I phoned BT on 26th August 2023 to give notice that I wished to cancel my services (broadband, digital voice and mobile phone) with them. I knew that this would result in my email service changing from ‘standard’ to ‘basic’ when the contract ended on 27th September 2023 and was already familiar with what those changes would be.
Later that same day I received an email telling me that I would soon be downgraded to BT’s Basic email service. No date was given in the email, but since I would be paying for my services up till the 27th September I expected that (or the next day) to be when the changes would happen.
Four days later (30th August) I noticed that the email client on my mobile phone wasn’t collecting emails from my BT addresses and was saying ‘Credentials needed’ for all four accounts. My Gmail account was just fine. I tried signing in with what I know are the correct email addresses and passwords several times but it didn’t work. I went onto my laptop and found that I could login to my emails on the web and realised that the changes were those associated with changing from BT’s standard email service to the basic one. More disturbingly, I also noticed that I had received an email telling me that BT would be stopping my Basic email service. That shouldn’t happen, even when you stop being a customer for broadband as long as you keep using the email address. Clearly something had gone wrong. I phoned BT customer service later that morning and was told that my service was being shown as ‘basic’ for email and that it would take up to 24 hours to rectify the problem with my email client and also that the changes mentioned in the email (which for some reason BT insists on referring to as an ‘order’) had been cancelled.
The next morning (31st) nothing had changed. Before phoning customer services again, I checked that I could access my emails on the web and found that I could, but I had received another email telling me that my basic email service would be stopping soon – exactly the same wording as the day before. I still couldn’t access email via my email client app on my phone. So later that morning I phoned customer services again. I was told that my service was being shown as ‘standard’. We tried a couple of things, involving my Gmail app and the BT email app which I was asked to download to my phone. Nothing worked and the error message I was getting didn’t seem to match any that the assistant was aware of and I got the feeling he might have been out of ideas. He then suggested we tried yet another third party email client. At this point I decided to put my foot down and I said, ‘Look, I am convinced that BT has done something to my email account that they shouldn’t have done. Despite the fact that you say it is showing me as being on the standard service it is working like the basic service. I really feel we are clutching at straws now. I think we need to escalate this problem.’ Or words similar to that. The assistant told me that he would pass it on to someone else. I’m afraid I didn’t catch the job title he used but he promised that they would call me that afternoon. At around 1pm to 2pm. I am still waiting for that call (at 11am the following morning) and my services are just the same.
I am posting this here because I just can’t cope with phoning customer services again. I have seen a post on the community with a similar issue and the ‘solved’ post was submitted by a moderator called ‘DanielS’, so if anyone knows how to get to him I would really appreciate his help.
