The perils of emailing through your TV (talk21.com)

Member Name: Caradawn

Product:	talk21.com
Date:	12/09/03 (800 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: email through your TV

Disadvantages: Slow

Okay, it's time for a rant. I don't complain much, you've really got to upset me to get me to do that and I guess my last email provider really did that!

Before I got my computer, which wasn't that long ago, we had a Sky minidish and digibox installed. I know that what I am about to talk about won't apply for most of you because youv'e got computers and therefore wouldn't need to email through your TV. Which, as you have probably guessed, is what I had to do.

When I applied to Sky they were offering a free keyboard with the package which you could use to email through Sky. It arrived a month after our minidish and digibox instalation. I had to call the Sky customer services team for help setting up my Talk21 account and they very helpfully pointed me in the right direction. At first I was really pleased with my new email account and quickly started sending emails to everyone telling them about my new email address. It cost 12p to connect, then the local rate phone call after that. This, as it turned out, posed to be quite a problem.

Firstly I would like to whinge about how painfully slow the Talk21 service was. Whenever I selected anything, ie: inbox, outbox, send, reply, save even page down, there would be a half minute wait. The most common two words to ever appear on that screen were 'please wait'.

You can't read the emails off line, so the more emails I got the longer I spent on line. If the email was long then I would have to page down, which I usually did half way down the current page so that it would have paged down by the time I'd reached the bottom of the page. You can't read attachments, so if I received one which really had to be read I would have to wait until I could borrow my dad's computer, go to the Talk21 web site and access my email account from there.

All this was rather annoying in itself, but not something that on its own would make me compl
ain. So we come to the other complications. At regular intervals I would press a button to select something and I would be ejected from the system for no apparent reason that I could tell. This of course meant that I had to pay another 12p plus call charges to get back on line. I know it's only 12p, but when it happens time and time again it soon mounts up. I also on occasions encountered problems getting on line or, once online, getting my account up. In these cases a note would come up saying that there was a fault, giving you the customer services number to call and quoting a fault number. I really felt sorry for the people employed to answer the calls because these faults happened quite regularly. Sometimes the fault was due to Sky, but mostly I believe it was due to Talk21.

I suppose the last straw was when the phone bill arrived. It was three times what it normally is! I know BT are losing a lot of money and now I'm beginning to wonder if this is how they're trying to get it back! Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Talk21 a BT service?

Once I got my computer, I accessed Talk21 through that for a while. I still found it very slow and quickly abandened it. Unfortunately I think my previous experiences had also put me of to a certain amount.

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