UK Broadband Usergroup FAQs (frequently-asked questions)

It is a customised version of Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 with a Yahoo Toolbar, pop up blocker and access to Parental Controls and a firewall.

No, you do not.

BT management have made it clear that this is NOT compulsory although the help information does not say so. You can start the registration process by either clicking on the link in your invitation email, or visit home.bt.yahoo.com.

At the log in page you enter your primary email address including the domain name. You may get a standard windows download box, in which case choose "Save to" rather than "Open" (and save to your usual backup or maintenance area).

Alternatively you may get a web page saying that software is being installed - in which case close the page immediately using the close box in the top right hand corner. You will then get a window saying you are registered and you will almost immediately receive a welcome email. You can then visit home.bt.yahoo.com, once again enter your primary email address and you will be taken to the BT Yahoo! homepage.

Yes. Go to Control Panel, and click on the Add/Remove programs icon, and you will find the new software listed there. From here, you can use Windows uninstall feature to remove the BTYahoo browser.

You will not be able to use the Parental Controls feature, the firewall or the pop-up blocker. You can however find these tools elsewhere, including elsewhere on Yahoo!

Zone Alarm is available free from Zone Labs. Pop up blockers are available from a number of sources including as part of the latest Google toolbar. Parental controls can be implemented via Internet Explorer anyway.

BT-Yahoo! provide an email filtering service to filter out spam and viruses. The system is now being upgraded to use SpamGuard Plus from Yahoo! - see the SpamGuard FAQ. Customers are being migrated onto this service now and you should get notification about it from BTYahoo! by email to your primary address. In order to sign up for this filtering service you will need access to the BT-Yahoo! homepage at home.bt.yahoo.com

If you are an existing BTOpenworld customer you already have some BTOpenworld web space (the amount varies depending on your account type.) This will remain the same, and can be accessed just as it is now with the same ftp details. BTOpenworld management have told us that they have no plans to remove this service. For some good advice about accessing this space and how to manage it see Andy's shortcuts at: http://www.btinternet.com/~firststop/shortcuts/btow_shortcuts.htm particularly shortcuts 10, 10a and 11.

In addition, both existing and new customers will be getting web space hosted by geocities. This unfortunately carries adverts and appears to be bandwidth limited (very heavily visited sites may be closed down for a few hours).

You get 15Mb per registered email address making a potential space of 165Mb if you have one primary and ten sub-accounts. You also get 100Mb of storage for photos and on-line documents. The ftp details for this service are different from the BTO web space and can be found in the BT-Yahoo! help pages at: http://help.yahoo.com/help/uk/bt/geo.

You also need to be aware that your geocities web pages will contain the full associated email address in the url, and if you use the on-line wizard to create a page from a template it will also insert the full email address several times in the html code.

You may wish to only have web space associated with a secondary email addresses that you do not use for email, as they are therefore likely to attract spam as your address will be harvested from the site.

In BT-Yahoo! they are known as sub-accounts. You will need to register each of your existing secondary addresses with the new service, they do not get registered automatically along with your primary address.
In addition you can now have up to 500 disposable email addresses for use with web subscriptions etc. See the SpamGuard FAQ, or go to webmail and Mail Options/AddressGuard.

You can register each one via the login page at home.bt.yahoo.com, using the full email address and its associated password. On the BT-Yahoo! homepage at home.bt.yahoo.com, there is a link in the blue bar at the top of the page, on the right hand side, called My Account. Click on this and you will be taken to your account administration page. You can delete or add sub accounts, change personal details and also change payment details.

The BT customer base has been added to an existing Yahoo! customer base, and our domain names are the only way we can be distinguished from other Yahoo! customers who may already have otherwise identical ID's.

You should be aware that although your BT-Yahoo! homepage uses your "Name" (as chosen in My Account), other Yahoo! services will use (and make available publicly in your on line profile) your full email address. If you decide to use these services you may wish to create a sub account specially for that purpose and log in under that ID rather than your main email ID. Any account you use for the Yahoo! services is likely to attract spam because of the full email address being exposed on the web.

BTY have recently (May 10th 2004) made Launchcast Plus internett radio available to subscribers, and it is possible to log into this service using your special privacy profile, and the display of the underlaying email address is truncated. This is not however the case on the US end of the main Yahoo Launchcast service.

They are unaffected by this change. You can continue to use them as a separate Yahoo! ID. But you cannot store info on more than one Yahoo! ID at a time on your computer (except via separate user logins on Windows XP) and you need to sign out of one account before going to another.

There are help pages at http://help.btinternet.com/yahoo/help/ and also at or http://www.btyahoo.com/yahoo/info

Yes. The homepage is customisable and you can add or remove modules, and also expand or collapse them. You can alter content, colour sceme and layout of the material. You can also add a number of separate customised pages with different content, behind your main page.

You will need to check your security and privacy settings. Some of the servers from which the graphics and navigation buttons are fetched may be on privacy/security block lists and you will have to decide whether to unblock them using the Internet Options icon in Windows Control Panel. This includes the domains us.i1.yimg.com and us.yimg.com
BT Support staff have advised that the page may work better if you have the Sun Java machine installed, rather than the MS Java VM. Go to Internet Options Advanced tab to investigate this.

BT-Yahoo! state that you need IE5.5 or above to use the service. The compatibility of the homepage to work with other browsers such as Mozilla/Netscape and Opera is being investigated by users.

POP3 and SMTP email are unaffected. Your email client does not need to be reconfigured.
Do check that your email client is using your full email address including domain, as your login username. The approved server names for both pop3 and smtp are mail.btinternet.com. Make sure that your email login username does NOT include your hg number if your are on broadband - the old BTOpenworld system allowed this, the BTYahoo one doesn't.

Web-mail will be eventually only accessible through the new BT-Yahoo! homepage at home.bt.yahoo.com which will also be the only way to administer your email accounts and inspect your spam folders.

The privacy policy of BT-Yahoo! is different from that of the BTOpenworld. You can see both privacy policies here http://www.btyahoo.com/bty_privacy and you can continue to exercise your rights under British Data Protection legislation - that page contains a link to the opt-out form.

If you choose to use services provided by Yahoo! rather than BT-Yahoo! then the different Yahoo! privacy policy will apply and you will not be covered by Data Protection legislation.

Good question.

BT_Yahoo! tell us that they are looking into this. It is hoped that in future the displayed ID which forms part of public profile information within the Yahoo! network will not in future contain your full email address.

Meanwhile, when using such services on line, you may find that it is safer to create a BT-Yahoo! sub-account specially for the purpose, or create a separate Yahoo! identity which does not include a btopenworld or btinternet domain address.

You need to navigate your way back into the old BTO portal which is not easy as several pages will redirect you to the BT-Yahoo login page. Try <A HREF=http://www.btopenworld.com/mybtopenworld >this one which takes you to a BTO page where there is a link on the right marked My Website, and a choice marked \"Edit your homepage url\".


For general info about BTO webspace go to <A HREF=http://www.btopenworld.com/create/webpage/0,6668,,00.html>http://www.btopenworld.com/create/webpage/0,6668,,00.html

On broadband you now have 2Gb of storage space for your primary account, and 100Mb on each sub account (as from June 15th 2004). Attachments can be up to 10Mb (but remember that a 10Mb file sent with an email will probably be over the limit once it has been encoded and overheads have been added).