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Oops - talk21 is still rubbish 22 of 22 Ciao Users found the following review helpful
Rating from buzios 2 Stars ()

Advantages It's free

Disadvantages Bad performance, design, bugs, adverts

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 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.

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Comments

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Previous page Next page Page 1 of 5 | 1 - 5 out of 22 comments
  • eve6kicksass 06/06/2004 17:25
    Rated this review as
    Very Helpful

    Thanks for the warning!!! Chris xxx

  • olivers 01/04/2004 10:17
    Rated this review as
    Very Helpful
  • matties_bitch 23/11/2003 14:29
    Rated this review as
    Very Helpful

    my friend had a talk21 email address, but I thought talk21 had closed I haven't heard of it for so long! Luv Sue

  • Linzee 12/09/2003 22:09
    Rated this review as
    Very Helpful

    yeah know exactly where you are coming from with this one. bt have done no work on improving this at all have they!!! good op

  • zargax 20/05/2003 23:03
    Rated this review as
    Very Helpful
Previous page Next page Page 1 of 5 | 1 - 5 out of 22 comments

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