No, my email password is NOT wrong!!!
July 24, 2013 2:52 AM Subscribe
BTYahoo! seems to be developing signs of dementia.
I have been with BT Yahoo! for ages. For a long time, I only had 1 computer and the service occasionally pretended to forget my password but usually saw sense after several re-inputs. In the meantime my devices have multiplied (all Apple OSX and iOS though) and the problem has become more frequent and severe.
Strangely, despite all devices accessing the same account (and therefore the same settings), they seem differentially affected. Sometimes a device will still be able to receive emails but not send them. Unfortunately my MacBook (which I use most of all) is the worst affected and has lost email access completely.
I have tried emptying the browser cache and this seemed to help temporarily but now the fault is back. Apple forums suggest BTYahoo! is infamous for this. BTYahoo! doesn't seem to offer telephone support for their email service, so short of reinstalling the account (which I fear may lose me years of emails) or changing my email provider service (which I hesitate doing) I am close to stuck.
If you have had this (or a similar) problem, how did you fix it? Any ideas?
I have been with BT Yahoo! for ages. For a long time, I only had 1 computer and the service occasionally pretended to forget my password but usually saw sense after several re-inputs. In the meantime my devices have multiplied (all Apple OSX and iOS though) and the problem has become more frequent and severe.
Strangely, despite all devices accessing the same account (and therefore the same settings), they seem differentially affected. Sometimes a device will still be able to receive emails but not send them. Unfortunately my MacBook (which I use most of all) is the worst affected and has lost email access completely.
I have tried emptying the browser cache and this seemed to help temporarily but now the fault is back. Apple forums suggest BTYahoo! is infamous for this. BTYahoo! doesn't seem to offer telephone support for their email service, so short of reinstalling the account (which I fear may lose me years of emails) or changing my email provider service (which I hesitate doing) I am close to stuck.
If you have had this (or a similar) problem, how did you fix it? Any ideas?
Could you set up a gmail account in parallel and import your old mail into that. If that is successful, close down the btyahoo mail account. In the meantime you haven't lost anything. If you are desperate to keep the btyahoo address you can get the gmail account to pull mail across from it (or set up forwarding at the bt end).
posted by crocomancer at 5:44 AM on July 24, 2013
posted by crocomancer at 5:44 AM on July 24, 2013
Following on from crocmancer's suggestion, if you do want to keep the BT Yahoo! email for any reason* (but use another, better service for day to day email), you'll need to log in to Yahoo at least once a month (they say every 150 days but this is lying, ruin-everything-it-touches Yahoo! we're talking about) or risk losing it completely.
* For example, I have a free Flickr Pro account via my original BT email address (which became a BT-Yahoo email address long after stopped using it regularly) but I'm wondering if that will change now that BT have "dumped Yahoo".
posted by humph at 5:55 AM on July 24, 2013
* For example, I have a free Flickr Pro account via my original BT email address (which became a BT-Yahoo email address long after stopped using it regularly) but I'm wondering if that will change now that BT have "dumped Yahoo".
posted by humph at 5:55 AM on July 24, 2013
Response by poster: Thanks so much guys for your useful advice. To update, I have done a password reset using another browser as suggested by dancing lamb, and it worked for less than a day the first time but considerably longer (actually until now) the second time. Not sure if the particular make of the browser makes a difference - I have FireFox and Chrome besides Safari and generally avoid IE whenever possible. The landscape has been shifting also - BT are divorcing their email business from Yahoo!, and I have received a notice [long expected] that I will have to pay in some form or fashion if I want to hold on to my btinternet email address from September. As we are contemplating changing our broadband from 2 "old" installations (for increased bandwidth) to 1 fibre optic connection anyway, we have now decided to go with BT for that and can thereby keep the existing email address for free. It is hoped that the new connection may prove less troublesome than before ...
Further comments on this strategy (especially from UK members) are very welcome before we go ahead and do something we might regret ... alternative fibre optic broadband providers for us are SKY and TalkTalk ...
posted by kairab at 5:00 AM on August 24, 2013
Further comments on this strategy (especially from UK members) are very welcome before we go ahead and do something we might regret ... alternative fibre optic broadband providers for us are SKY and TalkTalk ...
posted by kairab at 5:00 AM on August 24, 2013
Response by poster: Forgot to mention that I also (as a backup) installed MS Office Outlook and have been getting all my emails in parallel through this. However sending emails has proved intermittently troublesome with both Mail and Outlook as email clients - not sure why as it seems to be happening very much on and off.
posted by kairab at 5:02 AM on August 24, 2013
posted by kairab at 5:02 AM on August 24, 2013
This thread is closed to new comments.
The same exact thing happened to me last week (although, admittedly I'm in the US). The...brain trust at Yahoo support was pretty useless. However, once I tried this as a last resort, it finally worked.
I then just went back to my iPad, iPhone and usual browser and switched to the new password with no problems at all.
Good luck.
posted by dancinglamb at 4:12 AM on July 24, 2013