BT has been forced to roll back changes it made to its rules on outgoing email addresses after they caused confusion for its broadband customers.

In March, the firm's Retail tentacle applied restrictions that meant customers who do not use an "@btinternet.com" address for outgoing mail must verify it to avoid a 553 SMTP error.

BT has now decided to clarify the process before giving it another whirl. A statement released by the firm said:

The email security enhancements we introduced earlier this month, although only affecting a minority of our customers, had a greater impact than we had expected.

This is an important security enhancement needed to prevent spam and phishing abuse on the Internet however we rolled-back recent phases of this work as soon as we realised the impact it was having on customers and this will have cleared most of the recently-experienced 553 errors.

If you have use a different email address in the "From" field of your email client to that of your BT Yahoo! email address then it can still be used as long as the email address is not another BT or Yahoo! email address.

Got that? BT said it would try again "once we are satisfied the customer journey is as clear and simple as possible". Which is nice.

More here, courtesy of Thinkbroadband.com, including help if you're still having problems. ®

Related stories

• BT hands top job to Retail chief (8 April 2008)
• Exclusive BT and Phorm secretly tracked 18,000 customers in 2006 (1 April 2008)
• Exclusive BT pimped customer web data to advertisers last summer (27 February 2008)
• Updated BT home router wide open to hijackers (9 October 2007)
• PlusNet email goes adrift (8 January 2007)