Posts Tagged Email
BT Email versus Gmail
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Computers & Technical, Non-writing on November 25, 2016
Over the last few months my btinternet email account has become flooded with spam – up to 70 emails a day offering me Russian beauties, gambling facilities and endless opportunities to get a ‘free’ store gift card. The BT spam filter catches virtually none of these (but does catch stuff that isn’t spam!).
So I asked BT for help in stopping this deluge and they recommended setting up ‘rules’ to indicate what should be filtered out as spam. That was an impossible task given the ever changing email addresses, subject lines etc. used by the spammers. And it involved opening the emails which indicates an active email address and then you get sent even more!
Enough was enough and I decided to try Gmail which I’d heard had a stronger spam filter. I set it up so that all the mail from my btinternet account was automatically forwarded into Gmail.
Using Gmail over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been impressed by the following:
- The spam filter is much stronger and catches virtually all the spam forwarded on from btinternet
- The automatic separation of social media related emails and retailer promotions from the main inbox makes it easier to see at a glance if there’s anything important
- Emails related to the same conversation are kept together
I am not so impressed by Gmail’s use of ‘labels’ instead of ‘folders’. When I ‘label’ an email it remains visible with everything else in my Inbox – the BT folders completely separated such emails. Plus there appears to be no easy way of importing my BT folders into Gmail (unless anyone out there can help me?).
Conclusion? Overall, Gmail makes dealing with my Inbox easier so I’ll stick with it and keep forwarding from the old address until everyone’s been informed (and is using!) the new one.
Email Antics
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Computers & Technical on May 21, 2012
I’m in the middle of switching email addresses – and it’s causing me a lot of grief!
I’ve used the same web mail address since we got our first home PC back in 1999 and for most of that time it’s worked fine. But over the last few months the service has been crashing out, refusing to load my inbox and freezing when I press ‘send’. I’ve been reluctant to switch to a new provider because:
- I liked my email address (it didn’t include any annoying numbers or dots to make it unique from every other person with my name)
- Like most writers I always have ‘stuff out there’ which obviously has the old address on as a contact point
- I guessed it would be a lot of hassle to change
However, there was only so many times I could put up with losing a carefully drafted email plus we’ve recently upgraded to BT Infinity at home – so I decided to bite the bullet and join the @btinternet.com clan.
I was lucky with my new email address – all I had to do was slip in my middle initial to make it unique and still appear businesslike. Then I jumped for joy when I saw that it was possible to import contacts from other email providers – but sat down heavily again when I realised my old provider was not amongst those listed as compatible. It looked like I had a long ‘copy & paste’ job ahead of me.
But there was good news when I found an option to get mail forwarded from other email addresses. I filled in the prompts and clicked ‘new mail only’. At least now it wouldn’t matter if I forgot to keep monitoring my old email – all those competition wins that are bound to come in over the next few months would be automatically forwarded to @btinternet.com!
Then, before my very eyes, my new inbox filled up with over 2,000 emails.
Every single email from my old address had been imported to the new!
This had advantages and disadvantages. I could open messages and click to add the sender to my new contacts list but a massive deletion job is now necessary. And I’m not finding it easy to delete whole page after whole page because I keep spotting something that might be useful…just like when I try sorting out books for the charity shop.
Somehow I reckon this job is going to drag on and on. Maybe it would be easier to go back to sending messages via pigeon or even in a bottle (which explains the odd illustration to this post – just in case you were wondering!)
Despite all this I can still be contacted via the ‘About Sally Jenkins’ page of this blog or please leave a comment below.
Sally Jenkins 