UK ISP BT Bodges SMTP Email, Redirects Sent Messages to Staff Account

Some of BT’s customers had a nasty surprise yesterday after they discovered that the ISP’s outgoing (SMTP) email server appeared to be forwarding their messages to an unusual address (stevewebb2@btinternet.com), which quickly became full and then bounced the emails back with an error.

Apparently the unusual redirection of customer emails lasted for several hours yesterday before the fault was corrected. Naturally there’s nothing that valued customers like more than having their personal messages redirected to the inbox of somebody they don’t know.

The Register speculates that the Steve Webb named in the unusual address could belong to a network admin at Synchronoss Technologies, which only recently took charge of BT’s Cloud services. Webb’s LinkedIn profile shows him claiming to be responsible for “supporting email platforms for O2 and BT, looking after the mail gateway, the backend servers containing the mailboxes, calendars and address books and other servers in the platform.”

A BT Consumer Spokesperson said:

“A small number of customers reported an issue sending emails earlier. Sorry about this, it’s fixed now.

The mailbox in the delivery failure notification was for internal/test use and appeared in error, sorry for any confusion that caused.”

Officially the fault is said to have been resolved at 3:30pm yesterday and as usual BT’s definition of a “small number of customers” is open to interpretation when you consider that the ISP is home to 8 million broadband subscribers, although we don’t know how many actually use BT’s own email service.

Perhaps it’s a good thing that Webb’s inbox was flooded into submission as it prevented a larger number of personal messages from being exposed to the wrong recipient. Add this to the list of examples for why you should always keep your email and Internet access providers separate.