Laughably even a response from JTN to tell me they are looking into the problem on their network took almost 14 hours to get me without leaving the Plusnet network.

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Emails getting delayed by about an hour from and into my metronet account this morning. I might have to switch away from using metronet email.....

After several weeks of problems, the last 24hours have seen a marked improvement.

It's now Monday lunchtime, and I've just received an email that was sent to me, from a freeserve email account, late on Thursday night - i.e a 3.5 day delay.
I'm not clear as to whether the cause of the bottleneck lies with Freeserve, or with Plusnet.

I'd appreciate it someone could take a look at this, and see whether if it's indicative of continuing problems, can be explained, by a problem which is now fixed, or is attributal to Freeserve.

The headers are below (edited to remove some addresses).

Thanks in advance,  John

Hi John,

Looks like the email was sat on this server:


The reason it was delayed for so long could be down to a problem at Freeserve's side, or it may have been that our mail delivery platform was refusing the connection from Freeserve - We wouldn't really know without trawling our logs.

I personally think it's something to do with this. On Thursday when the email was sent we had a number of ACL rules in place designed to temporarily defer messages that didn't meet certain DNS criteria. For one reason or another I suspect that our mail platform was rejecting this email from Freeserve. The Freeserve servers will have kept on attempting delivery but at less frequent intervals following each failed attempt.

We removed the ACL rules on Friday which allowed the email to come through.

Thanks for the feedback, Bob

John

Having trawled through a large number of headers, before seeing the post above, there has been no delay accessing PlusNet servers (from my host) since 1800bst on Friday, which may tie in with what Bob posted.


With the delays arising for a number of hosts, I would have thought it reasonable to suggest that the problem was with PlusNet.

I'm inclined to agree with canford, seeing as the e-mail I forwarded from a PlusNet account to a PlusNet account on Thursday evening still hasn't arrived. Although having said that, I'm beginning to suspect that it's simply not going to turn up at all now. (Though the question then is, why?) And I also notice that I was sent an e-mail (not from PlusNet) at about 6:50pm this evening, which is still yet to turn up too...

Be3G, did that email come through? Where did the headers show the delay?

Sorry for late reply; been busy for the past couple of days... but nope, that e-mail's still not turned up, so it really does look like it's just vanished in to thin air.

Despite several emails to me over the last few weeks, I was just thinking that this had cleared up. I have been asking all my correspondants to copy messages addressed to me to another account on the ac.uk network. I have discovered today that an email sent on Tuesday containing important information for a meeting did not arrive. i am very frustrated at the lack of response and apparent lack of concern from plusnet other than monitoring this forum. I do not want to post my email address or those of my correspondents on this forum. I do want a email to send that information to so that this can be cleared up and I do want an address to complain more formally to.

al

What response are you wanting? Where we're encountering these examples I'm asking for evidence of the problem. Suffice to say, a lot of the time I do not get the information I'm asking for. Thanks to those who have provided information BTW as it is appreciated. We do have a problem at the moment when the mail delivery servers are busy. They're failing to accept new connections which can cause short delays (but not loss) of email. This can be attributed to almost *all* of the examples I have recently seen.

I have no evidence of missing email. If you've reason to suspect that an email has gone missing, then we need to check our logs to see if it ever reached us. To do this it would be helpful to have the following information:

• Sender's email address
• Recipient's email address
• Time email was sent
• The server it was sent out using (ie. relay.plus.net)

Then send me or one of the other Comms guys a Private Message.


Use the email link under my profile?


Our Code of Practice containing this information can be seen here.

To be honest, I'm a little dismayed that you feel information surrounding the problems with email hasn't been forthcoming

We've tried to keep customers as up to date as possible. We have some pretty significant changes planned for next week which you should all hear about soon.

Please be assured that we're not just putting our feet up and doing nothing. Far from it, we're working very hard because we know that we *need* to be on top of the situation and in a position where our mail platform can reliably manage with the inevitable increase in spam email in the run up to Christmas. It's spam that's the root cause of most of our troubles.

You say that all your messages are copied to an address in the ac.uk domain? If so then we would be interested to see one of these that turned up there but not at your PlusNet address.

As previously mentioned, we can then check our logs.

As someone who is moving half way around the world next week, and given PlusNet's previous 'form' in this area, this sounds ominous.

Please can details be made available so that I can decide whether a 'free' hotmail or gmail address might be more sensible/reliable?

Thank you

I think it would be wise to set up with gmail in advance. They want you to have a pre-existing working email so that they can send an email for you to confirm that, yes you would like their email.

Bob - I'll be sending you a PM shortly with the info regarding my missing e-mail.

I am here - for the first time - because the "help and support" page is asking for feedback from customers experiencing email delays - well we are, and I am getting really fed up with it - is there anyone out there who is as [Censored] off as I am with having emails delayed/lost?