Mike's general stuff ~ Random
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BT/Yahoo being bone-headed to the extreme, again
About 6 months ago, BT Internet and Yahoo merged mail services.
In the process, all users by default had Yahoo's anti-spam service switched on, silently, with no indication of what had happened. The result being lots of customers (whom I know through my business) having mail problems, usually in the form of mail not arriving via their mail software as expected, but also in an effective 'denial of service', in that if a BT Internet customer neglected to "upgrade" their account (by logging into the BT Yahoo mail website), then their email software access via POP3 simply stopped working.
The cause of mail apparently disappearing was an anti-spam feature that had been enabled by default for all customer accounts, which takes mails deemed to be spam out of the POP3 queue and into a webmail-available-only "Bulk" folder. Even when this bulk mail folder was holding hundreds of mails, customers would not be informed (an email from Yahoo would have been nice). In many cases, the "Bulk" folder contained non-spam messages.
But BT/Yahoo just done the same thing again - Yahoo have "upgraded" the system, and by default (even though for example my previous setting on the account was to have anti-spam disabled) enables their second anti-spam system, and adds another layer where mail doesn't get picked up through POP3 (as in, normal email software) if Yahoo thinks it is spam!
The only reason why I thought to check my BT email accounts was because I received an email telling me my account had been "upgraded" (the space available has been upgraded, which was nice), and I suspected that they might do something stupid, again. Also, in this email, I quote:
"You will continue to access your Yahoo! Mail account as usual. No further action is required, and there will be no interruption of your service."
Oops!
Even though I have made the changes to my account to switch off all anti-spam features, there are still 19 emails sitting in my webmail inbox that I can't pick up through my email software.
Some may say in reply to this situation that customers should carefully read all emails from their ISP. Perhaps so, but should they have to be reading them for fear that their ISP will do something incredibly bone-headed if left unchecked?
Nice one "BT Yahoo! Internet".