Monstrous new BT email upgrade

[licquorice]

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@Jules68 wrote:

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Whilst Ofcom can act as an ombudsman their remit is far wider. In this case it could be argued that it falls within their competition remit - BT as a Broadband supplier has Significant Market Power - as email forms part of their broadband offer making a substandard email offering can be understood to be taking advantage of their market power and be anti-competitive.  Of course, this is an issue for debate, but there is at least a prima facie case to be taken to Ofcom. The Ombudsman timing and process you quote here is not relevant to this part of Ofcom's role.

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See message 1638

[Jules68]

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@licquoricewrote:

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@Jules68wrote:

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Whilst Ofcom can act as an ombudsman their remit is far wider. In this case it could be argued that it falls within their competition remit - BT as a Broadband supplier has Significant Market Power - as email forms part of their broadband offer making a substandard email offering can be understood to be taking advantage of their market power and be anti-competitive.  Of course, this is an issue for debate, but there is at least a prima facie case to be taken to Ofcom. The Ombudsman timing and process you quote here is not relevant to this part of Ofcom's role.

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See message 1638

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Ofcom will be concerned if they believe that BT is using its Market Power to 'get away' with offering services which a fully competitive entity would not offer. With a claimed 5 million email customers - and many more households with broadband services from them,  an evidenced disdain for meeting customer needs is evidence (potentially) for abuse of power. An email service is not a Universal Service Obligation (USO) certainly, but high handed approaches to customers 'because you can'  shows an abuse of market power. BT's relationship with Ofcom is always tricky, BT does not want them having a further stick to beat them with, so threatening an Ofcom competition reference can be a good way of getting BT to listen to you. If other problems are in the offing, this may well be a last straw, causing Ofcom to find against them (to demonstrate they can) , and even though BT might very well win an appeal, that is an expensive route to follow.

I am on record (here) as believing that the numbers who are receiving a very, very poor email service from BT are probably comparatively low (as I suspect from personal experience that the coding for the Web Mail service is clashing with some installed software or drivers on only some machines) - but the rushed and poor way the migration has been managed, and the admittedly sub-standard design does impact all customers.

[licquorice]

You are totally missing my point. The email service is perfectly fine, it is the BT supplied User Interface that is the problem. It is not necessary to use the BT supplied User Interface. There are many free email clients available and if that is not an acceptable solution and a webmail interface is required, the mail can be forwarded to or fetched from one of the free email providers'  webmail interface.

[Jules68]

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@licquoricewrote:

You are totally missing my point. The email service is perfectly fine, it is the BT supplied User Interface that is the problem. It is not necessary to use the BT supplied User Interface. There are many free email clients available and if that is not an acceptable solution and a webmail interface is required, the mail can be forwarded to or fetched from one of the free email providers'  webmail interface.

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I think you may be missing mine. BT's interface is necessary if you wish to make alterations to BT's handling of email - for instance you cannot change BT's wrong treatment of SPAM through a client (or actually through BT's own mobile app!) We have all discovered that marking things as 'not spam' is insufficient - you also need to mark the sender as a 'safe sender' (and vice versa).  You also cannot create mail folders or move or rename them  without using BT's interface.

Additionally there are numbers of people who need to read their emails but may not have access - for instance at work - to a machine on which they can install their chosen client - and that is also true of people travelling who may be using public machines. So access just through a client is not fully sufficient, even though for many of us it is a huge boon.

Whilst BT has not yet got its security algorithms sorted (and it hasn't) access to its own interface is still key. You simply can't, as far as I can see, change anything inside their email service except through their interface. Any 'spam' adjustments you make will simply work on your chosen client or email forwarder, not on BT's underlying algorithms.

So, if you take email at all from BT then on some occasions you are stuck with their failing front -end. And for some people who may not be tech savvy or have their own machine to use, on all occasions.

[gg30340]

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@Jules68 wrote:

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Ofcom will be concerned if they believe that BT is using its Market Power to 'get away' with offering services which a fully competitive entity would not offer. With a claimed 5 million email customers - and many more households with broadband services from them,  an evidenced disdain for meeting customer needs is evidence (potentially) for abuse of power. An email service is not a Universal Service Obligation (USO) certainly, but high handed approaches to customers 'because you can'  shows an abuse of market power. BT's relationship with Ofcom is always tricky, BT does not want them having a further stick to beat them with, so threatening an Ofcom competition reference can be a good way of getting BT to listen to you. If other problems are in the offing, this may well be a last straw, causing Ofcom to find against them (to demonstrate they can) , and even though BT might very well win an appeal, that is an expensive route to follow.

I am on record (here) as believing that the numbers who are receiving a very, very poor email service from BT are probably comparatively low (as I suspect from personal experience that the coding for the Web Mail service is clashing with some installed software or drivers on only some machines) - but the rushed and poor way the migration has been managed, and the admittedly sub-standard design does impact all customers.

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Do you seriously believe that BT are "using its Market Power to 'get away' with offering services which a fully competitive entity would not offer. With a claimed 5 million email customers - and many more households with broadband services from them,  an evidenced disdain for meeting customer needs is evidence (potentially) for abuse of power"  

The very fact that they have acknowledged and have started to implement fixes with more to follow blows that argument out of the water.   

Yet more speculation and hypothesis in this part "  BT does not want them having a further stick to beat them with, so threatening an Ofcom competition reference can be a good way of getting BT to listen to you. If other problems are in the offing, this may well be a last straw, causing Ofcom to find against them (to demonstrate they can) , and even though BT might very well win an appeal, that is an expensive route to follow"  or do you have evidence of this?

[Jules68]

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@gg30340wrote:

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@Jules68wrote:
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Do you seriously believe that BT are "using its Market Power to 'get away' with offering services which a fully competitive entity would not offer. With a claimed 5 million email customers - and many more households with broadband services from them,  an evidenced disdain for meeting customer needs is 

The very fact that they have acknowledged and have started to implement fixes with more to follow blows that argument out of the water.   

The argument here would include the speed and care (given when this move was first mooted) that BT has taken, together with its failure to halt the migration once it was clear that something wasn't right. Using customers as unwilling beta testers  would be another case to make here

Yet more speculation and hypothesis in this part "  BT does not want them having a further stick to beat them with, so threatening an Ofcom competition reference can be a good way of getting BT to listen to you. If other problems are in the offing, this may well be a last straw, causing Ofcom to find against them (to demonstrate they can) , and even though BT might very well win an appeal, that is an expensive route to follow"  or do you have evidence of this?

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Ofcom is a regulator and no regulated company likes to have its regulator on its back.  Sure I was hypothesising a scenario - but that's what you do in management and strategy. I was commending such a reference to Ofcom as being something that might gee up BT to put more resource and effort into this (and possibly even slow down or halt the migration until it's solved). And do you think I need 'evidence' to suggest that involving lawyers is anything but alarmingly expensive? 

[PaddyB]

Hi Everyone

We've seemed to have gone on off on a tangent again. Please and we keep this thread on topic.

Thanks

PaddyB

[JohnRH]

@PaddyB 

To be fair I think people are finding it difficult to keep this on topic because with even the smallest problems not seemingly being resolved users are becoming extremely frustrated. This is not helped by suggestions ranging from "the answer is probably somewhere in these 160 pages", "I can't understand what all the fuss is about my system is fine",  "google it" or "install another user interface, that's all you have to do".....apologies as those quotes aren't exact but if you've been reading all this you'll get my drift.

[goldmankind]

Dare I say  ive  had  words with Boris    who  says  We have a plan   Use  BT  dont use BT  if you can use BT   dont use BT  if  you must use BT  use it    BT  web mail  to  the people   lol 

[gg30340]

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@Jules68 wrote:

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@gg30340wrote:

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@Jules68wrote:
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Do you seriously believe that BT are "using its Market Power to 'get away' with offering services which a fully competitive entity would not offer. With a claimed 5 million email customers - and many more households with broadband services from them,  an evidenced disdain for meeting customer needs is 

The very fact that they have acknowledged and have started to implement fixes with more to follow blows that argument out of the water.   

The argument here would include the speed and care (given when this move was first mooted) that BT has taken, together with its failure to halt the migration once it was clear that something wasn't right. Using customers as unwilling beta testers  would be another case to make here

Yet more speculation and hypothesis in this part "  BT does not want them having a further stick to beat them with, so threatening an Ofcom competition reference can be a good way of getting BT to listen to you. If other problems are in the offing, this may well be a last straw, causing Ofcom to find against them (to demonstrate they can) , and even though BT might very well win an appeal, that is an expensive route to follow"  or do you have evidence of this?

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Ofcom is a regulator and no regulated company likes to have its regulator on its back.  Sure I was hypothesising a scenario - but that's what you do in management and strategy. I was commending such a reference to Ofcom as being something that might gee up BT to put more resource and effort into this (and possibly even slow down or halt the migration until it's solved). And do you think I need 'evidence' to suggest that involving lawyers is anything but alarmingly expensive? 

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Oh my mistake, I didn't realise that you were the management and strategy team of "Fix BTMail" or that you had all the inside information on how BT would react to a customer complaining to Ofcom and how Ofcom would deal with the complaint.