Re: Passcode When Logging Into Webmail - Page 2

gg30340 · ‎07-06-2026

I fail to see how you are being "discriminated" or "punished" by BT because they have "enhanced" the security of your email account. If anything you should be complaining that it has not activated on your family members accounts.

Did you "gift" your family the BTMail accounts by following the following procedure whereby they become responsible for the email account and have their own BTID in order to manage the account or did you just tell them to use the email account and it is still "owned" by you and managed by you which means only you can change the password and you can still have access to it?

See link about gifted email accounts.

Creating BT Email addresses | Email | BT Help

If you "gifted" the email account to them they will, if using webmail and not an email client, have to set up 2FA by following the procedure when they log in.

This will activate the 2FA and in their MyBT they will see that it has been activated by looking at the Your Details > Personal Details page

If you did not gift the email account to them the email account is still "owned" by you and managed by you and it should be activated on these accounts . If it is not you should contact BT 0330.1234.150.

As regards paying for an email client, there are many free email clients such as the Thunderbird email client which are as good as and probably better than Microsofts offerings that you could use and save your self money.

2FA does not work with email clients or email apps because the email client/app is device based in order to logon and use them and hopefully your device is secure to prevent unauthorised use where as webmail can be accessed from any web browser on any device any where in the world.

Sulla · ‎08-09-2026

Since posting my first comment on this thread, I have not been prompted by the 2FA system for authentication. This would suggest that 2FA has been suspended.

PeteThePen1 · ‎08-09-2026

Hi

Thanks for the update on the Passcode issue. I am happy to report that has been removed for my account too, so life is simpler again. There was a brief spell when the Pass Code was changed for an "Are you a spam bot?" question that asked you to use the 'click on the photos with cars' system. That was an improvement as it did at least mean that I did not have to go and find my phone. The only trouble was that some of the little photos were of very poor quality so finding the presence of the chosen object was not easy.

Hope that you enjoy your time with BT Webmail, but do look out for the 'flags' problem. You will have noticed that when you read an email and then close it the system leaves it with a flag. Great idea if you want to see which emails you have looked at in this session, but it hides a 'trap'. Assuming that you have read 2 emails and closed them and next find something that looks like spam. So you flag that email and go to 'Mark as Spam and block sender' and then continue. What will have happened is that the senders of your two previous reads will now have been blocked and marked as spammers as well as the bad email. So if you are expecting emails from particular sources and they don't appear that is how they will have been blocked. You will need to go in to the list of blocked senders (Settings\Mail\Blocked Senders) and delete their addresses.

Regards

Pete

PeteThePen1 · ‎09-09-2026

Good Morning

I clearly spoke too soon. Two factor is back on both my machines now. Looks as if we will have to go on complaining about it...

Regards

Pete

licquorice · ‎09-09-2026

And then complain that your email account has been hacked

Wolf_b0i · ‎10-09-2026

I have a similar issue. A couple of months ago BT made me set up verification and it would ask me every day. after a couple of weeks it learnt to recognize my pc and stopped asking. Then yesterday it suddenly started asking again.

PeteThePen1 · ‎10-09-2026

Hi

Sorry to hear that it has happened to you too.

I suppose that my basic gripe with BT is that they tend to impose this sort of thing on us. We are not asked if we would like to participate which is what a range of other organisations have done when thinking about introducing 2FA. I understand that webmail is potentially more open to attack than an email client, but that assumes that the user's machine is secure. However, given how many popular apps like FakeBook scrape the user's machine for data my suspicion is that there is not too much difference.

My choice is to pay a substantial sum for virus and other machine protection and avoid apps that are known to scrape for data. Thus my use of webmail should be fairly secure but BT has decided not without asking me.

Hey ho!

Regards

Pete

Wolf_b0i · ‎10-09-2026

According to Google AI assistant, which one can believe or not believe, the issue may be caused by a windows or browser update. According to the AI windows update sometimes modifies the cookies you have stored which causes the site to forget it knows your pc. Anyhow I am hoping that after a couple of weeks it will re-learn again.

Sulla · ‎10-09-2026

I spoke too soon.

After my post on 2026-09-08, I was put through the 2FA setup process while logging into my BT ID Portal on 2026-09-09.

I am not yet prompted for a PIN when I log into Webmail accounts, but as of today (2026-09-10), I have been having problems fetching emails via IMAP and viewing emails in Webmail. I do not know if the issues are linked, but the timing of the events hints that there may be some connection. Details of the issues I am experiencing with IMAP and Webmail are in a separate discussion.

Wolf_b0i · ‎10-09-2026

I've been getting the same. Apparently a fix is mark the email as read then click it again. I tried it a couple of times and it sometimes seems to work.