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HELP! I have been locked out of email for 10 days and counting

Anna5 — Sun, 19 Dec 2021 12:10:43 GMT

I divide my time between the UK and South America and since coming out here on Thursday last week I have been locked out of email completely. I have rung BT 6 times, spoken to 7 different people and made an official complaint, none of which has done anything to fix it. This is now critical as I can't access my local bank account without this email and have urgent bills to pay, let alone business email unanswered for 10 days. I am up a mountain in the Andes with little else in the way of comms and desperately need this email back NOW. What can I do to instill some sense of urgency into BT?

Re: HELP! I have been locked out of email for 10 days and counting

Keith_Beddoe — Sun, 19 Dec 2021 12:12:29 GMT

@Anna5

Are you a business user?

Re: HELP! I have been locked out of email for 10 days and counting

Anna5 — Sun, 19 Dec 2021 12:27:13 GMT

It's not a business account as such but used for freelancing. And by contractors working for me.

Re: HELP! I have been locked out of email for 10 days and counting

Keith_Beddoe — Sun, 19 Dec 2021 12:34:58 GMT

@Anna5 wrote:

It's not a business account as such but used for freelancing. And by contractors working for me.

I expect you have been locked out due to suspicious activity, as you are operating the account outside of the UK. There are restrictions on how you use your account as explained in the T&Cs.

You would be better using an email account which is not tied to a specific ISP, something like Gmail which is global. Its never a good idea to use a residential customer email account for business use.

As this is just a customer to customer help forum, nobody here would be able to help, but you may get some advice on what to try.

Re: HELP! I have been locked out of email for 10 days and counting

licquorice — Sun, 19 Dec 2021 13:03:02 GMT

Can you access webmail here

Re: HELP! I have been locked out of email for 10 days and counting

Anna5 — Sun, 19 Dec 2021 13:09:55 GMT

It's worked OK from here for the past 4 years, with one shorter interruption in May of this year, so evidently something's changed. I do have a gmail address so that's good idea, I could switch to that one for most purposes, but need to get into the BT one meantime.

Re: HELP! I have been locked out of email for 10 days and counting

Anna5 — Sun, 19 Dec 2021 16:30:39 GMT

Hi licquorice, and no, webmail doesn't work, that's how I access my email normally.

Re: HELP! I have been locked out of email for 10 days and counting

Keith_Beddoe — Sun, 19 Dec 2021 17:29:10 GMT

@Anna5

Are you a current BT Broadband customer when you are in the UK?

If not, its possible your email address has been deleted.

Re: HELP! I have been locked out of email for 10 days and counting

Anna5 — Sun, 19 Dec 2021 19:49:09 GMT

Yes, I have BT broadband in the UK and it's working fine. The problem is that BT's system thought my accessing webmail from here was suspicious. OK, that's understandable, but now they know it's not, why can't they unlock it? I have spoken to 7 people at BT in the past 10 days and I still don't have email. And it's taking up to half an hour to get through each time. It's not like I've never been to this particular country before - I've lived here for periods of up to a year. And I'm sure other BT customers must leave the UK from time to time.

Re: HELP! I have been locked out of email for 10 days and counting

NeilO — Mon, 20 Dec 2021 09:33:51 GMT

Hi, @Anna5 I'm really sorry to see you're experiencing problems accessing your BT email address as I can appreciate the inconvenience this is causing you.

I'll send you a private message in a moment so you can send over your details to the moderation team and we'll be happy to ask our email experts to look at this for you.

Thanks

Neil