British Telecom e-mailed us today with the message that our monthly online bill is ready for reading. Coincidentally, 18185.co.uk also e-mailed our call-charges bill. All very good and supposedly saving paper, just like HSBC, which has been struggling to get us to accept paperless bank statements—assuming we can get at our account to read the bad news.

Of the three companies, only one, the smallest of the lot, has got a paperless bill that lets us see the amount we owe and log into our account with ease. That is 18185.co.uk, which sends an e-mail in the form of a single-page invoice, ready to print if necessary. Full call details are on the Web site if we want them.

This is the firm we pay for the call part of our telephone use. We dial 18185 in front of any local, national, or international telephone number. We usually get the conversation for free, plus a tiny connection charge.

The other two companies, BT and HSBC, are so untrustworthy in their online offerings that we will not move to their “paperless” accounts. (Read: less paper for them to buy and more for us to supply for them.) Both companies send accounts with numerous near-empty pages, bar their logos and corporate rubbish. If they stopped using them, they would halve their paper costs—especially if they kept to a single ink colour.

BT revamped its Web site recently, and the new one is not recognized in our password loggers, the Mac OS Keychain, or 1Password. The site won’t accept our username and password, and clicking on Forgotten Password results in an automated e-mail uselessly saying, “This is an example template for forgotten password.” So much for its paperless bills.

HSBC was also locking out Safari 3 following a Web site revamp last year. It is fixed now, just in time for Safari 4 to be released in beta form.