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.
This post has been deleted by its author
This post has been deleted by its author
" 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 ?
This post has been deleted by its author
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.
This post has been deleted by its author
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.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
