/were?
I also use Thunderbird as a front-end and for backup of my account(s), I don't find it difficult to use, quite the opposite for me, and find it much better the when I used Outlook.

 

@KT53 Though £10 sounds a good discount does it actually represent a good price ?
Lots of providers around these days and many contracts for around £25 a month for a 100mb service, some actually using the same BT lines.

Agree with the others that moving to a free and open email service like Gmail is a good idea.
You say you have many contacts, then surely you have a list of them with your user names and passwords for each one, so easy enough to tick off eaqch one as your change over.
Hope you don't use the same user name and password for all accounts ?

Don't forget, even though you have accepted the new BT contract you have the right to cancel it within 14 days without penalty and move elsewhere.

 

The discount makes it decent value and does provide 70mpbs download and 20mbps upload, which is considerably higher than some of the lower priced alternatives. I do have a list of many of the companies but probably not all. In many instances the e-mail address is required to set up the account although the display name is different. No I don't use the same password. The base BT account has at least 4 different e-mail addresses hanging off it, and I really can't be ***** to change everything. If the price difference was greater there would be more incentive.

 

Obviously his and hers.