Anyone on TALKTALK broadband, tesco,net email? Problems?

[elliemental]

I have had no emails coming through for 4 days. Tesco.net say it's a talktalk broadband issue, Talk talk are charging £1.50 a minute helpline to basically say ''oh yeah, we've heard about this. er, ring tesco...''

Is anyone else having same problem,s?
Advice?
Plot with me to lace their coffee machine with laxatives...?
Hold my hand?

desperate bump

our talk talk internet connection has been a litle ropey for about a week...but as far as I know our emails are ok

We're having talk talk internet ishoos too. Helpful aren't they

actually our talktalk connection is OK at the moment, but is often v bad and the modem doesn't reach all parts of the house we will be leaving as soon as the contract expires. False economy.

wi-fi is not guaranteed to reach everywhere, so no guarantee another router will work any better. There are units to send data via the house 'mains' wiring, often called Homeplug (there are 3 or 4 different speed models, at 14 Mbps, 85 Mbps, 200 Mbps and now 1 Gbps).

Look for HomePlug Starter packs (2 units often a little cheaper than bought separately) and probably the best for PCs are the 85 Mbps. Higher speeds are usually sold for audio/ video so you could plug one into Sky HD in lounge and another into a flat-screen TV upstairs for a 'no wires' link. There would be some connections from the adaptor in the mains socket to a PC or Sky/TV of course.

For the 85 Mbps, prices from 30 to 40 quid (for a pair) may be found if you hunt online. May make sense for anyone who has a rambling old house or thick walls, where wi-fi can be a major hassle.

I don't trust wi-fi very much compared with ethernet cables, or data-over-mains, but that's because it is much easier {for me} to see an LED switch on to show a connection is working, and it is pretty much guaranteed to be 100 Mbps or 1000 Mbps, whereas wireless speeds depend on signal quality and number of wi-fi devices sharing the channel. Of course, wi-fi has the advantage of easily allowing movement from room to room and no untidy wires.

my tesco.net via talktalk is down. we phoned tesco and they said is a dispute with talktalk blocking tesco ip addresses for tesco.net customers. this could be for sometime. i have set up a yahoo email and am getting a non-talktalk subscriber (my mum is on btinternet) to forward my tesci emails to the yahoo address.

is a pain in the rear and how dare they not even inform us of what is ahppening.

Oh, that's bad - had not come across mention of this elsewhere, but now having done a little searching, seems that some people have had a problem for several days (though most complaints have been on the www.talktalkmembers.com forum, and only one on a 'PC magazine' website - here: PC Advisor )

As a possible stop-gap until this gets fixed, people could try using mail 2 web which would get the POP mail from Tesco.net and show the messages in your web browser.

It is some time since I have used it (I use a commercial mail service called Runbox.com which can pull in mail from other mail accounts.

I'll find the web link in a bit (was checking on a different PC) but it appears there's some problem for TalkTalk customers if their IP address starts with a 2 ( you can check your IP address here quite easily - mine shows as 92.41.14.64 at the moment, on a mobile dongle from Three).

PS if anyone uses Yahoo Answers they could perhaps put someone on there out of his misery about this TalkTalk | Tesco.net situation!

ah thanks. we finally got hold of so-called tech support from talktalk, I knew more than they did He had the fricking cheek to listen to me then say ''have you tried turning your pc on then off again...''
Nobber!
So we got through to a higher level tech person who still couldn;'t actually help at all.
yes, it is the fact htis happnened and someone at TalkTalk kbnows about it as they claim their engineers a ''working on it''. But as you said, they carry on taking our money and don't even let you know! I have heard of businesses realy struggling becaue of this.
They have no idea how long situation will continue for.
FFS I have had the same email addy for 10 years. What am I supposed to do now?

I know how bad it is when your e-mail is not reliable (which is one reason I have mail go to Runbox and Google Mail, in case one is down, and important 'support' mail goes also to my freebie PAYG Orange mail address, so I get a text alert).

Having had my first e-mail address for 8 years on domain ultranet.com which 'went' during a takeover by cable firm RCN from Chicago, I decided an ISP e-mail address would no longer be a good idea.

In the short term, you may want to use www.mail2web.com but in the longer term, I'd get a free account at Google Mail, or Yahoo! mail, or www.Live.co.uk if you use Windows Live. I use a few commercial e-mail services but also like to use Google Mail as a reserve as it is free!

I know that after so many years you don't want to change it, but you are no longer using Tesco.Net (and most of the ISPs could demand a fee for using their mail service, and bump it up every year).

ISPs often seem to rely on people staying loyal because of the 'hassle' of switching.

You've made the switch of ISP, and have a {temporary} problem, but what if Tesco.Net decided to close their mail service ?

In my case the ISP was taken over, in some other cases, such as CloudNine, they closed down. In the case of Tesco.Net, they could, too. No joke, they recently withdrew their Voice over IP service, which they used to promote on TV, because the phone numbers were allocated to a company which has ceased trading, so Tesco cannot run it, and all those phone numbers and unusable, and the VoIP phones probably difficult to change to use anything else.

In the longer term (assuming you have opened a free mail account with some firm like Google), I'd then get my own domain and direct e-mail to your ISP mailbox (or the Google/other firm Mail account).

For personal use, you might choose a name such as family.com (so you could then have mail addresses like [email protected] or whatever (unfortunately I found my family name had already been registered). Note that for most domains the registrant name and address become public information, so may want to use work address when you fill that bit in.

If you have a business, then your own domain looks more professional than some address @aol.com or @hotmail etc. Also, for business users, it's fairly easy to have mail going to both an office PC or mail server (if there are a number of staff) and to some service like Google Mail (which can store at least 5 GB of mail, so means you can archive all incoming messages / orders/ etc in case of a PC crash, and view them via any web browser when you are away from your usual PC).

sorry - should have said that the description given above is called "e-mail forwarding"

Lots of firms offer their own 'mailbox' service but they sometimes charge for it, and often you could get your domain hosting for a tenner or so, and have as many e-mail addresses as you want, so please don't be ripped off if you decide to go down that route.

Lots of options, too many to go into right here, right now, but for people who have started their own blogs and use e-mail and so on, their own domain is one extra thing they may consider as that 'ties it all together'. One of my first web pages was a list of useful links to other web sites (search engines and those to do with hobbies like radio and music)

We build up massive collections of web links but often cannot share them easily. Making a web page can put them online for friends to have a quick 'sign post' to your favourite ( = useful ) websites.

network guy, amny many thanks for your detailed and helpful reply...as soonas dh returns from abroad, we'll get onto it

regarding the modems...
our previous one, from Orange was fine (ramblling tall house with thick stone walls)I just wish we had stayed with them.
Even if I'm sitting next to the modem it is slow and unreliable at some times of day.

I'm with NetworkGuy on this one - provided you research it, having your own domain hosting is more convenient, flexible and reliable in my experience. I am with 1&1 Internet and have never had a problem in 6 years.

wonders will never cease - it is sorted

I had to deal with more than 1,300 emails but hey ho....!

thanks again folks.

I'm on TalkTalk's Opal service for some reason and I've had no problems.

I used to be on Nildram when Talk Talk took em over for some reason they switched me to Opal which is the business service, not that I'm complaining.

elliemental - Glad you got your e-mail. One morning I found I had 44,000 messages (a spammer had sold a mailling list to 11 UK firms, with 4,000 supposedly "opted in" mail addresses on one of my domains {false, of course}). I warned them to remove the addresses or I would charge them 5 pounds per e-mail as harassment. No more adverts from those firms, and strong apologies offered to me.

Ryoko - Yes, Opal has had some good reports (lack of capacity in my area so no new customers for Opal or TalkTalk possible for a few months)

However, it seems the problem was affecting anyone with an IP 2.x.x.x and maybe Opal has fewer users, allocates from a different set of IP pools, and probably has a fraction of the number of users with e-mail on Tesco.net.

Ryoko - thinking back to when Richard Mardlin ran Nildram, it was one of perhaps a dozen niche ISPs that were a cut above the run-of-the-mill 'home user' ISPs, so perhaps it was based on a strong wish from Nildram that their business customers get a certain quality of service that they were absorbed into Opal instead of the other section.

If his first name was not Richard, then my memory is in need of 5000 Volts to kick-start it.

If TalkTalk was that caring I would think they would have a 0800 number for the customer service as well, customer service is pricey.

Really ? I thought that TalkTalk billing made calls to their own 0870 ? number free, rather than charging a customer for the call.

It is at least 3 years since I was with TT (for phone calls only, not line rental and certainly not for internet), however, and 0870 has undergone change because of Ofcom, so they perhaps use 0844 at 5p a minute (?)

As you are on Opal, they'd assume calls are a business expense so would not feel as likely to make them free, perhaps...

Oh, just took a look on the Opal site... Customer services numbers...
Small business: 0800 083 3003 (8am-6pm)
Large business: 0800 298 6725 (8am-6pm)

So is it Broadband customer services that is pricey, and do you mean TalkTalk or Opal ?