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BT Yahoo! ate my email

Mighty powerful spam filters

BT reckons that "a couple of thousand" customer have been hit by a snag that has left users of its ISP services without email.

The monster telco is currently migrating some 1.8 million users over to its BT Yahoo! platform following a tie-up between the two companies announced last year. The migration began early in January and is expected to be completed by the end of April.

As part of the move, punters get a new BT Yahoo! Mail service which includes spam and anti-virus filters bolted on to the system.

And, according to one reader, the spam filters worked instantly.

But as he explains: "My initial delight that I received not a single spam instead of the usual 50 every morning was wiped out when I realised I wasn't receiving any normal emails either - well, drips and drabs, but soon I was getting phone calls from friends asking why I hadn't replied to them."

And he's not alone. Here's what another reader had to say: "BT recently informed me that my BT Openworld account had been updated to BT Yahoo! internet (not that I asked for it or anything). I wondered why I wasn't getting much email.

"It turned out that the spam filter, which worked pretty well when it was BT Openworld, was eating all my email. It gobbled my daily football email from The Grauniad, snatched away normal innocent emails from normal innocent people, and best of all it zapped 'Your new BT eBill available to view online' from BT.

"The only thing it lets through is spam," he said.

According to other readers, BT Yahoo!'s new spam filters are so efficient they don't let anything through.

A statement from the monster telco apologises for hitch but explains that the spam filters aren't up to speed yet. Once they are, though, the matter should be sorted.

Said BT: "The filtering of spam from customer's mailboxes has not yet reached its optimal performance level. This is primarily because we need a significant volume of mailboxes (500,000) with @btopenworld or @btinternet domains on Yahoo!'s mail platform. This is so that Yahoo!'s spam filtering algorithms can identify the specific attacks and bulk mailings to @btopenworld and @btinternet domains. This should will be achieved very shortly.

"We understand that this problem has affected a couple of thousand of our customers and we apologise for any inconvenience this has caused." ®

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