Retaining a BT Connect email address

[AnneT]

Hello All,

Can any BT employees help me with this please. We're looking to move our broadband away from BT but have a BT Connect email address. We're happy to pay to retain the email address and have been reading up about premium mail. Every time I have spoken to BT about this they tell me that we can't keep this address. Is this correct?

Unfortunately for us the email address is on the liveries of all of our vans and cars and is our main business email.

Any help or advise anyone can give me on this would be much appreciated

Thanks in Advance

[kelper]

Long term, you should plan to register your own domain name and then you keep an email address even if you changed your ISP.  It looks more professional than having a BT, Yahoo or Gmail address.

[PaulC1]

Hi AnneT, 

What you have been told is correct. If you cancel your BT Business Broadband you lose your btconnect.com email address. The way I suggest customers handle this is by creating another email address with a different provider and then forward the btconnect.com email address to the newly created email address. That way you start using your newly created email address right away, informing your customers of the change of email. Then when you cancel the BT Business Broadband and lose your btconnect.com email address, all your customers have your new email address. 

Thanks

^PaulC1 

[HarnedM]

BT says people can keep their email addresses for free using a basic service that's only accessible via a browser but that customers who want to maintain their normal email service, they have to pay £7.50 per month.

[PaulC1]

HI HarnedM, 

This is an option for residential customers using the btinternet.com email addresses. Currently there is no option for this if you are a business customer.  If you don't have a BT Business Broadband connection, you don't keep your btconnect.com email address.

Thanks 

^PaulC1

[stpjg011]

Hi Paul, i have the same sort of question, however the btconnect email addresses i have are not part of my BT Broadband - the primary owner is BT - UKcEIN@btconnect.com - i have had these email addresses for over 20 years! If i have a problem it is a nightmare as 1) i am not the primary user 2) i am residential and thses are classed as business. Will i lose them when i leave BT, and i have a password problem at the moment, who can i contact?

[jtanna]

The simple solution is to buy a domain from BT using the BTConnect.com email account and so BT will have to keep your BTConnect.com account as it needs to be renewed every two years using the same email account.

You don't have to use the domain for anything else if you don't want to but keeping btconnect.com account is sometimes useful especially if you have many contacts who are still sending messages to you using that email account.

Some years ago I wanted to buy a domain from BT because they were cheap at that time so when I tried to use hotmail account, I was told that I can't use that account but I need to open a new BTConnect.com account to do business with BT. So I did it and it still works for now.  I don't use that account for anything else as such except that BT sends me some promotional info and Domain renewal notices so I keep it.

The BT domain costs about £6.00 per year so it is peanuts as far as I can see it.

Good luck and let us know what happens about this.

[trevarcher]

Hi Paul, 

I have a related issue in that we upgraded our bt business broadband to bt halo broadband (fibre to property) which became active in January.  The old broadband package should have ceased to coincide with this but BT continued to invoice us for both the old and new service.  Once this was sorted mid June and the old service cancelled my btconnect email address was also cancelled without prior notice, instead of continuing with the new upgraded package, as I expected it to as it is all under the same BT business account.  I have now been told there is no way to reactivate this btconnect email account.  Surely this can't be the case, since we only upgraded the broadband service and did not leave BT.  Also if I send emails to the old address from a different email, I get no notification that the btconnect email address is not valid. The same will apply to my contacts and customers!  Is there no way to continue using this address as part of the upgraded broadband package?

Trevor

[mrchairman]

Hi, I am late to this I know, but faced with the same situation, the work around is to have ANY product or service with BT Business, which can be as simple as a single domain registration at £10 for 2 years. I did that and it preserved the our @btconnect email addresses.

On another matter, recent emails from BT tell us that @btconnect users will no longer be able to access email using an email client after the platform changes this month (April 2023) . I do not believe this is correct, and it's unhelpful of them not to offer the simple solution of activating OAUTH2 authentication in your client. 

For me as Thunderbird user, it's as simple as changing the outgoing and incoming server details to STARTTLS and OAUTH2, after which you will be asked to do a one-time login to Microsoft using your email password,and an OUTH2 token will be added to your password string. This method of logging in has been in place for some time with the 'full-fat' Office 365 email product for some time, and it's well overdue that BT fixed the lamentable security on the @btconnect domain.

[JeremyHigginson]

I am later still to this thread, but if anyone is still following it, here is my experience....

Until recently, I had been a BT business customer for broadband and mail services pretty much since it was possible to do so. But I actually reserved my "____.____@btconnect.com” email addresses for personal use, as I had a separate set of company mail addresses using my own domain name. This all worked fine even after I shut down my company…. Until BT (or rather Microsoft, who seem to run their mail servers) ceased to allow simple mail protocols, which meant I could no longer use my Windows desktop version of Outlook to send or receive mail, and I had to rely on browser-based versions of Outlook, which directly access the mailboxes held on the BT / Microsoft servers.

The problem with this is that the online storage capacity is limited to just 1GB, which is speedily consumed. Previously, with desktop Outlook, I used the feature to automatically delete each of my online mails 60 days after I had downloaded them, so I never reached that limit. Now that the simple mail protocols have disappeared I have no means of auto-downloading the mails directly to desktop Outlook, so I have set up a routine (in the browser-based version of Outlook) to automatically forward my emails to a parallel address "____.____@outlook.com" which can utilise the more secure protocols, which are then accessible on desktop Outlook.

I now use desktop Outlook to poll this "____.____@outlook.com" address and download them that way. But as there is no automatic pruning of old messages, I now have to log into my online Outlook, and use a manual process to keep the on-line store below the 1 GB limit. Very annoying, but it does work.

The main problem that I now find with the "____.____@btconnect.com” addresses is that they continue to make the assumption that they (and I) belong to BT, and that my "office" is the BT headquarters in the City of London. This means that I cannot "transfer" them to my domestic MS 365 account, and this causes me no end of annoyance.

In addition, I moved house in August 2023, and surrendered my BT broadband service. I am currently lodging with friends while we build a house, and therefore have no broadband service in my own name, but I have managed to pay a small (monthly) fee to BT which means that I can continue to use the "____.____@btconnect.com” addresses until I re-register with BT for a broadband service.

Hope this helps someone with similar problems....