Hi Everyone,
We would like to thank you all for your feedback in relation to the new BT email platform. Your feedback and comments are not being ignored. I am sorry it has taken some time to address the concerns that you have raised. I have read through all the comments on this growing discussion New BT email upgrade and our Email team have reviewed all the points that have been mentioned on the thread. Our email team are extremely keen on making sure we let you know what is going on and working with you to drive improvements.
What we have noticed is that some of the concerns that have been raised are down to the new email platform working slightly different to what you have been used to on BT Yahoo. I would highly recommend reviewing the content on this help page, We've updated your email as it will help you understand the changes.
Having written that, there are some issues that you have highlighted which is related to a bug, or functionality that is on the roadmap for future updates to the platform. Below is a list of concerns that you have raised and an update from us to address these;
Functionality still exists
- Attachments – Reports suggest that once an attachment is downloaded from an email, you can no longer view the attachment via the original email. You are still able to view the attachment via preview. There are plans to bring further improvement to this function in the near future
- Search – You have told us that if you search and this returns multiple results. Once you select one of the results you cannot easily back out to the search results, instead, you must rerun the search. You are able to navigate between search results by using the preview arrows. In our next update, we have added an exit button which will return you back to the search results
- Hovering your mouse over an email does not present an option to mark the email as read. This function still exists, if you hover your email over the email you wish to mark as read, you will notice 4 icons will be presented. The icon of an ‘eye’ is what you need to select to mark an email as read, you can also Reply, Flag for follow up and Delete. You can see an example from this help link, We've updated your email under the ‘Manage email with shortcut’ section
- Multi-folder search – We have read comments which suggest that when searching your email by word association, you need to know the folder to search in. On BT Yahoo the search results would present all emails containing the search term and the folder these emails are located in. This still works, when you search, click on the drop-down box and select ‘All inboxes. The search results will then list all emails that have matched your search terms and the folder in which they are stored
- Sending an email to groups – Some of you have reported that you are unable to send an email to existing groups you have set up when using email on a mobile device. This has been tested and works as expected. We believe that there may have been an issue which would be account specific so if you find you are unable to send an email to groups via a mobile, please create a new thread on the Community and we will help you work through this
- Mail not opening in list view via single click – This has been addressed and you can now open an email with one click
Roadmap or improvement coming in the next update
- Hovering your mouse over an email address to check if the address is genuine and has not been spoofed – This item is on our roadmap for a future release, so we are planning on returning this functionality
- Hovering your mouse over a link contained in an email does not present a popup to show the full URL – This is something that is on the roadmap, so we plan to introduce this functionality in a later update so watch this space. In the meantime, if you hover your mouse over the link contained in an email, the full URL ill be presented at the bottom left-hand side of your browser screen
- Rules/Filters – We will be increasing the number of filters a mailbox can have so that it is significantly higher than any users currently have, this will solve this problem.
- Autocomplete contacts – You have told us that when composing an email and entering an email address, the address was auto-completed this will work on the new platform but the metadata driving it on BT Yahoo is not available to seed the new platform, we are looking at ways that we might seed this ourselves when we move mailboxes, for those already moved the system it will learn as you send emails
- Email sub-account remains on BT Yahoo when a primary email address has been moved to the new platform. You have told us that some of your email accounts have been migrated while others have not, which means that you may find that you cannot use the new BT mail app for all your email addresses – We are looking into ways to improve this process by grouping email accounts together so that when you are migrated, all your emails will be migrated to the new platform
- Folder naming convention – You have told us that the new email platform does not allow the use of certain special character and this is causing some problems. We are investigating improvement to naming conventions which we hope to include in future updates
Investigating
- Sync between mobile and webmail – We have read some reports that when you open an email via webmail, the email still appears as unread if you then access your email account via a mobile client. We are investigating this issue
- Sent items not appearing in the sent folder – We are investigating this issue and will reach out to those of you who have reported this issue for more info.
- Incorrect marking of spam – We are investigating reports that some of you find that emails are being incorrectly marked as spam on the new platform
- Folder counts not increasing – Reports suggests that when an email is added to a folder, the number counter does not reflect the change. We are investigating this issue and will update you when we know more
Bugs
- Deleting a message in ‘None’ view – Reports suggest that you must navigate in and out of your inbox once you delete an email. We are very sorry about your experience, after looking into this issue it appears to be a bug. We are working to better understand this issue and will update you all as soon as we have more info to share
- Authentication token expiry – You have told us that you have received a message on your mobile phone from BT to say that your authentication token has expired and is asking you to input your credentials again. This behaviour occurs on the BT Email app and we are investigating a potential bug. We will update you when we know more
- Sent email formatting – Reports suggest that any formatting that you include on an email is not presented in the sent folder. We believe this is a bug and are working to understand and resolve this issue
Other
- We have read some reports that the new email platform is performing slow, slow to move between folders, slow to delete or slow to navigate around webmail. We did experience some issue from our end which may explain the slow performance some of your experience. Performance is something that we will continually work on to drive improvement. At this time, we are not aware of an issue on the platform that would cause slow performance and the vast majority of customers are not reporting slow performance. We would still very much like to help anyone experiencing this issue but to do so I would strongly recommend creating your own thread
- Loss of contacts – You have told us that after you have been migrated to the new platform, you have noticed that some of your contacts have been lost. There is no, known problem, which would cause this issue, but we would very much like to help anyone who finds themselves in this situation. If you have lost contacts since the migration, please create your own thread here on Community and we will reach out to help further
I hope that this information helps you adjust to the new BT mail platform. We are dedicated to improving the BT email experience for everyone, so your feedback is vitally important. Please continue to offer your feedback and we will continue to review this with our email team and will update you accordingly.
If you are having a specific issue that has not been mentioned above, please create your own thread so that we can help you further. Please continue to offer your feedback on the main thread, here, New BT email upgrade as we are listening 😀
Hi Everyone,
I want to provide an update on my previous post. Our email team have updated me on a few of the issues everyone on Community has told us about, so I want to share these with you. Also, we have been working on a couple of other areas of email that you have told us about since my last update so I will update you on these as well
You have told us
- Spam
- That emails that you previously received to your inbox on BT Yahoo are now landing in the spam folder
- Email contacts that you have added to your safe sender list are being delivered to the spam folder
- The number of contacts that you can add to your safe sender list is too small
- Email notification from Community are going into your spam folder – This issue should now be fixed
- Emails from Amazon.co.uk are going to your spam folder – We are looking into this issue and appreciate the help that some you folks are providing
Spam controls are something that we constantly monitor and are working to improve. The new email platform will learn so please continue to categorise email as spam when it arrives, you can do so by selecting the email and then from the ‘More’ option choose ‘Mark as spam’ and if you find email being marked as spam which is not, please use the ‘Mark as not spam’. You can find this option by navigating to the spam folder, selecting the email and clicking on the ‘more’ option.
- Word documents - Copy and paste from Word documents do not retain some of the formatting once copied into an email. We are investigating this issue and will provide an update once we know more
- New emails are not highlighted when they arrive unless you refresh your page – We are looking into this and will provide updates once we know more
Update on issues we have addressed
- Rules/Filters – We will be increasing the number of filters a mailbox can have so that it is significantly higher than any users currently have, this will solve this problem.
- The number of rules that can be applied to a mailbox has now been increased. We have increased this significantly so you should not reach the new limit
- Folder naming convention – You have told us that the new email platform does not allow the use of certain special character and this is causing some problems.
- Our recommendation on using special characters in the naming of folders is to avoid special characters in folder names if possible or stick to characters within US-ASCII character set to reduce the risk of problems. # is useable but not currently at the start of a folder name.
- Authentication token expiry – You have told us that you have received a message on your mobile phone from BT to say that your authentication token has expired and is asking you to input your credentials again. This behaviour occurs on the BT Email app and we are investigating a potential bug.
- We have put in place a fix which has reduced the occurrence of the issue significantly on IOS, but less so on Android devices, which remains a priority investigation.
I will update this thread again as soon as I have more information to share.
Hi everyone,
Thank you for your continued patience while we have reviewed all the feedback you have kindly provided since being migrated over to the new BT Mail platform. We are keen to address all the points that our customers have raised. We have been working away in the background and below is the latest update on the feedback from you folks on Community.
We plan to address the feedback you have provided over the next few releases. Below is the target month in which we hope to roll out the new versions, all being well 😀 This is subject to change but we will update you when a newer version is released
- Release version 2.16 - August
- Release version 2.17 - September
- Release version 2.18 - October
Outstanding feedback from Community
- The number of contacts that you can add to your safe sender list is too small - This functionality will be addressed in a future release, we have targeted this for release version 2.16 in which we plan to increase the safe sender list to 1000
- Autocomplete contacts – You have told us that when composing an email and entering an email address, the address was auto-completed. This will work on the new platform but the metadata driving it on BT Yahoo is not available to seed the new platform, we are looking at ways that we might seed this ourselves when we move mailboxes, for those already moved the system will learn as you send emails - We are making improvements to our autocomplete function in an upcoming release (2.17) to give better matching to frequently used email addresses.
- Hovering your mouse over an email address to check if the address is genuine and has not been spoofed – This functionality will be addressed in a future release, we have targeted this for release version 2.18
- Hovering your mouse over a link contained in an email does not present a popup to show the full URL – This functionality will be addressed in a future release, we have targeted this for release version 2.18. In the meantime, if you hover your mouse over the link contained in an email, the full URL ill be presented at the bottom left-hand side of your browser screen
- Sync between mobile and webmail – We have read some reports that when you open an email via webmail, the email still appears as unread if you then access your email account via a mobile client – This functionality will be addressed in a future release, we are aiming for release version 2.18. There is a one-minute refresh rate set on email which means that it can take up to a minute for the data to update to reflect any changes. We have found that when an email which is deleted from an app or other email client, may still show on webmail even after the one-minute refresh timescale. A fix is coming to reconcile deleted or moved messages (or any state changes).
- Folder counts not increasing – Reports suggests that when an email is added to a folder, the number counter does not reflect the change – This functionality will be addressed in a future release, we have targeted this for release version 2.18
- Sent items not appearing in the sent folder – We continue to investigate this issue, we are looking to see if this is related to the migration of the email accounts, however, we are also looking at the possibility that issues arise with some clients having specific sent folders that are different to the standard sent folder and not synched to the server.
- New emails are not highlighted when they arrive unless you refresh your page – The default refresh interval for checking for new emails is 1 minute, this is configurable so please check in your settings in case it has been set to a longer interval.
Spam
- Incorrect marking of spam – We are investigating reports that some of you find that emails are being incorrectly marked as spam on the new platform - There is a known issue with forwarding email into btinternet.com if the forwarder does not use SRS (Sender writing scheme) this causes SPF (Sender Policy Framework) fails.
(SPF is an email authentication protocol that allows the owner of a domain to specify which mail servers they use to send mail from that domain.)
If SRS is not used by the forwarder then the email appears to come from an IP address other than one that is included in the SPF record. We encourage users to use safe senders and mark spam/not spam in webmail or the BT mail app. We are looking at having a “Mark as not spam and add to safe sender” functionality introduced. We are keen to investigate and fix false positives and we are actively working on and improving deliverability and reducing false positives.
We have noted that some customers are complaining that when you mark a message as spam you still receive emails from the same contact. When you 'Mark as Spam' you are adding a vote against that email, but this does not block that domain from sending you an email. This information is sent to our supplier and contributes to the learning algorithm. If you would like to immediately block emails from these senders, please use the 'Block sender and mark as spam'. We apologise for any confusion caused
- That emails that you previously received to your inbox on BT Yahoo are now landing in the spam folder – We are working very closely with our anti-spam supplier to minimise these. We highly recommend using safe senders to ensure emails you want to receive, are not treated as spam.
- Email contacts that you have added to your safe sender list are being delivered to the spam folder – A couple of weeks ago we rolled out release version 2.15 which included some improvements in this area, hopefully, you have noticed an improvement. This problem could also be caused by forwarding without SRS(see explanation above). If you find that emails from contacts included on your safe list are still going to the spam folder, please create your own thread here on Community and we will offer further support
Attachments
- Word documents - Copy and paste from Word documents do not retain some of the formattings once copied into an email - We are still investigating, we are looking at a major uplift of the browser editor in future but we don't have a release version or timescales to share just yet. We will update you as soon as we have more information to share.
Other fixes
- Issues with access calendar on webmail for talk21 customers - This defect has been fixed in release version 2.17. **Edit** Correction of release version: My apologies I stated that this issue would be fixed in release version 2.16, however, this will be addressed in release version 2.17. Sorry for any confusion caused)
New issues we are looking at
- Inline images failing – there is a limit of 300KB for inline images, anything larger needs to be attached as an attachment. We are looking at this limit to see whether it can be increased and are also looking at improving how this works
- Inline images scaling issue – when an image is embedded using local image function in composing into the body of an email (not attachment), then it is not scaled properly. We are investigating this issue
Cheers
Sean
Hi Everyone,
On my last update, I confirmed that there were a few improvements that we had targeted for release in version 2.18. Some of these did not make it into the latest release and I am sorry for any disappointment this will cause, rest assured we have already planned to introduce these in a later release. These are,
- Hovering your mouse over an email address to check if the address is genuine and has not been spoofed. We are now targeting version 2.20 to address this
- Hovering your mouse over a link contained in an email does not present a popup to show the full URL. We are now targeting version 2.20 to address this
- Sync between mobile and webmail – We have read some reports that when you open an email via webmail, the email still appears as unread if you then access your email account via a mobile client. We are now targeting version 2.20 to address this
- Folder counts not increasing – Reports suggests that when an email is added to a folder, the number counter does not reflect the change. We are now targeting version 2.20 to address this
We hope to deploy 2.20 in January 2021
Now for the other improvements that version 2.18 has included,
- There was an issue which meant that if there were comma’s or special characters in the names of your contacts then you were unable to send an email. This has now been fixed
- On occasion when you tried to add an inline image to the body of an email when composing, an error message was presented. This has now been fixed
- Contact auto-complete will now suggest the most recently used contacts
- When you now delete an email in the ‘None’ view you will be taken back to the message list
- When dealing with spam messages the following option now exists,
- Mark as spam and block sender,
- Mark as spam and block domain,
- Mark as spam,
- Mark as not spam and safe sender,
- Mark as not spam
- There was an issue in which your contact list did not show in the correct order when sorted by the last name. This has now been fixed
- Contact sort is now case sensitive
Cheers
Sean
