So what's up with BT Internet?

14:43.19 - Tuesday 29th March 2005   (Link to This Entry)

Dayum, this is turning into a regular series. I should register WWW.SOWHATSUPWITH.COM and put them all in one place.

BT have been emailing business customers warning them that their ability to send emaill is going to be stopped unless they authenticate themselves with the SMTP server. This is all well and good, and in these days of mass-mailing spam viruses perhaps even logical and desireable. The downer is the fact that BT simply don't have a clue.

Business customers tend to have domain names. Because they have domain names they generally don't collect their email from BT servers, but their own or those of their hosts. Twice now, BT have told my customers to "just tick the box that says 'my server requires authentication' and it'll be fine" and broken their email systems. The customers don't know this and wonder what they've done wrong, and then call me because I'm not in Bangalore with an accent so thick you could float rocks in it.

The problem is, BT are employing overseas (read: India) workers with a minimal grasp of the nuances of the English language and whose only real ability is to read from a prepared script, hoping against hope that everything will work. For many home users who have @btinternet.com addresses this is fine, but businesses are a whole other matter. Neither of the customers I've had to deal with were asked what kind of email setup they were using - they just received an email with some general instructions.

Even more bizarre, my customer who was told they'd be cut off on the 22nd March can still send email via mail.btinternet.com - just as long as they don't authenticate with the server. WTF is that all about? Sheesh!