BT hits 'undo' on anti-spam email update

First official thing I'd heard about this.

They never bothered to email and announce the fact that they were going to make the change either before or after the change happening. Email just stopped working. (strangely enough if you pressed send enough times, it did get through eventually).

The obscure instructions were hidden in the Yahoo web interface (which I never go into), but started looking up why the 553 error was happening. It took a while to track it down.

You were then forced to register each email address as a sending address in the yahoo web mail, which then sent a confirmation email back to your account with a code number that you had to enter back in the yahoo interface in order to allow you to send the email from your normal email client. However if you had multiple accounts to register, woe betide you if you tried to register more than one at once, as the code numbers all cancelled each other out and got mixed up!

Great bit of customer service and the usual fantastic standard of communicaiton from BT.

Not strictly true...

I know you're cribbing someone else's work, however, this statement isn't strictly true;

"customers who do not use an "@btinternet.com" address for outgoing mail must verify it to avoid a 553 SMTP error"

I use BTYahoo..!! mail, and don't have a "@btinternet.com", I have a "@btopenworld.com" address, I don't have to verify every outgoing mail...

Why am I suspicious

Because they have been doing this for commercial customers for years and rather than keep the nice simple to you must authenticate your log in to send other domain emails – they keep changing the rules on how to allow domain relaying –

but funny if the domain is hosted on your BT account then there is no problems - I wonder what the connection is ?

Fnckwits

Absolute madness. Having jumped through the required (and not easy to find) hoops to get my e-mail service back to the way it was, now it doesn't matter. Admittedly the process was fairly simple to do, but if you don't habitually use the BT/Yahoo web pages it wasn't easy to find.

Oddly enough, I don't recall seeing an e-mail announcing this change in service either.

BT are truly a tribe of clowns.

If at first you don't suceed switch ISP's

Except there is one additional wrinkle that has so far been lacking coverage. The fact that, even if you do jump through all of BT's fire rings, there is still no guarantee it will work, I had to do this process for my Dad's machine and managed to get it working, however the very next day the problem was back and no amount of fiddling with the rules could make it work. I wasn't even going to try to ring the Help desk as I have been there before and didn't fancy loosing another couple of years of my life. In the end I had to give in to the dic tator and change his address to the crappy BT one :(

One more bright idea from BT's penny pinching department and I'm off. Life's too short to spend it trying to figure out what idiot is going to break your broadband service next.

In NZ too

Telecom (the NZ version of BT) has the same Yahoo disease, which they introduced last year to much fail (I think their email was out for a week? Good migration that one). They too have just implemented the same thing here. Disgusting process.

The new super 'anti-spam' is REAL clever as well. I sent an email to joe@blogs.com*. The reply from joe@blogs.com (with RE: <my original subject>) got sent to the spam folder however. WTF? Yeah REAL fkn clever.

* joe has had his identify change in order to protect his identity.

As someone who works for BT

.. and actually sees the numbers that relate to SPAM (as in >90% of emails sent) it's a major headache for the company.

My job isn't involved in anyway with the BT Retail operation or even BT Exact, who are responsible for the security issues but whilst BT often pi55 peeps off with customer service, there are some serious problems with SPAM email and something has to be done to resolve it.

Rather than constantly whining and moaning about it on El Reg, would some of you lobby for execution of the spamming b@stards who cause the problem? You know, a bit like China and drug dealers, where they shot 6,000 of 'em and got rid of a lot of problems. Or would that require too much effort ;)

I applaud the effort pity about the execution

Bt are finally being smart when it comes to handling the abuse they allow their subscribers to do to the rest of the internet

the measure of only allowing people to send e-mail from addresses they have verified are their own, stops 90% of outgoing spam from all those folks with an infected pc connected to bt {more than 1 in 3 pc's is infected in the UK}

{assuming they also block port 25 direct connections to MX's}

{also hoping they track users attempting to mis-send mail to inform them of the fact their machine is likely compromised}

we have been doing this for some time and not only does it reduce outgoing spam to near-zero but also means users find out their machines are hacked within minutes of the hack happening thus {considering the adverage time between infection and discovery/fix is 3years}

if every isp did this simple measure global spam {we see 99.x of all incomming mail atm is spam} would drop off dramatically

and more importantly as the time till fixed of infected machines would drop botnets would shrink dramatically

Its just such a pity that they couldn't execute the launch properly and inform users in pleny of time

we announced it, made it optional for 3 months, {when you configured it it started working for your id/password} then finaly cut off those without it configured after the 3 months, 10 phone-support calls later all was done {the others still blocked are obviously bot-infected pc's the owners simply do not use mail on as none have called about their blocked smtp or checked their inboxes in the year since, probably webmail users who were never aware their pcs were spewing so much smtp traffic {by smtp auth i add} we have been slowly calling them as we have no other means of informing them