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Problems with BT Broadband (BT Suck!)

July 8th, 2006 by Stephen

I sent the following letter to the BT UK Correspondence Centre 3 times. I never once got an answer. I cancelled my BT subscription, but to re-use my efforts, I offer this sorry tale for your amusement.

BT UK Correspondence Centre Durham DH98 1BT

Dear Sir/Madam

Re. Fault with BT SMTP Service Affecting Our Account

On or about Thursday 26th January 2006, BT Internet reconfigured their SMTP server service manually or automatically in some manner that caused a loss of service from our BT Internet account (xxxxxxxx.x.xxxxxxx@btinternet.com). We use a variety of laptops, desktop PCs and PDAs to access our account, depending on where we are in the house and what we are doing, and the failure affected all of these devices.

The symptoms of the failure were we could no longer send mail, because the SMTP authentication failed. However, we had not reconfigured SMTP authentication, and the password was clearly fine as we could continue to receive mail from the POP3 service, and use web mail.

Online Support

After waiting for a day or two to see if the problem would correct itself, my wife decided to contact technical support on Sunday 29th January, as she had an email she needed to send. She spent a couple of hours with the technical support to no avail. In this time, they made some suggestions that I think, as an ICT professional, were unacceptable, and you will want to review these issues:

  1. At no point did the call centre take on board that this was a fault that had simultaneously affected multiple setups on diverse operating systems. When my wife asked if anything had changed on the mail server, she was adamantly told “no”, despite clear evidence to the contrary, and the fact that the call centre were clearly not in a position to know this.
  2. On discovering that my wife was using Microsoft Outlook to read email, she was told that as this was not a supported mailer, she should take the issue up with Microsoft! Now this response annoyed me because
    1. the problem was very clearly not with the mail software,
    2. my wife could easily switch to Outlook Express if that is what was necessary,
  3. If you say that you only support Outlook Express, and will not help with problems on any other mailer, then you lock yourself into proprietary Microsoft technologies. You are saying that users of other operating systems, handheld devices, text only mailers and mailers used by people with disabilities cannot access technical support. This is probably in breach of your duties under the disabilities discrimination act, and is certainly bad business sense, as you are saying that there is a huge user base that you do not want as customers. You do not seem to want users of open source software, for instance - despite the fact that your SMTP service is itself the open source qmail SMTP server.
  4. Your support staff did not tell my wife what she needed to tell Microsoft. Certainly Microsoft have no interest in a sudden loss of service to the BT Internet mail service, and would send the problem straight back to you. This kind of passing-the-buck is not acceptable from a service that should be attempting to help customers resolve problems.

My wife, on my instruction, transferred to Outlook Express and refused to close the support call. After a while, the call centre asked if we had a firewall enabled. Quite sensibly we do run a firewall in our ADSL router, and the support centre suggested we disable it. I immediately disabled the firewall, and in the meantime established the further information that sending mail still worked from our dial up BT Internet account. However the call centre staff would not take our assurances that the firewall was disabled for granted, and informed us that we must contact our firewall vendor!!! Repeated insistence that the firewall was disabled eventually prompted the call centre to give us a telephone number through which we could escalate the fault.

Telephone Support

I called the support centre on Sunday evening to escalate the fault, and despite my telling the operator that we had been through online support, I was asked all the same questions. Yes, I had (grudgingly) booted my Linux laptop into windows and was running Outlook Express. No, we did not have a firewall running, and so on. At this point I was asked what ADSL modem we were using. I indicated that we had an ADSL router, and your call centre staff told me that the router must have a firewall and I needed to contact my vendor!

At this point, please bear in mind that (a) I had disabled the firewall, (b) the router had been working fine to date, and (c) the problem was failure of authentication, not failure to connect to the SMTP server. Again, this is a pass-the-buck attitude to support that must be dealt with. It is quite unacceptable.

I told your operator firmly (but quietly and politely) that the problem was with the BT SMTP server, and that he needed to escalate the fault - that the fault lay in a failure by the SMTP server to accept our fully resolved broadband IP address as a valid relay domain for our credentials. I reiterated that we had been through the online support process, and that the support centre had already been unable to help, and that the problem should be escalated to a suitable engineer. The operator refused to escalate at this point (some 10 minutes into the call) and continued to offer suggestions to fix the problem. I politely continued working with your staff to try various suggestions.

At one point your operator asked me to connect by hand to the SMTP service. This I did (I told him the port numbers as he started mentioning port 110, which is the POP service. Port 25 is SMTP). We quickly established that my communication was fine and I gave him my ADSL IP address. After many suggestions and many long periods of holding, your operator eventually agreed to escalate the fault some 50 minutes after I had place my call.

It seems to me that all companies I deal with who use outsourced support these days require me to speak to them for about an hour before they will eventually admit to pass on a fault to a technical contact. I am unhappy about this, and you really need to consider a means by which technical people can send technical queries to their peers, without this timewasting filter.

I indicated I would be going to bed at this point, and could the technical support engineer call me in the morning. The operator said he would pass on the message. No call was ever returned.

I would like a call credit for the time spent on this call - particularly as your operator refused to escalate the fault, and also because no call back was ever received.

Email Support

On the afternoon of Tuesday 31st January I used the BT web site to send an email about this fault. Prior to sending this email, on Monday night I spent some time investigating the fault, and discovered the following:

I connected by broadband and captured this SMTP session information: (I have obfuscated the base64 encoded password, but otherwise the session is exactly as seen on the SMTP server):

220 smtp810.mail.ukl.yahoo.com ESMTP EHLO eeyore.gloomyplace.org.uk 250-smtp810.mail.ukl.yahoo.com 250-AUTH LOGIN PLAIN XYMCOOKIE 250-PIPELINING 250 8BITMIMEAUTH LOGIN 334 VXNlcm5hbWU6 c3RsalcGdshabi2wLmtJJpzdG9u 334 UGFzc3dvcmQ6 aXblRmsqXQQ= 535 authorization failed (#5.7.0)

The WAN configuration for this connection was:

ppp0 Link encap:Point-Point Protocol inet addr:86.145.210.33 P-t-P:217.32.86.146 Mask:255.255.255.255

According to dig, the IP address 86.145.210.33 resolves as:

22.210.145.86.in-addr.arpa. PTR IN 604800 host86-145-210-22.range86-145.btcentralplus.com.

I then repeated the experiment with the broadband disabled, and connected via dialup. Here is the chat, which you will note succeeds:

220 smtp810.mail.ukl.yahoo.com ESMTP ehlo eeyore.gloomyplace.org.uk 250-smtp810.mail.ukl.yahoo.com 250-AUTH LOGIN PLAIN XYMCOOKIE 250-PIPELINING 250 8BITMIME AUTH LOGIN 334 VXNlcm5hbWU6 c3RlcGsaqhlfdfbdi5wsqasLdsd672 334 UGFzc3dvcmQ6 aXblRdsjkXaQ= 235 ok, go ahead (#2.0.0) ...

The dialup IP/gateway info was:

213.122.53.24/32 gw 213.122.53.24

This IP address resolves to:

24.53.122.213.in-addr.arpa. PTR IN 604800 host213-122-53-24.in-addr.btopenworld.com.

I sent all of this information with various suggestions in the email. I noted that the problem could be in the way that qmail is building its authsenders file (or PAM equivalent), and pointed out that the problem was that the btcentralplus.com. domain was not being listed against my credentials as a valid relay domain.

I then gave you the key information that would have allowed an engineer to resolve this problem. I wrote:

” It may be that this is because my BT Internet email address pre-existed the broadband connection”.

Other than an automated acknowledgement, no reply was ever received to this email.

Eventual Resolution

As BT were not talking to me, I continued my investigations. I noted that there was no huge outcry on Usenet about the failure of BT’s SMTP service, so I presumed that this problem only affected me or a small user group. I considered what was special about my BT account.

One thing that was special was that we have had a BT dialup account for a very long time. Long enough that we retained the five free email address service from our BT anytime account. Recently BT have extended this service to all customers, but it was a service we already had.

However it occurred to me that the automated registration system may treat my account differently from newer accounts with this service, and that you may have reconfigured your SMTP service to disallow the older accounts, or maybe my credentials were simply damaged in your database and needed refreshing.

I thus “upgraded” my account from the existing “five free email address” service to the exact same service! This will have pushed new versions of my credentials around the BT Internet network, and sure enough after a short pause, the SMTP service started authenticating from our broadband IP address once again.

Conclusion

It is now Friday 3rd February. BT have not followed up on my original fault report, nor on my email query. I have managed to resolve my own problem, but only through an in depth knowledge of how these services work. If we had followed your advice, we would now be talking with Microsoft!

I am extremely unhappy with this experience, and have noted various lessons that I believe BT must learn.

As a BT shareholder I am unhappy that you appear to be turning away a large part of your potential user base through your “outlook express only” policy. I am also unhappy that your failure to address such support issues is presumably turning away other customers. I myself am now considering looking for an alternative ISP.

I would like the following undertakings from BT:

  1. To refund my call costs for my support call on Sunday Evening;
  2. pass on my resolution of your fault to your call centre as soon as possible, so that others affected by this fault can be told quickly how to resolve it;
  3. To address the failures in your technical support centre, to ensure that in future, genuine technical issues can be passed onto someone more knowledgeable more quickly. I would like BT to tell me how they intend to achieve this;
  4. To ensure that the failure to return calls and emails is addressed;
  5. To provide support for cross platform mailers - e.g. Mozilla Thunderbird, and also for text mailers and those used by people with visual difficulties.

I look forward to your considered reply.

Yours faithfully

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57 Responses to “Problems with BT Broadband (BT Suck!)”

  1. on 06 Sep 2006 at 8:37 pm1 Alan

    I read this post with interest. I haver exactly the same problem. Last weekend, I suddenly couldn’t send mail via the BT SMTP server. The service has been running happily since I set up BT broadband about 2 years ago. I spent a very frustrating 3 hours with the BT call centre and got nowhere.

    I’m not an technical expert and I am trying to understand how you managed to ‘upgrade’ your account. I don’t say any way to do that on the btinternet website.

    Any advice would be very gratefully received.

    Alan

  2. on 06 Sep 2006 at 10:14 pm2 Stephen

    Hi Alan,

    I have just taken a look at the BT Internet website but they seem to have removed the page I found for upgrading the account. :( Sorry about that. I\’ll keep looking, and if I turn it up, I\’ll post a link here.

    Have you tried the service through dialup? That was very telling in my case - as it absolutely proved that the problem lay with BT broadband, and not with my home setup.

    Other than that, all I can really suggest is moving to another supplier. BT communications is an oxymoron! We signed our phone service over to another provider yesterday because of yet more problems with their lack of customer service.

    Anyway, try the dial up and feel free to post your results here… I\’ll keep looking for the missing page.

    Regards,
    Stephen

  3. on 07 Sep 2006 at 11:54 am3 spk

    Found it!

    I have found the web page where you can upgrade your account to five email addresses for free (mentioned in my article above). The URL is too long to write in full, but click here to go to it.

    I hope it works for you.

    Regards,
    Stephen

  4. on 09 Sep 2006 at 6:32 pm4 Alan

    Stephen

    Thank you for the prompt and helpful information. I have checked out the e-mail account upgrade but it would allow me to upgrade as I already have the BT broadband service which apparently supercedes the 5 e-mail addresses. Also, I don’t have any dial-up access, just the the permanent broadband connection. I spent a further very frustrating 2 hours with the BT helpdesk going through the same innane checks and tests (which I had already done with them previously), eventually to be told that I should uninstall and reinstall Outlook Express (I’m sure they will eventually tell me to uninstall and reinstall XP!). I explained that I normally use Outlook (I’m using 2007 beta) and that’s where I first discovered the problem. So I set up Outlook Express just to get over their objection to supporting Outlook. Now I’m waiting for a call back from from their technical escalation service but I’m not holding my breath. It looks like I have no choice other than to move to another supplier.

    Many thanks again for your help.

    Best regards

    Alan

  5. on 09 Sep 2006 at 6:47 pm5 Alan

    Fixed!!

    I had seen another post where the problem was resolved by turning off authentication and then turning it back on again. I tried this within Outlook but to no avail. I just happened to switch off authentication in Outlook Express. It wouldn’t send mail, asking for authentication to be switched on. I switched it back on and suddenly I’m sending e-mail without any problem! This was with my BTinternet account and I just now need to check my other accounts but I’m pretty sure they will be OK.

    No thanks to BT and I will still look at changing.

    Best regards

    Alan

  6. on 09 Sep 2006 at 7:50 pm6 Stephen

    Alan,

    Excellent news that it is all working, and thanks for posting your experiences here, as hopefully the next person in your position can read your solution here.

    Regards,
    Stephen

  7. on 28 Sep 2006 at 4:24 pm7 Dave

    Yesterday Outlook 2000 stopped sending emails from my desk top PC a new laptop also running Outlook 2000 and Outlook express 6 on the desk top.

    Errors can not connect or time out.

    I am with AOL is there a port issue, or some thing else? Mail has been working fine for about 18months.
    Has BT messed with the SMTP set up??

    Removed authentication and I get the same errors

  8. on 28 Sep 2006 at 5:02 pm8 Dave

    Just set SMTP port to 587 email now being sent!!

  9. on 27 Oct 2006 at 4:41 pm9 sandor.beres

    I have problem with the internet connection.Usualy they blame the remote computer. The advisers are very polite but that is all. It is an ongoing problem a rebate was promised and Iam still waiting. Can anyone suggest a better ISP Iam thinking of leaving BT.Get a grip BT.

    Yours truly

    S Beres

  10. on 31 Oct 2006 at 11:48 am10 marina

    In despair, I have looked for fellow victims of BT vindictiveness/stupidity. We ordered broadband, waited, Bt said we were connected but after HOURS of calls and fiddling, weren’t. Cancelled BT broadband. A marker was put on our line so we can’t get broadband from anyone…that was 5 weeks ago. Total monopoly. Can’t do a thing.Any suggestions? Am writing to You and Yours on Radio 4.

  11. on 31 Oct 2006 at 4:27 pm11 Stephen

    Marina,

    The marker on your line is a pain, and BT should certainly have removed it by now. However, you may be able to ask another service provider to negotiate its removal with BT on your behalf.

    If you feel that BT are deliberately obstructing your move to another provider, you could contact OFCOM. OFCOM will not normally get involved with individual cases, but they can investigate BT for anti-competitive practices.

    Stephen

  12. on 11 Nov 2006 at 9:42 pm12 Y Safle » BT Losing Ground in Broadband Market

    [...] I sent this letter to BT 3 times and never once got so much as an acknowledgment of receipt from them. The letter itself was about their failure to communicate! [...]

  13. on 25 Dec 2006 at 10:14 am13 Alan

    Dave

    Thanks for leaving your note about the port setting. Two days ago I began to get errors ‘connection was interrupted’ every time I sent e-mail from Outlook or Outlook Express. Eventually I looked up this thread and tried your solution i.e. changing the SMTP port to 587 and suddenly mail started to flow again! How can BT get away with messing around with these settings?

    Thanks for posting here - it save me another round of frustrating and likely futile debate with the BT service centre

    Alan

  14. on 09 Jan 2007 at 7:27 am14 Chris

    Hi, I just found your blog entry in a Google search on problems with BT SMTP mail sending.

    Many thanks for writing this detailed and clear story. I have been having exactly the same problems for some time, only under slightly different circumstances. I cancelled my BT broadband account in Jan 2006 because we were moving overseas, but they said the BT Yahoo services and email accounts would remain open and free to use. Since then I’ve had the exact problem you describe, and have made numerous attempts to troubleshoot it without success (I have never called the BT helpdesk about it because the “0906…” premium number is not diallable outside the UK and no alternative number is given.
    Thanks to your blog I now know what the nature of the problem is and, more importantly, that it is not worth pursuing a fix. I cannot “upgrade” my email addresses as some of your readers have done because I no longer have an active BT broadband account, so I will drop BT mail altogether and find an alternative.

    Thanks again,
    Chris

  15. on 10 Jan 2007 at 9:44 pm15 Stephen

    Thanks for the comment. I’m sorry to hear about your BT woes.

  16. on 26 Jan 2007 at 9:45 am16 Alistair

    Oh no !. I wish I hadn’t found this blog. I have just switched over to BT Broadband (from a previously totally reliable Virgin service) - in order to take advantage of the free wireless router and the free voip phone - but I find I am unable to send any outgoing emails. I don’t even get any errors it just comes up with the Logon Pop-up screen with username and password - which are entered correctly, click ok and it just re-displays the Logon screen. If I cancel, it does stop but does not return any error. I have been through the painful process of contacting the BT Broadband helpdesk and gone through resetting my Outlook express email accounts numerous times - being told every hour by different operators to do exactly the same thing.
    I did set up the email accounts before my BT broadband was activated (just as the email confirming my Broadband order had said I could do) and so I’m wondering if the BT Smtp server has somehow got set to only allow me access from my old ISP domain. I don’t really want to go through setting up any more new email accounts. I also know that there is nothing wrong with my Outlook express (I did wonder at first if the BT Yahoo installation software had manage to corrupt it) - as I managed to put back one of my old Virgin mail accounts and found that I can still send email through their Smtp server ok.
    I have sent off an email to BT technical support - but I am not too hopeful of getting any suitable response from them.

  17. on 26 Jan 2007 at 10:27 am17 Stephen

    I’m sorry to hear about this. It is strange that you can stills end email via your virgin account if your broadband is now with BT. Do Virgin allow connection to their SMTP server from any domain?

    If they do not, this might be the problem - you may actually still be on Virgin, and are thus being refused by BT because the IP address is one of Virgins. (However, tech support really should have spotted this, so maybe that is not the problem).

    You could also try a different emailer. Even though BT say they only support outlook express, other mailers will work just fine. You could download and try Mozilla Thunderbird (it is free and open source).

    I am not sure that the problem will be exactly the same as mine - but it could be related. It may be that in setting up your account, BT did not properly push the new credentials around their network. If this is the case, based on my experience, I don’t rate your chances of getting a solution. As you are a transfer from another service, you should be able to ask for a Mac migration code at no cost to go elsewhere!

    I hope you get it sorted out before it comes to that though.

    Stephen

  18. on 14 Feb 2007 at 4:06 pm18 Y Safle » Blog Archive » Call Centres Returning to the UK

    [...] Quite right too. I have cancelled all my contracts with BT over their abysmal customer service, exacerbated by hours on a call begging that a fault be escalated with them (and not with Microsoft as they stupidly suggested I do - see my letter to BT here for the gruesome details). These call centre staff are on a script, which perhaps works fine when the problem you have is something the script resolves. They are like Microsoft help. Sometimes it does help, but usually you go through trying suggestion after suggestion until you get “Microsoft help was unable to resolve this problem”. [...]

  19. on 14 Feb 2007 at 5:39 pm19 mono loco

    Alan’s simple fix has worked for me (post 5). I’ve had a BT account for ages, dial up and now BB. Generally no probs (must be one of the lucky ones).
    Then all of a sudden I can’t send using the SMTP mail server. I’m using an XP system with Thunderbird, tried all the usual check on the settings to no avail. So I tried Alan’s fix, switched off authentication, sent a test email (failed obviously) then switched back on , re-entered details and hey presto, it all works.

    No idea why but happy to have solved it without helpdesk frustration.

    Thanks

  20. on 15 Feb 2007 at 3:31 pm20 Clive

    I have the same problem, only started a few days ago - can’t send mail and so far I’m getting different advice and useless info from BT.

    RE: Fix (post 5), does this only work with Outlook Express? I have Outlook 2000 on Win XP.

    Also fails with Thunderbird email client. I ran an SMTP diagnostic program which indicated and authentication issue. Am going to try btopenworld as a mail server address as I’ve seen posts that this may work + also look at setting up my own local smtp mail server….

    Everything had been fine for the past 2 yrs until now - is this a recent thing?

    Thanks

    Clive.

  21. on 15 Feb 2007 at 10:11 pm21 Stephen

    Thanks mono loco for reporting back your experiences. It is interesting that this fix worked for you too. Clive, the only way to know if it works for Outlook 2000 too is to try it. If you have a dial up connection, you could also see if you can send mail by dial up but not by broadband. (This was the problem we had here - and it showed conclusively that the problem lay with the credemtials on BTs network and not our local setup).

    Good louck with this.

    Stephen

  22. on 20 Feb 2007 at 10:50 am22 Alistair

    A few days (and many emails) later (since post 16), it looked like BT had fixed my problem and my out-going SMTP emails appeared to be working ok. But then after 5 days or so they stopped working again - so another batch of emails were send and the same old responses were received back. Then I noticed my IP address - it was currently 86.xxx.xxx.xxx - the day before when everything appeared to work it was 81.xxx.xxx.xxx … and tracing back through some FTP logs I found my IP was also 86.xxx.xxx.xxx when I first had the problem of being unable to send emails and had been 81.xxx.xxx.xxx when it started working again. So I switched off my router, had a cup of coffee, switched it back on and found it had picked up an 81.xxx.xxx.xxx IP address and everything worked fine. Well not everything, there were various bits and pieces that my Broadband account was supposed to have which it didn’t - Bt Digital Vault and 11 email accounts (I had 5). So I sent off another email - this time as a complaint to BT rather than to their support or helpdesk asking them to get my account set up properly (or I would go elsewhere). About 3 days later they actually did something - at their end (rather than asking me to rebuild my PC again) and my BY Yahoo email account appeared with it’s 11 e-mail addresses, I had access to BT Digital Vault and I could also send out-going e-mails when my IP was 86.xxx.xxx.xxx. Success at last … well not quite. My main e-mail account could send out-going e-mails but none of my sub-accounts could send when the IP address was 86.xxx.xxx.xxx. So it’s another batch of emails, to which I’ve already had the usual repsonses of being told to re-configuring Outlook express, remove blocked addresses, switching off firewalls - the usual set of “It’s not our problem - it must be something wrong with your PC”. And to think that my old reliable ISP - Virgin has now dropped their price by £7 a month, but I live in hope that BT will eventually put my accounts right, and that after that I might never need to contact their support again.

  23. on 20 Feb 2007 at 11:13 am23 Alistair

    P.S. Although I’ve been singing the praises for Virgin as a very reliable ISP , since they joined with or took over NTL and their cable network I’ve heard from friends who had been with NTL that their service has suddenly become far less reliable and the helpdesk does not help.

  24. on 20 Feb 2007 at 11:22 am24 Stephen

    Thanks for posting youre experiences.

    On Virgin service levels - I understand that NTL is a much larger operation than Virgin, and whilst the service has been branded under the Virgin name, what you are really getting is NTL.

    One can hope that Virgin will turn this around, but after seeing how Homecall have destroyed Pipex, I don’t live in much hope.

    There is a lot to be said for going with smaller ISPs, where customer service is important to the company.

    Anyway, I’m glad you mostly got things working. Interesting about the IP numbers. That is definitely a problem at BTs end, and again probably to do with pushing correct credentials around their network.

  25. on 20 Feb 2007 at 11:52 am25 Alistair

    …and thanks for your site…. it is very illuminating and refreshing. I hope I find the time to read all your ‘waffle’.

  26. on 22 Feb 2007 at 10:16 am26 Clive

    Hi Guys,

    I tried toggling the authentication with Outlook 2000 - still no luck. I haven’t tried dial-up.

    My responses from BT have varied from upgrading to the next level of broadband (which I already have) and that I should use dialup as that’s the only way to send messages now - perhaps they have done some updates and those of us that used to dialup are now getting kicked off. They also provided a load of other contradictory/useless information which came as no surprise from what I’ve researched so far.

    However, I have solved the problem!!!!! I made my machine a SMTP mail server (with restrictions so hackers can’t bounce mail off me). You can download for free from is http://www.postcaseserver.com - in order to work port 25 still needs to be live and so far so good - you can configure it to update on startup every few minutes etc and some test messages sent OK.

    So I will probably give up trying to get BT SMTP to work and when I get chance swap to a cheaper provider.

    BTW, if you do move away from Btinternet, do you normally lose the email address or can you continue to use it with a different connection provider (I don’t want to have to change details all over the place if I can help it).

    ta,

    clive.

  27. on 22 Feb 2007 at 11:31 am27 Stephen

    Hi Clive,

    Thanks for reporting back. Your solution is certainly the best one - but probably beyond the technical knowledge of many. Keeping your own SMTP server secure can be quite tricky.

    When we left BT Internet, our email addresses remained. I still use mine because I have not bothered to change it to the new provider. You do, of course, have to change the smtp settings to the new provider’s service, but you can still receive email from BT without problem (at least, we can… I suppose they may have just forgotten about us).

    However, some time ago I bought a domain name specifically so that I could have an email address under my control, and I forward all the email to whichever provider I am using to read email. That is probably the best solution!

  28. on 06 Mar 2007 at 12:51 pm28 Y Safle » Blog Archive » BT Openreach Engineers that suck

    [...] Oh, since this debacle with BT. [...]

  29. on 10 Mar 2007 at 9:34 pm29 Alistair

    Lo and behold - I finally appear to have a working BT broadband connection from which I can send and receive emails from all my BT email accounts. I’m not sure how or when BT eventually put it right, but a few days ago I had a call from some Marketing company. I was about to tell them to go away when they said they were researching peoples dealings with the BT Broadband helpdesk … so I said ok I had a few minutes to spare. They asked numerous questions of the ilk, “Were you satisfied with the helpdesk response to your problem ? ” … answer “NO, they still haven’t fixed it after 6 weeks ” … “Would you say you were dissatisfied ?” “Yes!!”, .. “Would you say you were ’slightly dissatisfied’ or ‘very dissatisfied’ ?” ..”Very!!”. After quite a few more “very dissatisfied” responses they asked if I would like them to ask BT to fix my problem - I said yes and gave them details and my phone number, thinking that BT might actually contact me. That was 5 days ago, I haven’t heard anything from them, but if anything I am quite happy that I haven’t - as everything appears to be working now - I just hope I don’t ever need to contact them again.
    Surely sooner or later there has got to be an alternative to using BT - whether as an ISP or just having to use their phone lines.

  30. on 11 Mar 2007 at 4:23 pm30 Stephen

    Hi Alistair,

    We had another run in with a BT engineer last week. The sooner there is a real alternative to BT the better! Still, I’m glad things are fixed at your end.

    All the best,
    Stephen

  31. on 13 May 2007 at 7:39 pm31 Mark

    Hi

    i am a professional in the way i do things and as i have used bt
    in the past,well all of u have expressed bt in a nut shell…!
    BT you are the most robotic idiots i have ever come accross on the global scale THATS THE TRUTH !!!!!

    i had a bt yahoo email account, i went abroad they told me that in 90 days your account will be suspended cause your not using bt line bla bla bla
    anyhow i told them that i want it deleted,so that was the end of that, but
    8 months on i sent an email to that account that i had and it didn’t bounce back as u would expect when and email account is deleted,so i called them up and as u would know talking to robots u get no where…. even the manager wasn’t in …! , so they r saying that they cant delete it for five years, that’s crazy..! who does bt think they r anyhow anyone know anything about this that could help would be nice

    thanks Mark

  32. on 07 Jun 2007 at 3:45 pm32 Laurence

    BT are particularly bad when it comes to individuals, they apparently do better with business but not by much.
    I think they’d rather spend money on slick advertising than providing a service that works.
    I would suggest going with a smaller ISP (like Demon) who lets you set up your system how you want to, doesn’t lock you into specific hardware (get a router not a modem), helps you set up your own hardware, offers unrestricted bandwidth, and doesn’t block any ports.
    Bear in mind that although it may be dearer, how much is spending a day trying to sort out an issue with your ISP worth?

  33. on 25 Jun 2007 at 12:02 pm33 Robin Bruce

    This is just one of the many reasons we are launching HelpHound (www.helphound.com) in July.

    See this posting by searching ‘BT’…

    My business experienced ongoing problems with BT broadband.

    ‘We had several visits from different engineers. Eventually David Reed from BT engineers in Exeter visited. He was positive and helpful and explained that our problems resulted from BT’s internal budgeting for long-distance (over 6k) broadband connections. And that we would need to contact ‘High Level Complaints’ if we wanted to get our problem resolved. We spoke to Janice Bate on 0800 169-1572 who was helpful but found trouble in getting any response from a PTO (Precision Testing Officer’. She eventually recommended we contact the Chairman’s office (0845 600-2853) where we spoke to Lindsay Shelley who managed to get a PTO on the case. Problem solved. The Chairman’s (Sir Christopher Bland) email address is cb@bt.com. Don’t ask me how we found this out but in the end we didn’t need it, but I reckon the fact that BT staff knew we knew it may have helped. We obtained a refund on all our broadband charges for the period in question.’

  34. on 30 Jun 2007 at 6:57 pm34 Andrew Wilsher

    Hello hello

    Well I have just found this page much like a lot of you when you found out you have problems with BT which they are not willing to sort out , or in are case as like again meany of you blame on Microsoft ( evil overlords they are ).
    As soon as we got onto BT Broadband with a WiFi hub we have started to found the PC has crashed almost ever time within 10 to 30 min of being on line ,If the PC is left ofline this never happens we have contacted BT surport more time than you can count but they want to blame XP as they think it is clashing with the BT set up CD (WHAT THE f**K)
    We have had no real help from them ,please has anybody else had this type problem and does anybody have any anvice to help , if there is any help coming for any of you I will make cups of tea and jam sandwiches for you for a week .

    Yours hoping for help Kate and Andy

  35. on 01 Jul 2007 at 10:51 pm35 Jeni

    Hi - have just seen Stephen’s letter and I am just about to send a similar letter - tho not as technical to BT. Have spent seven hrs on phone to BT regarding not being able to send mail. Now, I am not a technical person, but have had to do my own research and I think it is a problem with the SMTP server. I can receive, but not send mail. This has only just happened. Out of the blue after using BT broadband for two years. I think that BT are no not allowing me to send mail via yahoo SMTP server. Anyway, if anyone has any solutions, please do let me know! I have copied in the Chief Exec in to my letter and If I do not get a response I will certainly contact WHICH or some such magazine. It is so incredibly frustrating!! Jeni

  36. on 24 Jul 2007 at 9:10 pm36 Alistair

    Oh well, it was ok for about 4 months … but what do you know, I can’t send out emails yet again. I sent off an email (using a non BT email service) to BT reporting the problem and got back the usual reponse (from someone in a far-off-land …the same place that the company I work for are about to send their own IT helpdesk to) that my email settings are not correctly configured (… even though they worked for 4 months ?) and that I needed to re-configure. Of course I don’t, but I did waste far too much time wondering and checking if I had somehow managed to alter my email settings. I guess I’ll just have to wait another few weeks for them to fix whatever it is they appear to be so good at messing up.

  37. on 25 Jul 2007 at 8:47 pm37 Alistair

    It seems that myself and thousands of others who have the misfortune to be using Windows Vista are suffering from BT’s inability to run an Smtp server without screwing it up every few months. However as someone on web pointed out - you can bypass their problems by switching to use Smtp Port 587 instead of 25.

  38. on 26 Jul 2007 at 2:13 pm38 xmogzx

    hi there,

    i stumbled across this post, whilst looking for problems with bt broadband speed ( mine keeps dropping to 135k, when im paying for 8meg )

    just in case its any help, i have discovered that if you call bt and follow the menus to end services with bt, then tell the operator that unless they put you through to someone in the uk, who is not reading a script, then you shall cancel all services with immediate effect, and seek to recover all monies paid to bt, through the courts, based on a breech of contract, then they WILL, at the managers discretion put you through to tech support in the uk.

    the uk call center (08000778120) is pin protected, and pins are issued by the center on a temporary basis, so that those of us on the edge of leaving bt can speak to some one who speaks English. the pin stops working once the issue is resolved.

    these people CAN help, they are technical, and they solved a line fault in 12 hours, which i had argued with mumbai for 3 days about.

    mumbai simply kept telling me that the reason my connection was slow, was that either i was downloading illegal copy righted material, or i needed to change the micro filter. ( the fix only lasted aprx 3 weeks tho, hence another call to cancellations for me. i have been promised a call from the uk within 24 hours, and given a uk number to call directly, should no one call back)

    try it if you loose patience.

    if anyone else tells me to plug my 220v router into the test socket i will explode….!

  39. on 26 Jul 2007 at 11:19 pm39 Jeni

    Interesting stuff about BT. I have written twice now to BT re the SMPT server and NO RESPONSE. BUT, I have found a work around. I signed up to CLARA NEWS. I know use the Claranet SMTP server for outgoing mail and it works! Clearly there IS a problem with BT SMTP. If I can work this out then BT tech surely should. I am not a techy at all - just very determined to resolve my problem. I WILL be taking legal action against BT unless they provide me with refunds etc. How can they get away with this awful service? Good luck all. Jeni

  40. on 27 Jul 2007 at 12:23 am40 Robin Bruce

    Some of you may have seen my post about BT a few weeks ago - We’ve just launched HelpHound - http://www.helphound.com - a consumer community - you might be interested to see the comments about BT - and even add some of your own?

  41. on 12 Aug 2007 at 3:48 pm41 Andrew Spencer

    I’ve been with BT for over 10 years now, and fortunately, never suffered any huge issues. However, on the 3 occasions I have spoken to them in the past few years, the technical support was dreadful. On one of those occasions, I gave up, and fixed it myself simply by trying ‘one or two things’. However, the last call just yeaterday was a laugh. I’ve just tried to use this BT Digital Vault, and it won’t work for me. It simply will not upload any of my photos. I rang them, and after 30 frustrating minutes of useless discussion, the support guy said it must be the Firewall. he said turn it off, and it should work! He asked me which Firewall I use, I said it is the one BT supply (Symantec) as part of their package!! So I said ‘So BT provide Digital Vault but it doesn’t work with their own Firewall?’. To which he replied ‘ No I don’t think so’. Like last time, I will search the internet and probably find my own solution. BT Support is an absolute pile of **!, and I am seriously considering moving. Oh, and I also only get 1Mb of speed when 8Mb is advertised….

  42. on 16 Aug 2007 at 7:30 pm42 Kevin Galvayne

    I think BT are a complete shambles of a company an I say bring back the 40gb caps as i used to have speed. I was conned into recontracting to bt on the 10th of may and since this the 25th may i’ve been unable to play games online or download at a decent speed.

    BT tech say check filters, wiring routers ah yes and the favourite connect to the test socket then ring us back, silly people i’ve tested 5 routers and still the same, BT TOTAL CRAP. BT are too big to supply the demand… it makes me feel like smoking and i stopped last year

  43. on 22 Aug 2007 at 1:56 pm43 David Carss

    I am having similar problems to Kevin Galvayne.

    So far I cannot connect to internet at all. Tried 2 BT home hubs, a Zoom router, 2 PCs, 2 Macs, 2 handheld wireless devices and none work but all the harware works at my work or at friends houses.

    I have had my broadband stopped and reprovided but it still doesnt work. 2 engineer visits have failed to find a cause but the engineers PCs dont work with the net either! They cant track the fault so its not their problem apparently(?)

    My complaint is currently being looked after by 3 different high level complaints people but Im still getting nowhere.

    Im now at the point where I dont know what to do. If I leave BT I will still have the same probs as it their lines/infrastructure that is causing the problem and it will be even harder for another internet provider to sort.

    Really - what more can I do to get this sorted? Im at a complete loss and BT are just as bad. Short of making them rewire their connection to my home I have no ideas.

    Does anyone know what kind of legal case I can take up as clearly this is a breach of the Provision of Goods and services act? I have been told several times by BT (not to mention being signed up by BT for Broadband) that my line is suitable for broadband (also told my connection supports up to 6.5Mb by their engineers) so I think I would be entirely within my rights to demand a resolution to this without any further personal expense.

    Can anyone help me?

  44. on 28 Aug 2007 at 12:59 pm44 Mark Cowan

    After some arguement with BT, I was offered a discount on our planned upgrade to an 8Mbit/s broadband connection as compensation. Three months later, the connection still kept dropping out and still only ran at 2-4Mbit/s for the short spells that it would remain connected at.
    Also, the BT router’s HTTP interface intermittently froze while I was mapping ports for various games and servers, so a 5-minute job took nearly 2 hours, as I had to keep resetting the router.

    I phoned their tech support, and was asked to disable my anti-virus (which would have no effect on the ROUTER’s ability to maintain an internet connection anyway), asked to reboot my computer, reset the router, etc etc.

    I tried explaining that I’ve been using computers since I learnt to read, that I build, overclock, repair and maintain them for extra income and that my dad (who came at that point) designs industrial computers, networks and general IT infrastructure for a living and has been since before the solid transistor existed.

    Eventually, by digging up personal phone numbers of certain BT support staff via the internet, we got through to someone who had a western accent and had some idea what they were actually talking about. They said it that the connection had been sold to us as “up to 8Mbit/s”, which, since we had recorded the original call, we were able to show was false.

    At this point, we were told that 4Mbit/s+ wasnt actually available in our area - so we’d been sold a service which they couldn’t actually provide, despite us living so close to the exchange that I could practically hit it with a tennis ball from my office window.

    The problem was eventually “resolved” when they noticed that we were also refusing to pay the bill, and they lowered our connection to one which they could provide, replaced our router for free with an equally buggy and unreliable one, cancelled the bill, and seemingly blocked a load of ports that we regulally use too.

    I don’t intend to go through all that crap again with BT to get my ports back, I’ve set up various work-arounds to get most of them. The main one I really need is port 110 (pop3). Any idea how I can get use out of this one again?

    Cheers, Mark

  45. on 05 Sep 2007 at 5:37 pm45 John

    I am currently going through a living hell trying to get BT Digital Vault to work - Their help desk are useless.

    I sympathise iwth anyone dealing with this appalling company.

  46. on 25 Oct 2007 at 8:47 pm46 Will

    When I ordered BT Vision 2 days ago, the man said that he would phone the confirmation through 2 days later.

    Did I receive a call today………….no- of course not. It’s BT we’re talking about!

    I phone BT, and guess what “the order has been cancelled sir.”
    No explanation, no reason. I have to order again! I was on the phone for one hour! The re-ordering took twice as long because “the other man did not cancel it properly.”

    Arrrrr!!!!!!!!!! That implies that BT tried to cancel my order- and they were not going to phone me were they?

    Anyway, I have successfully re-ordered, and my service should be delivered in 2 weeks.

    Lets see…..

    (Rant Over)

  47. on 25 Feb 2008 at 9:44 pm47 Philip Kay

    I had the same problem. All of a sudden after months with no problems SMTP stopped authenticating my user name and password. I could receive email from my domain which is not hosted by BT but could not send.

    Broadband was working fine. Logged into the bt yahoo account and could send/receive web based emails. I created a new email account and tried this for authentification, still no joy. Tried port 587 still no good and finally tried a router reboot which did the trick……better than spending several hours taliking to BT.

    Thanks for the advice on this page.

  48. on 22 Mar 2008 at 12:34 pm48 Ray Girvan

    Found your site via searching for a solution on the same problem.

    I think they did another reconfiguration a day or so ago: I use Pegasus, and my mail just stopped working (no change of settings) with exactly the same pattern. Despite the authentication fields being set correctly, I can only send e-mails if my btinternet.com address is in the “From” field.

  49. on 23 Mar 2008 at 11:11 pm49 Richard

    Just had a similar problem. I looks like BT are changing things again.

    Found this link which I found useful, hope it helps. It seems to fix problems from 12th March 2008 onwards ?!

    http://www.gyford.com/phil/writing/2008/03/22/bewareofthe_le.php

  50. on 24 Mar 2008 at 10:25 am50 Philip Kay

    My recurring SMTP problem which could only be solved by rebooting my router suddenly disappered (reported earlier in #47). Only to be replaced several days later by the 553 error, yet another BT smtp send problem.

    To solve this I had to login into my BT/Yahoo account (something I rarely use) and add the send email address(es) used by the various PCs and email accounts we have to allow them to send via BTs SMTP servers.

    Logging in is not so obvious: you have to login to your BT account (I use http://www.btinternet.com which redirected me to bt.my.yahoo.com) and then select Mail which gives you the BT/Yahoo web based email (oh and look at all those emails I have never read!) and then select Options->Mail_Accounts and then add the email address. Also be careful, I got further caught out by case sensitive email addresses as I use Philip.Kay@domain.co.uk which BT does not think is the same as philip.kay@domain.co.uk as set up in outlook.

    Anyway hope this helps someone. I’m switching broadband supplier as soon as my contract is up!

  51. on 27 Mar 2008 at 1:55 pm51 Ray Girvan

    > Anyway hope this helps someone

    I can confirm it works (I just found, via Googling, the same fix).

    I had the same experience as Stephen, though. BT Broadband told me categorically that it was impossible to have my own domain in the From: field - even when I mentioned that I’d heard (I didn’t know how at the time) that it was somehow possible to do it by whitelisting specific addresses.

  52. on 03 Jun 2008 at 12:48 pm52 Lisa Fleming

    I am totally sick of BT. I certainly won’t stay with them as far as broadband go. this is the 4th or 5th time the email sending has gone down. Do they give a toss NO! More interested in trying to wow the public with their flashy television adverts!!
    bt broadband 535 authorization failed (#5.7.0) AGAIN

    Come on BT where the heck is the British in telecom - before the rest of the country deserts you!

    I’d been with tiscali for 5 years not once did I have a problem!

    Uswitch - oh yes I am!!

  53. on 12 Jul 2008 at 3:54 pm53 Cassie

    It was BT where I used to work and even as a business customer it was hard to get the phone answered and problems resolved.

    Sadly I now am on the receiving end of BT at home. I’ve lived there five weeks and the internet connection has been unreliable, with random dowtime for no apparent reason. At the end of BT barred our account ‘accidently’, told us we needed to wait eight days to get it reinstated. When this deadline came and went they then said we needed to wait at least 24 hours before phoning them back, and that was almost a week ago with no Internet service resumed.

    If it wasn’t that it is a shared house and not my account to cancel I would be back with Virgin in a heartbeat.

  54. on 21 Aug 2008 at 12:38 am54 kevin galvayne

    I have one thing to say….. sky, O2/BE or an enta supplier bt are just a waste of space even after a new line I still have an unsable aliminium connection grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr oh well better than 25 quid

  55. on 04 Sep 2008 at 9:40 am55 Toito

    BT wenbsite : a joke
    They have a complaint form on their website in which an email adress is mandatory.
    BUT there is no way you can type in the “@” and there is no way you can paste your address in.

  56. on 21 Sep 2008 at 2:56 pm56 pete

    i have had bt for around 18 months. i pay for “upto 8mb” download but was told my line would not support 8mb because of how far i live from the exchange but i should recieve around 3/4 mb. i actually got arround 850kb but out of lazyness Put up will it. as i started to use it more my wireless hub started playing up i phoned the tech line and spoke to a woman in dubia who spoke really poor broken english and after 1 and a half hours on the phone all i was suggested to do was unplug the hub for 10 mins and reconnect. this has been the same for the last 6 months. also during peak hours the speed suffers even more and im lucky if i get dial up speed. i had enough last week and phoned bt to cancel the service saying how unhappy i was and how bt was not supplying the service i was paying for and kept on being told about the distance i lived from the exchange. i told them i wanted to cancel the service and was told i had renewed the contract term and when i ask how, i was told that i had received a line discount on the bill which systematically renew my term and was held untill 12months was up to which i told them their fortune using a few colourful expressions. i have now ordered virgin broadband which comes in a few days.

    I WILL NEVER USE BT FOR AN ISP EVER AGAIN.

    NOW IF YOUR THINKING OF GOING TO BT TO USE ONE OF THE HOME HUBS. PLEASE DONT DO IT!!!! ALSO KEEP AN EYE ON YOUR BILL IF YOU ALREADY ARE USING BT THEN WATCH FOR DISCOUNTS CREEPING IN ON THE BILL BECAUSE THERE’S A CATCH. THEY TRIED NOT TO RELEASE ME FROM THE SERVICE

    TAKE CARE ALL
    PETE

  57. on 09 Feb 2009 at 10:07 pm57 Jo

    I have just got off the phone from an hour long call with BT as my service on my laptop, BT vision tv and sons playstation 3 keeps getting disconnected.

    To cut a long story short BT said they thing the problem with the connection is that my homehub is next to a lamp causing interference and the faults with the three devices are unrelated. I said common sense would say it is connected to which he replied ‘BT doesn’t use common sense’ . . . . . . . I laughed so hard, just what I needed after wanting to throw the homehub out of the window……don’t think he was too amused though……needless to say as in most other peoples posts they still haven’t sorted the problem out and we left the call with them suggesting instead of using wireless I keep my laptop connected with the ethernet cable for the next 48hrs. . . . . I explained that as the broadband box was in my hallway and I didn’t feel that I should only be able to use my internet sat on a cold draughty floor that wasn’t a viable option….he said I wasn’t prepared to explore all possible avenues of troubleshooting.

    I will be looking for a new supplier first thing in the morning!

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