BT bodged its email storage upgrade yesterday after punters received emails warning them that they are exceeding their Yahoo! Mail storage quota by a "very large amount" and that their accounts had been "temporarily disabled from receiving new messages".

Yesterday, the UK's dominant fixed line telco announced it had "beefed up storage in time for the summer hols".

All BT Yahoo! Broadband and narrowband customers are to get improved email services, the telco said, "kicking off with a boost to mail storage capacity".

In a statement the telco said: "With immediate effect, all broadband and most narrowband accounts will increase from the current 50MB level to 2GB (40 times bigger than previously). Secondary mail accounts will increase from 10MB to 100MB."

However, even before BT had issued its statement trumpeting its move, The Register had received emails from bemused BT punters trying to figure out what the telco was up to now.

They'd received an email from the "BT Yahoo! Mail Team", telling them: "You are currently exceeding your Yahoo! Mail storage quota by a very large amount. You are only allowed -2048.0MB of storage but you are currently using 2.6MB of storage. Your account has been temporarily disabled from receiving new messages."

One bemused reader told us: "I don't think that their mailbox size upgrade went quite to plan - they're expecting us to ensure that we have -2GB of email in our mailboxes."

A BT spokesman admitted that the email had been "sent in error" to around 10,000 customers and that as soon as the mistake was spotted, an apology was sent out. Email accounts were never disabled, he assured us. ®

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