BTMail [warning: major rant]

Or: "Why life has felt unduly stressful for the last couple of months".

[And not just through buying a house and trying to get it liveable!]

Some of the things that have been irritating:

• BT gave no warning that it was going to switch from BTYahoo! to BTMail; the last communication I had from them about the mail service was some time in the spring, asking if I wanted to switch to the new mail format.  I didn't; I hate transferring to new platforms [is that the right word?], especially when I'm pretty sure they're still going to be in Beta - and every other time BT has messed with the mail service, it's most definitely been still in Beta, so I don't think I was making an unfair assumption this time...  Leading on to:

• Clearly, the thing was still in Beta!  How many different error messages do you need to subject your customers to, and how many times are they expected to log in over the course of a day?  I started copying the error messages into a Word doc, and have nine different examples - there were several that were only on screen for a few seconds, so I'm guessing there were at least a dozen.  Great testing, BT?
• The no-warning thing meant that all my draft emails were deleted [I'd been working on several things, just waiting for a final piece of information before sending the mail; had I known they were going to be deleted, I would have sent them to myself, and then copied & pasted to a new mail to send out].  Reminds me of when I first had the BT internet service: I used to save all the emails as a Word doc until I was absolutely sure it had sent, as there were so many crashes that completely lost my mail [no autosave, and it felt as though trying to save the mail was what caused it to crash?]

• The perpetual logging back in; now it only logs me out about every ten to fifteen minutes, and I can click on the email button, and (mostly) go straight back to the inbox - before, I was giving up after I had logged back in from scratch twenty or thirty times in the first hour (and because it had insisted on a super-secure password that always felt even more long-winded; I got so fed up, I changed my password to something easy to type/remember - counter-productive, much?)...  Oh, and that "keep me logged in" check box - why have one if it does nothing?
• Not that it would have made too much difference, the people at BT were only delivering a fraction of my incoming email - what fraction, I have no idea, but I do know several people assumed I was ignoring them because I didn't answer an email (that I never received) from them.  I'm just lucky no-one in my family was trying to get hold of me; that could have provoked WWIII if some of them felt ignored!

• This made it difficult to spot straight off that BT had deleted all my disposable addresses [I've since had to log in to all my online accounts and change my details]; again, a bit of warning would have made this easier - changing email in some accounts is much easier while the first email still exists!
• Side note: a big "Thank You!" to the folks at Yahoo! for helping me resurrect the Yahoo! ID that was a casualty of this, and for not getting stroppy because I had to raise the matter twice [this was before I'd realised they'd deleted all my disposable addresses - they couldn't respond to a non-existent mail box, so I had to log the fault twice].

• The icons are so huge, and the font so large, that I can't see the whole folder names, and not all the information fits on the screen; I miss the neat & tidy way my mail used to look/perform.
• I can't use the wheel on the mouse to scroll down the [now much longer (see huge icons)] folder list - you have to click and hold a tiny little arrow [why is that so neat & tidy, when nothing else is?].  You have to be precise, or the email moves to the folder above the arrow!

• I can't navigate from one email to the next/previous from inside the email, I have to go back to the inbox every time; I really miss that function, too.
• It is so SLOW!

• The sending errors do seem to have slowed down - now I'm only getting them every few days, rather than several times per email; I can't say I'm missing the "saving draft"/"system busy" messages!
• And I can also, now, generally open an email at the first chance; it's been nearly two months since I have been able to say that.  Not that that was a thing I ever felt the need to say; I must have become very spoilt by BTYahoo! just sending my mails, opening them and saving drafts without constantly bugging out.

• The autosuggestions when filling in the addressee box is so weird: the old one used to bring up words starting with the letter I typed...  For David, I used to type "d", and then I could tab his address in [I'd got him entered with a nickname of David (imaginative, much?), so he was at the top of the list], or if I wanted one of the other David's in my address book, I would use the down arrows to pick which one.  Now I type in "d", and the list starts with "Adam... (tree surgeon)" - fair enough, his name has a "d" in it, as does Amanda's, but why does "Ancient Mariner" appear above David(s)?  [His domain, Gondwanaland,  name contains a "d" (or two), that's why.]  Who uses that programming logic?
• Autosuggestion, again: when I type in "dav" now shows: David Ro***, David Ri***, David Ro*** [work address], David Ca*** [address I want], David Ca*** [old address that I deleted, and is nowhere in my address book], David Ro*** [again!].  Two things: why would autosuggest keep prompting me to accept an email address that no longer exists; and why wouldn't it choose them by most-used if it absolutely can't get its "head" around using alphabetical order?

• Total failure of communication from BT - nuff said; they've been up to their normal standards of denying they might ever be responsible.  The refusal of the website to let me log faults felt like salt in the wounds, though!  Just because over three thousand people have reported this fault today, in week three of our misery, doesn't mean I don't want my voice heard, or your statistics to reflect the true number of people reporting a problem.

On one forum [a BT one, I think], some snarky user was berating another user, saying along the lines of "if the loss of Yahoo! mail is the only gripe you've got about BT, get over it", and the other user said basically what I think "Yahoo! mail was the only good thing going for being a BT customer".  It's made me very keen to tidy up all my emails so that when we move, I'm not tied into choosing BT for our new home!

This was the final cherry on the cake, as I've had a summer of tech problems: first the broadband stopped working [BT], then the landline [BT], then my mobile wouldn't charge [a big thanks to Russell for suggesting cleaning the terminals - a wooden toothpick saved me from buying a new phone, helped by the people in the phone shop avoiding eye contact when we were trying to get served - thanks you, guys, too!], so no mobile calls/texts, and then I've been virtually unreachable by email for weeks and weeks.

I'm so glad that everything is back to [reasonably close to] normal!

And apologies if you've waded your way through this, over two months on 1990's level functionality and more crashes than I've ever had with any package ever has made me a "bit stabby" as one of my favourite phrases stolen from the internet has it!  And it hasn't improved either my lucidity of writing or my blood pressure reading the notes I was keeping as it all went along, and remembering how it felt.

[End rant]