Can I Recover Email Addresses?

[Alicat58]

My elderly friend uses an iPad and told me she had changed her broadband provider from BT to TalkTalk. Her new modem arrived yesterday and she asked me to go today and set it up for her.
Everything went smoothly until I found I could not use her BT email address, so set up a new Gmail address. I did not think to save her email contacts, they are all gone and she is blaming me. I am not familiar with Apple products but is there a way of retrieving her email contacts?

[JimF]

"I found I could not use her BT email address"
Why not?

"so set up a new Gmail address"
Why on earth would you have done that?

[bednobs]

one presumes because she no longer pays bt for her email adress as she has changed isps.

[JimF]

You can keep your BT email address when you change Broadband providers. There may be a charge for this, though.

[Maydup]

Try this copied from BT Mail info.
Good news - you can keep your BT (www.bt.com) email address when you cancel BT broadband. To do so, you'll need to sign up to BT Premium Mail. This has the same functionality as your old BT Mail account, though it will cost you a fee each month to keep it going. Sign up by logging on to BT Mail and selecting the option to move to BT Premium Mail, or by contacting customer service.
Any additional email addresses linked to your account will be transferred across to the new service too, so you won't lose a thing.

[calmck]

Is her address book not backed up to Icloud

[jno]

so presumably the email account still exists? Sign up for a month and retrieve the address book, then.

[Alicat58]

I did not know that her former email address would be available for a month. Thanks for that!