topic Sending emails scuppered by VPN in Email

Sending emails scuppered by VPN

AndrewGood — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 09:59:54 GMT

After activating AVG Antivirus's VPN option on my Samsung Galaxy A42 5G, an error was flagged whenever I tried to send an email. The error went away when I disabled VPN. Is there some way I can set up Email to enable me to send emails while still having VPN active?

Re: Sending emails scuppered by VPN

MisterW — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 10:04:34 GMT

Have you got authentication configured for the outgoing server ?

Re: Sending emails scuppered by VPN

jab1 — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 10:06:08 GMT

You reading my mind, @MisterW ? Just going to ask the same question. 😀

Re: Sending emails scuppered by VPN

AndrewGood — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 10:39:09 GMT

I have "Require authentication to send emails" set to On. Should I switch it off?

Re: Sending emails scuppered by VPN

MisterW — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 10:54:35 GMT

No, it should be on.

In that case, its likely that the IP you're being allocated by the VPN has aquired a bad reputation and the Plusnet anti spam system is not allowing sending from that IP

Re: Sending emails scuppered by VPN

Townman — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 15:16:25 GMT

@AndrewGood wrote:

The error went away when I disabled VPN.

Why are you using a VPN?

Vendors of such services create no end of scare stories to tempt people to buy their services ... for no particular meaningful merit.

The only merits I'm convinced of for using a VPN are

To provide a secure point to point connection to extend a secure network across the internet - for example work from home but appear to be connected direct to the company's internal network
To appear to be located somewhere, which you are not - this has both legitimate and questionable purposes: an example of the former would be when abroad to appear to be in the UK to access key UK service providers

Does your VPN software permit split-tunnelling / whitelisting / bypass options? If yes then the Plusnet servers could be placed "outside of" the VPN channel. See What is whitelisting and should you use it? - Surfshark