TalkTalk website STILL down on day TWO Breaking: Talk Talk confirms it has been the victim of a "sustained cyber-attack." Internet provider Talk Talk is in the second day of its outage woes, with its website still on its knees and customers continuing to report connectivity issues. The issue first appeared yesterday at 3pm. However, according to outage website …
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This post has been deleted by its author
I'd rather trust my e-mail to an ISP over a budget web host.
Typical problems include the SMTP server keeps on getting blacklisted, e-mails do not get delivered and with no bounce/error message (only running an e-mail trace in cPanel shows a delivery failure), hosting providers not backing up servers properly and then their hardware failing, and so on and so forth.
I still use the e-mail account associated with an ISP I left many years ago. There are no ads on the web interface and I have IMAP access on my phone. I am using 700% of my disk usage but thankfully they don't seem to have noticed and/or care. Only problem is finding a reliable SMTP server (see above) but on my phone I use my network's SMTP server which is pretty reliable.
To piss the El Reg forum purists off even further, I also use TalkTalk as my home ADSL provider and they have been reliable and more than fast enough for my admittedly modest needs, whilst caving in to threats to leave which ensures that I get as cheap a price as the cheapest competitor. They also were the only people willing to install a new phone line for free.
It seems that every university that you've ever been at seems to provide a free alumni E-mail account. Some are 'proper' accounts that are not just forwarders. For a mere one of your British pounds (Euros can also be accepted) per month they provide a quite good service. They all seem to trace back to a provider in Newmarket of all places (perhaps the horses go on a treadmill to produce electricity between races). However that provider does actually sort your problems out and give useful advice.
I used to use E-mail provided by ISPs, however when I moved country they wanted a few pound a month just for a forwarding system. Not a good service.
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It's almost a shame that they split things up from the AOL system (their system is based on AOL's if I remember correctly, which explains a lot in itself) as you used to be able to log in there and see a mirrored mailbox of your own. it used to be quite handy if connection problems happened (like now) or even I you just wanted to dig up an email that you' deleted or downloaded, using it as an archive.
Sadly it no longer seems to be doing it, just tried and my AOL mirror inbox is empty (although you can still log into AOL with your Talktalk credentials if you need to send emails).
Also their (Talktalk's) website says that you can still access email via mobile and tablet, which seems to be the case at least from early this morning (as I'm at work now my tablet is offline, but it still has the email it synch'd at home before I left).
But not having webmail access is annoying, although their servers have been playing silly-buggers for reliable access via their web page for a few weeks now on and off.
from the bbc website:
"The phone and broadband provider, which has over 4 million customers in the UK, said credit card and bank details could have been accessed.
The Metropolitan Police Cyber Crime Unit is investigating the attack, which happened on Wednesday."
looks like peoples credit card info "could" have been obtained we will see as the story unfolds.
It's not just the service that sucks.
My auntie, now 89 years old, took to email surprisingly easily, having never previously used any keyboard.
Then came the day her ISP redesigned the interface to make it "new", "modern" and other crap, meaning that she couldn't find anything. Gone were actual words; all that was left was a set of symbols which were, to her, meaningless.
I installed a sensible client on her laptop, and she is happy never to have to face a redesign ever again.
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