The Register has contacted TalkTalk for more information and will update if anything is forthcoming.
via email?
TalkTalk's customers woke up this morning to find the UK broadband provider's email service was still fast asleep. The Brit telco celebrated its terrible customer service scores in Ofcom's annual survey by removing the ability of customers to complain about it by email this morning. Customers took to social media to vent …
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"which was once an ISP with excellent reputation and, oh the irony, _superb_ customer service."
Hmm. I started off with Nildram. Nildram were taken over by Pipex who were so pleased (and rightly) with the Nildram CS that they decided to roll it out over all their brands.
Then Pipex were taken over by Tiscali. The Nildram support was replaced by something which included an email system apparently operated by something along the lines of Eliza; if there were real people there they failed the Turing test. Still not too bad because there weren't any real problems. When TT took them over and the script monkey system just couldn't cope.
So you'd rather the people who have your credit card, telephone number and home address run your email, rather than the people who you just signed up to a free account for with no details required.
(P.S. Don't make me prove that you can get a GMail address with no personal info again, I was able to create one in ten seconds last time someone asked, without providing real name, any address at all, nor phone number, backup email or anything identifying beyond - presumably - my IP address).
"Yes, people who don't want their private email 'slurped' by the likes of Google and/or Microsoft still do"
You keep a Google or MS email address as a spam bin.
You then get your own domain and allocate addresses in that as required. You don't actually have to run your own server. There are registrars and third party providers who will do that for you. For this you pay a fee but email addresses are independent of ISP and mail service provider. You can shop around and ditch any who are taken over by the likes of TT or who turn out to have long term problems of their own without being taken over. With a little checking you can also ensure your email provider isn't hosted in the US.
Like I've said before, the sort of people who persist in using the email address given to them by their ISP (especially a long-dead one like tiscali) are the sort of people who just cannot grasp how stupid they're being. It's not *their* email address. It's their ISP's hook into them.
And when you use talktalk's webmail, you get more adverts than google can throw at you when you use gmail.
Also be aware aol.com is under the TalkTalk umbrella in the UK, and imap.aol.com has similarly fallen over.
A temporary workaround is to use pop.aol.com,995,SSL and truncate "@aol.com" from your username. This may / may not work with other ISPs if the issue is similar. It's the not knowing that makes it so exciting!