To answer your last question first: no, you should not trust any cloud-based company, whether large or small, with data that you consider important.
When my BT Internet contract ended, my BT email service carried on at Yahoo.Īll this was fine until BT informed me that it would close the account and delete all my mail, contacts etc from 16 September unless I started to pay them £1.60 a month for a premium mail service I don't want.ĭo you think this is ethical behaviour? Should we all stop trusting even large companies running ad-supported cloud-based services because, at any point, they can threaten to delete our data, and make us pay the high costs in time and effort of changing an email address, if we don't pay up? Is there any easy way to avoid being held to ransom, and transfer all my mail and contacts easily from one account to another? At some point, BT passed all the management of these email addresses to Yahoo, where they became standard, free (advertising-supported) Yahoo webmail addresses in all but name – run on Yahoo servers, with the Yahoo front end. More than 10 years ago, I had an internet connection from BT, which came with a btopenworld email address.
