A lot is not right with BTYahoo! response
BT are dragging their heels on responding to this latest BTYahoo! webmail problem. No surprise there then.
1. They have still not yet admitted that there is anything wrong via their status portals - the status pages and Usenet announce groups make no mention of the issue at all.
2. Staff responses on customer BTCare Community forum are few and far between and so far, they are blaming the customer (flor clicking on dodgy weblinks or using smart phones and wifi) rather than the BTYahoo! mail system. It looks like there is a management information lock down in place. As usual.
3. Outsourced overseas telephone customer helpdesk staff as usual, appear not to have a clue about the issue or the scale of the problem - so the average customer with an email problem is being given very little useful help or preventitive advice.
4. Several affected customers report that although they can change account passwords, the online system for changing their "security questions" will not let them enter, complaining of wrong username or passwords, or simply throwing up browser security certificate warnings. BT have made NO response to this.
5. The BT forum restriction on "troublemakers" (those with valid privacy concerns) is still being enforced rigidly - even if those "troublemakers" are returning to the forums with sensible helpful observations and diagnostic suggestions. I know - I'm one of them - with a forum ban dating back to the days when I made "repetitive privacy complaints" as a consequence of BT were making "repetitive privacy breaches" and covertly and illegally intercepting communicatioins in partnership with Phorm. They don't seem to have learned much about customer relations and PR in the intervening four years.
I seriously recommend anyone with a BTYahoo! or Yahoo! account who cares about the integrity of their email to, at the very least,
1. Convert all their accounts to forward mail to a third party so that the webmail interface remains empty.
If you can't do that - stop using webmail for reading and storing your mail and contacts, and switch to a pop3/smtp client such as Thunderbird or MSOutlook, and regularly empty the webmail Trash folder manually - probably at least once or twice a day. (Yahoo recently altered the system so that popped mail got duplicated into the webmail Trash folder rather than deleted - making it susceptible to harvesting by webmal account hackers - nice one Yahoo!)
I'm serious - BTYahoo!/Yahoo! webmail simply can't be trusted any more. They will tell you its fixed, and then the next batch of hackers will break it open. It's been leaking for months.
2. Empty out your online contact address book. Don't store contacts online with Yahoo! Unless you want them harvested by hackers and sent malicious spam/trojans.
3. Empty out all webmail email folders, including the spam and trash folders and keep them empty by forwarding mail to a third party address. Don't store email messages online with Yahoo! unless you want the sender/recipients to have their addresses harvested by hackers/spammers.
4. Remove details of any extra email accounts that can be used to "send" from each BTY account, and cut to a bare minimum, the number of addresses that BT can use to contact you on for each email account. Because those can be harvested by the webmail hackers too.
Best of all - abandon BTYahoo! email services completely and move to a professional secure email provider, preferably one who keeps their scanning corporate eyes off the content of your mail while it passes through their servers.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
