Which meant that I, and plenty of others, have been left up a creek without a paddle.
OK, so you are wondering what they have done and how to connect.
In the first instance they have sold their souls to the devil (that is M$). That's because it is easier for them to sub it out. It also means that M$ get their hands on a whole pile of new customers to try and flog their products too. Oooohhh, and I guess a sneak preview of all your lovely data for 'Boing' too. Nice.
BT will undoubtedly get some 'kickback' from M$. Despite Phorm being kicked in to touch, I am pretty sure they do a whole load of looking at your data - all those 'useful' BT helper applications monitoring all your activity.
They have also tried to cure that pesky problem of greedy little businesses trying to run servers and lots of computers behind their routers. What a nasty bunch of users they are too. They've all got loads of money and none of it is going to BT.
OK. So the bit you want. New BT login details as follows.
POP setting
- Server name: pop.outlook.com
- Port: 995
- Encryption method: SSL
SMTP setting
- Server name: smtp.outlook.com
- Port: 587
- Encryption method: SSL/TLS
Username maybe one of the following depending on what service you have :
- yourname@btclick.com
- yourname@btconnect.com
- an email address which uses a domain name you own, e.g. yourname@yourcompany.co.uk/.com/.net
Office 365 drawbacks. Where do I start ? BT expects that every user will use the online webmail. Which is awful. No consideration that people might not want to use it.
If you do you still use a desktop client, each user now has to authenticate with their own login details to send email (the From address has to match the login details). It completely screws you if you have your own server using the BT/M$ smarthost using one generic account for sending. I guess you can so something if you have M$ Exchange server, but if you use something like a Linux server, then currently you are right royally buggered. There probably is a solution, but at the minute I don't know what it is and I'm trying to find out.
So now you have to set up each client to send directly to the BT/M$ smarthost, bypassing your own server. A lot of work, and it means you can't control outgoing mail on your server so no generic company signatures, outgoing virus checking etc etc etc
This was changed without any notification and left lots of people wondering why their mail wouldn't send. Nice.
It was done allegedly to cut out the amount of spam being sent through BT. Sorry. That's there problem to sort out. If their systems are that awful they need to sort it out. Not screw the genuine customers who cause no problems.
(And I know how bad they are from the time I accidentally hacked one of their servers. I didn't even mean too ! Their 2nd in command for all their systems acknowledged it was about 9/10 on the severity scale, and had I been a bad boy, I could have royally shafted them. When they looked at the exploit they even found several more..........)
If you use an older version of Outlook e.g. 2003 or before then this seems to be your only choice. For newer versions it seems they provide a yet another pain in the arse 'helper' application for you. Oh joy. See this http://btbusiness.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/18599
For Outlook Express (Does anyone still use it ? If so they should be shot) and similar see this : http://btbusiness.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/18740/kw/18740
With my linux server and Thunderbird I have had to temporarily route all my mail via another provider. Ironically that is Telefonica, who own BT !!!!
Your problems don't end there. There are new sending limits but they don't tell you about it when (if) you are notified the system is changing : http://btbusiness.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/c/2048,2053,3883,2073/a_id/1241/kw/email%20sending%20limits
Ha, and another gotcha - they sent us a notification they were changing the account, but they sent the login details etc to the NEW email account. Great when you don't know the details..... idiots.
Anyway, so you get a bigger mailbox, but what they give with one hand they take with another....
The biggest problem:
1. using SMTP you can only send to a max of 50 people with a limit of 25mb per email
2. using Outlook Web Access it is 200 people and 10mb
3. No more 'catch all' mailboxes
So no more email newsletters. Well, you could always pay more I guess.
If you hit this page you will see it says :
"There’s a problem with your SMTP authentication.
If you're getting an error message saying Recipient not authorised, you may need to change the SMTP server for the mail account you're sending from."
Yeah, so how, as I said above, can you get your SMTP server to individually authorise each outgoing email ???
A few other little gotchas that you might like to think about.
Make sure that you at least login to your OWA account and turn off automatic junk just in case. I'm not sure what happens when you collect mail, but to be certain it doesn't just collect from your inbox, thereby missing a potentially important message it thought was junk, it is worth making sure that it all stays in your inbox.
Note that they also have there own junk filters which take out anything THEY consider to be junk without a by your leave and no notification. So if you have been wondering why you sometimes don't get an email, this could be the reason.
365 uptime? 99.9% (so they claim) up time = 364.635 days. So that isn't 24/7/365 is it ? And you can be sure that half a day it's down, you'll need it most.
365 has already had a number of notable outages. Personally I wouldn't trust any cloud system with my mail. I will never use gmail for anything other than junk. Same goes for M$. I have to use M$ at the minute but won't leave anything on their servers. And shortly I will have my own server running and be totally independently of them.
I'm sure I could go on. Certainly if you look in the help forums (which are heavily moderated) there has been a lot of unhappy customers.
Personally I am taking away ALL services from BT barring the line itself. Quite simply, I just don't trust them.
Good luck !
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