UPDATE
Please note that since writing this review Talk21 has been scrapped and users moved onto Yahoo so this review no longer applies but remains for historic curiosity.
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talk21 is the free email service provided by British Telecom. There are many things to dislike BT for and this ... Read review
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A review by buzios on talk21.com January 31st, 2003
Author's product rating:
Layout & Design
Poor
Navigation
Satisfactory
How fast is this website?
Very slow
MB Capacity
Good
Features
Need improvement
Server Reliability
Average
Advantages:
It's free
Disadvantages:
Bad performance, design, bugs, adverts
Recommend to potential buyers:
no
Full review
UPDATE Please note that since writing this review Talk21 has been scrapped and users moved onto Yahoo so this review no longer applies but remains for historic curiosity. ----
talk21 is the free email service provided by British Telecom. There are many things to dislike BT for and this is no exception.
I registered for talk21 about 5 years ago when there was not a lot of choice of free email services. I chose talk21 simply because at that time I could get a good email address (rather than the fredbloggs1234567 you would have had to have at hotmail or yahoo). However I don't know if this is the case any more now that there are a lot more people signed up.
I have used it for all of this time but recently abandoned it because it was becoming too annoying. Over the years it has hardly been improved at all. The only reason I stuck with it for so long is that I couldn't be bothered to inform everybody of my new email address.
Firstly, what is it?
Well, to be fair, talk21 is free and it does provide all the basics of a free webmail account. As normal you have Inbox, sent, draft and trash folders. You can also create other folders (up to 10 maximum). There is a simple contacts book where you can store contacts addresses, telephone numbers etc. You can access it over POP3 and configure it to pick up email from up to 3 other POP3 servers. You get 5Mb of storage space. You can send/receive emails up to 1Mb in size. You can used SMS notification or BT call minder notification of arrived emails. You can configure filters for spam. You can configure a signature or holiday message. All seems OK so far?
What I don't like is as follows:- 1) It is so slow. When I used it over a dial up it took an age to download the pages, probably becuase of the huge number of images and adverts. Now I have ADSL it is not a lot better. It is just slow. The fact that you have to navigate around many pages to do anything makes this worse.
2) It keeps failing. I was driven mad by the infuriating message which says 'Oops! - talk21 has logged you out' or 'Oops! - talk21 servers are currently overloaded' or 'Oops - talk21 has timed you out'. The last one usually happened just after you had spent ages typing in an email. In the end I would always prepare my emails off line then just paste them into talk21 as I was loosing too much through such failures.
3) It cannot render HTML. As most messages you get nowadays are in HTML this is a serious problem. When you do get an HTML message you get redirected to a browser which takes ages and is very painful. Strangely, about a year ago they put in a beta version that could render HTML for about a week. This seemed to work OK but after a week they reverted to the old version and the beta has never been seen since!
4) The advertising Yes, OK, they need to pay for it somehow, but there are far too many adverts making sownload times excessive. Also whenever you log out you are redirected to someone's web site. This week it is an online dating agency which could be embarrassing if you system administrator is snooping through the logs. These redirections are time consuming and annoying.
5) SPAM. OK, you can configure filters but there are no automatic SPAM facilities, like bulk mail, as you get with Yahoo.
6) It has loads of bugs. For example, the sent folder displays your email address rather than the addressee in the 'from' column. Well of course it's from you as you sent it! Often you hit the send button and it just locks up and doesn't send. It keeps crasing out with the 'Oops!' messages. Nobody seems to fix the problems. I have reported them many times but they aren't interested. Obviously BT are running this on a shoestring and the person that wrote it has probably left the company.
7) It is badly designed. It does not have a very friendly and intuitive interface and the response times are terrible.
8) Support. Basically there isn't any. You used to be able to phone for about 50p a minute (of course I never did). Now it is free but you just get a recorded message of service status. You can contact support by email but you won't get a response for about a week and they wont be very sympathetic to any comments about the fact that it doesn't work. Incidentally, if it is your only email account how can you contact support if it does not work?
Generally, it is very a poor service. The speed of access was what bothered me most and in my search for a fast one I found www.junglemate.com which is very fast. Also junglemate is well designed and has many, many more facilities (excellent contacts book, calendar with scheduling and reminders, on line bookmarks, file storage, import/export, tasks, notepad and much more). Also I would recommend Yahoo which also works very well and has a good spamguard.
Advantages: Adequate storage space (250Mb) Disadvantages: Worse than yahoo, no pop/smtp access, slow, banner ads, spam, features (like the free sms) have been removed.
**Update 27/4/2004**
This is the synopsis of what has happened post team up with Yahoo. Basically talk21 has turned into Yahoo, but with a more unreliable sign in. Just join Yahoo mail instead. Compared to the old talk21 service, the new BT yahoo replacement has a much better interface and a slightly increased mailbox and seems a bit more reliable, so overall it seems like an improvement over the old talk21. However, a big disadvantage is that it ... ...for their paid service. It's just a big advert for their paid service and not a particularly good one. The old review is still below
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I'm writing this review of talk21 as I'm shocked and appalled that ciao still rates it in the top 5 free email providers. Having read some of the reviews I can understand why: most of the reviews that praise the talk21 service are over 2 years old. The current ...
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Ciao members have rated this review on average very helpful
Advantages: Lots of good features Disadvantages: None as yet!
There are so many different web mail services out there that it's difficult to choose between them. Talk21 is run by bt, originally as a web based email service for btclick customers, although it has always been available to anyone who wants an account.
The reason I first opened a talk21 account is that they have a service which will send an sms (text message) to your mobile phone whenever you get new emails. I was looking for a free service which ... ...which was reliable. Since I joined they have improved this so that you also get the subject line of the email.
I should say that I prefer to use a 'proper' POP3 account as my main email address rather than a web mail service, simply so that I can read and write emails offline, and use complex sets of folders and filtering. I use my talk21 account to forward messages to so that I know when I have important emails. I can then access them online if ...
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Ciao members have rated this review on average very helpful
Advantages: Reliable, fast, functional Disadvantages: Nothing special
Bureaucratic Tendencies ... Barely Tenable ... Bloody Terrible ...Badly Turned Out ... Beautifully Tense ... Boringly Turgid ... Benefits Tiny ... Bodged-up Tools ... Buncha T***s ... Bendy Toes (eh?) ... Whatever!!! We've all got our views about BRITISH TELECOM and they're almost universally critical these days. Mrs D and I are as very unimpressed as anyone in this regard, but there is one offering in the BT stable which is difficult to fault, and ... ...contribution altruistically to the government's desire to get the UK on line and the 21 in the name refers to the 21st century apparently. For a free e-mail service, Talk21 is an amazingly strong offering. It offers almost 5Mb of web space for storing the messages and there's a pretty unique filtering function which allows you to send off junk mail to a trash can or alternatively send all messages from an individual e-mail account into a designated ...
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Ciao members have rated this review on average very helpful
Advantages: Easy to use, you can send text messages, you can get talk21 through Outlook Express etc... Disadvantages: not much!
...THE SITE
At talk21.com you can also find links to other BT sites, which are just as fast as the talk21 site, the links include MUSIC, NEWS, ENTERTAINMENT and many more so it is a good idea to have this site as your homepage. Other email sites such as Hotmail also have this feature though…
ADDRESS BOOK
The Address Book section on talk21 is called ‘Contacts’ and in this section of the site you can keep records of your friends email ... ...If you often send emails to a group of people then the ‘Groups’ section is very handy.
SMS NOTIFICATION
The SMS notification sends a text message to your mobile when you get a new email, and from scanning through other ciao reviews I hear that this feature is helpful.
Although I have never used it because I get far too much email and I doubt my mobile could cope with all the messages – and it would become an annoyance getting ...
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Ciao members have rated this review on average very helpful
I have become an experienced e-mail user. I have had a computer for over two years now and am coming to understand how the computer and the internet works. Since i have been on-line i have used the following e-mail providers, talk21, hotmail, yahoo, rocketmail and contactbox. Although i didn't use rocket mail to its full potential i came to understand that there was nothing whatsoever good about it compared to talk21. This opinion takes a brief look ... ...like to compare it to hotmail. This was the first account that i opened up because everyone raved about the oportunities it provided. Well, more like didn't provide. I wanted to call myself by my name, but being so popular it was already taken. I don't know if anyone is the same but i like a simple name without lots of underscore or numbers so i had to choose and unusual name with lots of numbers. On the other hand when i came across talk21, i wrote ...
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Ciao members have rated this review on average very helpful
