BT seem to be ditching their email customers during switch to EE brand

Anyone remember SWEN?

Hard to forget! Thousands upon thousands of emails. That's when I decided not to ever use my real address on usenet...

I was on dialup with Demon at the time, and the things were over 100K each and arriving at Demon faster than I could download them. I had to find out how to use the wretched webmail to go in and delete blocks of them.

You could (back in the day when most mail servers did not insist on secure connections!) also telnet into the pop3 server and interact with it manually :

telnet pop3.myisp.net 110 user myaccount pass mypass

Get a list of the messages waiting by using the LIST command:-

list

You should see a list of message numbers and the size of each (in bytes) displayed. You can now use the TOP command to display the first part of any of the messages. E.g.:-

top 1 10

The first number after "top" indicates the message number to display (from the list), the second number indicates how much of the message to display - 10 to 20 is usually fine to see enough of the message for you to decide what you want to do with it.

Once you have identified a message that you want to delete you can issue the DELE command to remove it.

dele 1

Finally when you have deleted all the messages you want to, you can issue the QUIT command to disconnect from the mail server.

quit

And you could, perhaps a bit earlier, use any/choice of SMTP server, and later on locked on to whomever you had dialled into.

I recall a utility that allowed me to switch SMTP when on my travels to my choice that were in my configured list. Handy when travelling around.

Hard to believe such naivety amongst IT professionals. Along with WiFi Passwords sent in the clear and default, if any, security on different brands of routers.

Richard Feynman described his experience while working on the Manhattan Project during WW2. He had a safecracking hobby, using all the techniques such as shoulder-surfing, people's DoB, or some digits of e or π if the mark was a mathematician. But also he recounted visiting the top generals' offices, and their boastings about having the safest and most uncrackable safes in the country. But Feynman knew that they very often left the safe set with the factory code, of which there were perhaps two or three variants for each manufacturer, but Feyman knew them all.