Their argument was that because “the problem was with 3rd party software” support was not free. Maybe I will try the complaints route as you suggest if and when I have the energy.
They are wrong it is there issue, spoke to a guy called Gourab and he openly admitted that yes it is there issue, and he stated that the error message originates from their server. BT won’t admit anything because they don’t even understand the problem, they are ill trained and incompetent.
still having issues with my Mobile (Android) logging into BT, suppose thats someone elses problem to. Jokers.
My issues seem to have gone away this morning anybody else working okay
Be good to know, I reverted to POP3 after 7 days of denials and lies from BT, would like to go back to IMAP, but would give it a few months until stabilise, please do bare in mind that this issue is INTERMITTENT.
Customer I was helping sent me this text last evening, BT called her & I suspect they have done something overnight. 
As I say I will leave mine on POP3 for a couple of months, BT have a habit of fixing then re-introducing, simply because they do not share issues appropriately.
seems ok first thing today
No. Problem is back
thought it would be, omg what are they doing ?
strangely I am getting problems with smtp, sending emails, worked fine yesterday,getting worried that this dabbling is going to cause severe problems for even more peeps.
Been out all day came back still wiorking also ran a diag test all ok
I am still getting the error intermittently
Hi All,
I am a computer repair engineer in the UK - working for myself and servind home users in my local area (mainly older customers). I install em Client Free for many of my customers (many of whom go on to purchase a pro license and bring revenue to em Client).
I have noticed this issue before (a year or so ago) and tried to get some sort of fix implemented but to no avail. Then the BT servers seemed to settle for a while and now its back with a vengeance.
I am now at the point of reconsidering this as a solution to their needs as the main thing for me is reliability and a good deal of my customers have a BT email address. I cannot afford to be a defacto “free support” agent to em Client and fix email issues for free. I charge by the hour and my customers are also not going to be happy for me to charge them to help fix/diagnose issues that are (in their eyes) caused by a program that I recommended. When I recommend a program I feel obliged to do so.
I am with great reluctance now evaluating Thunderbird as an alternative because at least that seems to keep working when this error arises (or keeps working more of the time). Yes, the customer may get an error but most of my customers will not really notice or care as long as the emails keep coming in.
To be clear - I absolutely love em Client as an email program. I think it is an excellent alternative to Microsoft Outlook (which has gone from being excellent in the 2007/2010 versions to abysmal in the 2013/2016/2019 versions and far nicer aesthetically wise that the main alternative Thunderbird. The other alternative, the built-in Windows mail program is so unreliable that I never (ever) configure this for customers).
I, like everyone else, just want em Client to work, regardless of a misbehaving back-end server or not.
I have logged a ticket with em Client support and wanted to share the “official” response from them with everyone.
I hope this is of help. Please note that I don’t want to open a big argument on this so please don’t troll my reply here - I am trying to help and move the thing forward 
Hello Paul,
At this moment we are monitoring the development of this problem but unfortunately, there aren’t any reported methods to fix BT accounts permanently(everything seems to fail after a few hours) and BT isn’t assisting in any way. The only assistance I can provide at this moment is the forum link below which contains discussion updated by other affected users. Judging by their replies, the BT responses are inconsistent and they vary almost in each case.
Forum link: https://forum.emclient.com/emclient/topics/emclient-is-not-downloading-email-from-bt
It is also fair to mention that the problem is with violation of https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4551#section-3.7 was detected and our developers have confirmed in numerous cases that the the problem isn’t and cannot be in eM Client. If the BT’s standpoint is that problem is with our app I think they can share technical details of what they believe is wrong with eM Client because we have facts to back the results of our investigation and perhaps if their engineers were able to share these details with you, we could figure out together where the problem is. Please let me know your thoughts.
We are very sorry that you are caught up in the middle of this situation but our company has no communication channels to reach higher support instances on BT’s side.
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Hi xxxxxxxxx,
Thanks for the update.
I think the key thing to take away from this is the following:
1. This is an ongoing problem at BT with their server farms and you should be aware that they have around 9.2 million broadband customers in the UK (some are Plusnet and some are EE but the vast majority are BT (source: https://www.choose.co.uk/guide/home-broadband-market-overview.html ). Many of these customers also have multiple ***.btinternet.com or btconnect or similar email addreses. We could be talking at over 15 Million email accounts that have teh potential to be affected by this issue.
2. BT cannot fix the problem in any permanent meaningful way as their infrastructure and staff are not up to the job or sorting the problem out properly and reliably. BT will give a diferent answer to each person that complains to them as they do not admit the issue openly and do not have a reliable solution to fix the problem. Their stock response (even after remotely connecting to a customers system) is to 1. Change your password, 2. remove your account from emClient 3. Re-add the account. This is clearly not going to fix the issue but it is all they can tell their customers. Their fallback solution, when challenged, is to say 4. We have a good webmail service, that is working so thee is not a problem and simply use that instead.
3. Other popular mail programs e.g. Thunderbird (which I respectfully suggest this is your main “free” alternative competitor - but not as aesthetically pleasing as emClient and not as slick and with no support) manage to adapt their software to get past the error, they manage to somehow introduce logic to ignore the bad email/command/server response and carry on downloading and working generally well despite throwing an error from time-to-time.
4. If only 1% of BT’s customers start using emClient then that could be 150000 licences for emClient. If only 20% of them take the paid version of emClient then that is potentially 30,000 paid licences.
You see… it really is in your interests, as much as our interests, to code in a workaround into emClient as any potential paying emClient customer who has a BT email address is going to be serioulsy put off otherwise. We all know it is BT’s fault but we also know that if there is “the will” at emClient then there will be “a way” to get this sorted from the other side.
FYI I am an NFR (not for resale) customer of emClient because I install emClient onto my customers computers as a simple set-it and forget-it solution to their email needs. Many of those customers have, up until now, gone ahaead and purchsed the full pro version of emClient. The problem is that I need a solution that is reliable and around 30% of my customers have a BT email address. I am currently testing “Thunderbird” as my go-to solution for them no solely because of this issue. I will not be the only person in the same situation.
Thanks
Paul
Thunderbird also has it’s problems believe me, perhaps you should consider advising your clients to move from BT (they are the root cause) to another supplier, I personally have a contract with BT until April 2020, I will leave as soon as the contract expires, I have also reverted to POP3 and bypassed IMAP all together, this may be worth considering, POP3 works well, has it’s disadvantages but also it’s advantages, IT WORKS. I agree with the comments in regards to EM Client the product is quite excellent, and even if Thunderbird did work I would be loathed to use it. IT Professional and repair.Engineer 30yrs in the Business, and disgusted with BT.
I’d be reluctant to move from BT email as it’s so much hassle to change email addresses and up until now, I’ve had very few problems with email though agree that BT client service has ranged from diabolical to generally unhelpful. Most people are stuck in BT contracts for up to 18 months so working on a solution and escalating the issue with BT is the way to go for me. There is an executive complaints level at BT which I used in the past and will be digging out today as like everyone else, have just been told rubbish by their so called chat helpline.
I’m trapped too, but only for 6 months, I shall be leaving after that, I have not seen an improvement in their support for 15 + years now, believe the offshore contingent to be running amok, unsupervised, technically incompetent and liars including the management. I know it’s a painful excercise but I will do it, it’s not good for my health dealing with fools, I will see in April.
Hi Steve, Agreed 100%. What a nightmare for all of us who try to help others (either as our chosen career or as a friend/family member trying to help a loved one)!
I did start to use Thunderbird for my customers but because it was so fussy and generally difficult to keep working smoothly I did not stick with it. The latest version however does seem quite promising. Do you find the same? I even went back to installing Windows Live Mail (2012) for a while a couple of years back as it was reliable and “just worked most of the time” but that is not a sensible road to go down as a professional computer engineer as its not been supported for years and is not going to be safe to use due to security holes and the lack of security patches.
I am currently (for those customers with only 1 email address) just setting up a link in Chrome or Firefox to use webmail. It seems the best solution for them as the ISP cannot dodge responsibility of it stops working. For those with 2 or more separate email addresses (where they don’t want to use forwarding) the situation is still very difficult.
So is POP a stable solution for the BT mail accounts? I take it that it is an IMAP issue. If so then I will setup all emClient users with a BT account with POP going forward and my customers who want to use “folders” will have to save them locally and remember to backup their machines from time-to-time. Because they don’t this , security of losing emails was the main driver to using IMAP (quite reasonably as IMAP - when it works properly that is - is a far better solution - especially of you have a tablet or phone in the mix and want to make them all seamlessly sync and be able to access folders from all devices).
I know that you already know all the stuff below. It is really for the other followers of this thread
I did consider sticking to POP and strong arming some of them to move away from BT some years ago but because some of my customers wanted:
1. to keep their btinternet email as they were so embedded down into that email address that some of them would not countenance moving to my preferred option of Gmail (as it would mean sending out hundreds of emails etc. and also changing many online services that use their BT email address as the account name).
1.a Sub-Folders to organise their mails
2. I did not want them to risk losing the content of those folders (or the structure of the folders that some customers religiously populate)
3. They are not very good at doing local backups so risk losing the folders and thus their organised email history (I know they say not to delete of the server but some of my customers are so embedded into the “folders” way of managing emails that dumping all the emails back into the inbox would be akin to losing an arm
This is why I setup (up to now) with IMAP and set to "download messages for offline use including attachments). I also set emClient to backup its database every 2 weeks as a belt and brace.
The obvious answer was to use IMAP as the folders (sometimes but not always Yahoo mail based systems - depending at what level you create the folders - and possibly not for talk-talk based servers either in many cases) get saved to the servers when I (foolishly) believed that the ISP would be backing them up and would restore them in the event of a disaster - NOT the case 99% of the time - trust me - been there too).
With regards to ditching BT. I agree 100%, this is the best answer. I guess they could setup a rule to auto forward to an alternative provider but some of my customers knowledge is very “light” and any kind of change for them is a real issue (ie. the thought of receiving an email to their btinternet email address and then replying to it from a gmail address is just beyond many of them to understand)
I then get the blame as being the messenger of the bad news and even lose the business on occasion.
The other advantage of ditching the BT email address is that you can then look to move broadband supplier and save a fortune (without having to pay BT £5 month to keep the BT email address which is flaky at best anyway).
BT should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.
Paul
The most short-sighted thing anyone can do is use their Internet provider as their primary email provider. Now so many are trapped like Jill, because it is such a chore to move to another email address.
Paul, for your new clients, set them up with a good free email provider that works well with whatever email client you decide to use. Then for the remainder of their short lives, no matter what Internet provider they are using, they will have the same consistent service.
Good comment Gary, I have considered just on-line provider and may even do that, your perfectly right.