Managing 18,000 emails when you can only highlight & manipulate 50 at a time.

[Thersites]

Long ago I concluded that BT Webmail was hopelessly & irredeemably rubbish. But, and confounding my expectations, the programming error that had caused the error message 'An unexpected error has occurred' to appear on my screen several times every single day...a frequency which caused me to regard it as 'the expected error'....was fixed! (This was a couple of months ago - V2.27 or thereabouts).

It caused me to reconsider my opinion of BT - maybe someone WAS in control after all, and was starting to get a grip on the  rudimentary functionality and the discouraging UX.  Maybe one might hope for OTHER longstanding problems to start to be fixed as well......

But sadly this was only flight of fantasy:  nothing useful has come along since.  And today I was reminded - while doing some inbox tidying - that it would take me 360 successive highlight & delete operations if I wished to clear the 18000 messages from my Inbox & Sent folders.

Can no-one in BT see that, without management tools, BT Webmail will continue to be no more than a joke application?  Whether to manage a large folder tree, or to weed and tidy among a large number of blacklisted email and domain addresses, search tools are needed to locate individual needles in the haystack, and aggregation tools are needed to carry out operations on multiple records in the stack.

Can no-one in BT see this, and is no-one able to do something about it?

[NeilO]

Hi @Thersites Thanks for your feedback, this has been raised with our email team before. The specific reason is that we do not want our users to accidentally empty their complete mailboxes. However, there will be future updates to improve this functionality.

At the moment there is the option to delete up to 200 emails. While in the message list, you can keep the Shift key pressed and scroll to click on a later message in the list.

The BT email team do take an active interest in feedback that is raised by the community, your previous suggestion asking for a search feature on the white/blacklist was fed back to the dev teams. They did say that very few users have large lists so it wasn't previously considered.

Thanks

Neil

[Thersites]

Thank You Neil: for replying at all; for your reply's promptness; and for it being apposite to what I wrote.  I take nothing for granted nowadays.

"...we do not want our users to accidentally empty their complete mailboxes".  Just so, but it represents a lack of imagination on the part of the developers not to be able to introduce sensible safeguards for this.  Introducing a confirmation step if <more than n messages> or if <more than 25% of messages  in this folder> are to be deleted, and a second  "do you really, REALLY want to do this?" step if ALL messages are to be deleted are obvious possibilities.  Not forgetting that deleted messages are in the trash and are not deleted but are readily recoverable.  If you are trying to cater for a lack of gumption that wilI carry users through these prompts and STILL to regret it afterwards, then.....Jeez!

Thank you for the info on being able to highlight 200.  Please make the developers aware that there are more use cases than just to bulk delete messages that make it highly desirable to highlight large numbers of them at a time.  Such as moving large numbers of messages from one folder to another after recognising a categorisation error.  Or when organising messages out of Inbox into a sub-folder, I (and others, I'm sure) want to be able to pick messages out with a search on a common feature, highlight the lot at once, and move them at once.  It's not rocket science, and MS used to do this really well in Outlook Express, the email client so old that it hasn't been supported for 15yr now.

I'm pleased also to hear that the dev teams considered a searching function for white/blacklists, but am unimpressed at their reasoning and what it implies of the quality of business analysis available to them.  "few users have large lists" - really?  This is only a matter of time - as they would see if some brains were being applied to the problem.  Spammers move onto new addresses as their current ones get blacklisted.  And over time, there are more spammers.  Where do your devs think those trends lead?  And this might not be an issue were spam-filter heuristics to be perfect....which they should know is impossible.  I am categorising on average, 2new addresses or domains as spam EVERY DAY.   Can they STILL not see the need to provide management tools?

Finally, I want to suggest you consider establishing a User Group whose sole purpose is to help improve the BT Webmail software through bug-reporting, usability and development suggestions, and prioritisation.  The BT Community does NOT achieve this, partly because its focus is understandably mostly on increasing the familiarity of new users with the software, and partly because there is no user prioritisation mechanism.  The model for this is emisnug.org - the user group for the largest GP medical records software house in the country. A stripped down version of this, focused on the elements I suggest, would serve admirably.

There WILL be, among BT's users, a sufficient number with enough experience, technical understanding, organisational skills and articulacy to: if the context is set right, if the facilitative tools are provided and if it results in progress....to make a success of this with volunteered time and effort.  We gain a better UX, and BT's devs get not only fewer brickbats, but also the outsourcing of much of the business analysis effort.  Collaboration, not conflict.

Please give some careful thought to this - it is the User Group that has helped EMIS evolve into the best GP software in the UK.

[Andy_N]

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@Thersiteswrote:

Or when organising messages out of Inbox into a sub-folder, I (and others, I'm sure) want to be able to pick messages out with a search on a common feature, highlight the lot at once, and move them at once.  It's not rocket science, and MS used to do this really well in Outlook Express, the email client so old that it hasn't been supported for 15yr now.

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Why are you comparing a browser interface with a dedicated mail client such as OE ?

There is nothing to stop you using a proper mail client such as Thunderbird or any favourite. These clearly give the funtionality you want.

[Thersites]

This is an interesting response - and thank you for troubling to make it.  Having been quite unaware - till you pointed it out for me - that a dedicated browser interface is necessarily rubbish, I had thought that what I was doing was comparing one piece of software for handling email with...another piece of software...for handling email.  My choice of a comparator written 30yr ago was to illustrate just how far backwards 3 decades of progress has brought us.

With further contemplation, I have also begun to marvel at your raising hot objection to a constructive proposal for improvement.  Only a Pom, I thought, could whinge at being roused from mediocrity.  What might, I wondered, be your interest in clinging onto it?  What could have provoked your leap to stand in defence of British Telecom:  from the dangers of product enhancement; from the harms of software improvement; from the pernicious evil of a systematic approach to meet user needs?  Is this the role that Gurus play in Britain?  Do they clap you for it, in the way that they truly, deeply, value the NHS?

I may appear to mock, and appearances may - or they may not - be deceptive.  Nevertheless, I am genuinely interested in understanding why you were affronted by the idea of making a stagnant, buggy, un-ergonomic and minimally-functional piece of software better than it currently is.

[infinitywaiter]

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In all the many years of using BT, I've never used BT Email as my main email client.

I've always used Microsoft Outlook and used BT Email as a backup method only.

That way I can have the luxury of a properly designed email client and if anything happens, I am covered as my emails are still stored on BT servers.

Not trying to knock BT's own web email client, however everybody will have their own personal user preferences and some will be happy and think BT's is adequate for them, whilst others will want more etc and therefore go for a proper email client like Outlook or Thunderbird as mentioned previously, others are available too!

The only thing I do every so often is to log into BT Email and check spam folders to make sure that nothing is stuck in there that should have come through etc.

I do agree with your reasoning of being able to delete more than 200 at a time, along with a simple popup window with a checkbox that the user has to click to confirm that they want to delete all their emails for example.

Not that hard to implement something like that, then it is the users responsibility if they delete all emails and not BT as they have been made aware and still proceeded.

Other companies have done that and require a checkbox to be ticked to clear all the folders contents, so nothing stopping BT doing it too.

As you mention 18k emails, if you went say Outlook route instead, then you have you got additional settings that you can tick to occur like delete mail from server after so many days or delete from server when deleted etc.

Even simple things like that would clean up a lot of emails for you.

I also run Outlook as POP3 accounts too even though most nowadays will try to push you always down the IMAP route, so that anything I do there doesn't affect BT servers and emails stored, thus not affecting any backups needed

You could simply run as IMAP and anything you do through Outlook or any other client, would simply sync with BT servers.

See here:

https://www.bt.com/help/email/manage-email-account/manual-settings/what-are-the-settings-for-outgoin...

I also use a third party plugin for Outlook to save and back up my emails through the pst files that Outlook saves too on a daily basis once closed, onto a seperate external drive, which gives me a backup to Outlook first, before having to go back into BT Email for anything.

Finally, is it intentionally done the way you have turned your question about BT Email into an advertisement for the company you have mentioned?

[Thersites]

Thank you for a thoughtful response on the matter of email clients.  To address your last point first: I have no connection, financial or otherwise, with either the particular User Group I gave as example of my proposal for BTWebmail, or with the software house concerned.  My post could not possibly have been an advertisement: the User Group are not selling anything.   And the software house are not either - unless you happen to be an NHS purchasing manager looking to buy medical records software for GPs - and how many of them do you expect to see here and how much notice will they be taking of a blog post in a context such as this by someone they don't know?

My link to the User Group was chosen to show a real-world instantiation of the suggestion I was making and for you - and anyone else who wishes - to see how such a User Group might be constituted and organised.  Specifically also to show it is independent from (and not in the pocket of) the software house concerned.  That independence is vital in fulfilling its remit of improving the output of the software house.  So it was HIGHLY PERTINENT in this context for me to say that this UG has had a strong beneficial effect on the software quality & usability.  My assertion is no more an advertisement for EMIS than was your making mention of Outlook an advertisement for Microsoft.

Now to the substance:  I have had 10yr experience of Outlook, which ended after a corrupted .pst file lost me many Gigabytes of work messages and the backup proved unrecoverable.  It transpired that the backup procedure did not include read after write, and the backup device was failing to write properly.  At least that's what I was told.  At this point I learnt that all of several years of my emails had been condensed by Outlook into a single gigantic .pst file (rather than distributed for resilience among many smaller files).  This created a whopping single point of failure, compounded by the fact that MS encrypts the lot and so renders nothing recoverable even with a low-level examination.

Yes, I could do a much better job of the set-up if I was to do it a second time, but such was the aversive effect of this experience that I haven't wanted to.

Which brings me to your attitude to BT webmail, which I am mystified by.  In common with another commenter in this thread you seem so cheerfully accepting of mediocrity that you have no appetite for - you may even gently be resisting pressure for - a global improvement.  By saying that with Outlook you can "have the luxury of a properly designed email client" you indicate you expect no such luxury from BT and will forswear any effort to produce it.

By contrast, I do NOT think that BTWebmail is necessarily rubbish - it is rudimentary in function, buggy in operation and clumsy in UX because BT have not put in the development effort to design and make it otherwise.  They have satisficed - "It is good enough" - despite having told a different story when the (much better) Yahoo mail was ditched.  I specifically asked at that time what the development aspirations were, and was told by one of the mods that market-leading functionality was the aim.  Maybe it was said in good faith...but if this wasn't a porkie, it IS a fail.

So my proposal of a feedback and prioritisation mechanism that works in other contexts is an attempt to rouse the slumbering giant.  I see of course that if I am the only one who sees that it COULD be better - the only one who, from the gutter, sees some stars (pinched from Oscar Wilde)...then the enervating influence of corporate inertia will ensure nothing will change.

Therefore I WILL examine your suggestion anew - and thank you again for making it.  But I hope at the same time for some support for us all aiming higher.

[gg30340]

Thersites

You may find that the Achilles heel of your "proposal of a feedback and prioritisation mechanism that works in other contexts is an attempt to rouse the slumbering giant"  is that BT are no longer making email available to new broadband customers or present customers who have not yet set up a BTMail account so I suspect that BTMail is on a slow wind down to closure and as such I doubt there will be any more development or changes to the present system. 

I would suggest that you consider moving to another email supplier before my suspicions become a reality.

Broadband ISP BT to Scrap Email and Cloud for New Customers - ISPreview UK

[Andy_N]

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@Thersiteswrote:

This is an interesting response - and thank you for troubling to make it.  Having been quite unaware - till you pointed it out for me - that a dedicated browser interface is necessarily rubbish, I had thought that what I was doing was comparing one piece of software for handling email with...another piece of software...for handling email.  My choice of a comparator written 30yr ago was to illustrate just how far backwards 3 decades of progress has brought us.

With further contemplation, I have also begun to marvel at your raising hot objection to a constructive proposal for improvement.  Only a Pom, I thought, could whinge at being roused from mediocrity.  What might, I wondered, be your interest in clinging onto it?  What could have provoked your leap to stand in defence of British Telecom:  from the dangers of product enhancement; from the harms of software improvement; from the pernicious evil of a systematic approach to meet user needs?  Is this the role that Gurus play in Britain?  Do they clap you for it, in the way that they truly, deeply, value the NHS?

I may appear to mock, and appearances may - or they may not - be deceptive.  Nevertheless, I am genuinely interested in understanding why you were affronted by the idea of making a stagnant, buggy, un-ergonomic and minimally-functional piece of software better than it currently is.

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You are simply saying things I did not say or imply.

How about this. Gmail webmail is only slightly better than BTs webmail interface. Any mail client is going to be far, far better than any webmail offering.

One thing with something like Thunderbird or other mail client is backup. Thunderbird stores all the data in a dedicated folder which can be easily backed up and copied to a new machine if required.

The word Guru or other item listed against forum users (apart from CL)  is something the system does based on a secret algorithm tied in with number of posts and other items. Apart from that it actually means nothing.