topic Re: Two more different error codes at Greenby in Email

Two more different error codes at Greenby

Kwak — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 10:59:25 GMT

I've mentioned before that I have email forwarded by myself to PN/Greenby which has the side effect that when it isn't playing, I get to see it. Other people won't see this as you see nothing at the PN/Greenby end, the people emailing them initially will see these errors

Today I've had this new one

Technical details of the failure: 
4.3.0 Error: queue file write error

Which I see another person talk about here:

https://community.plus.net/t5/Email/SMTP-Error-451-4-3-0-Error-queue-file-write-error/td-p/2034948

3 days ago I had this wierd one:

Technical details of the failure:
5.7.1 <XXXX@XXXX.plus.com>: Recipient address rejected: Domain inactive

Both of these errors are intermittent, emails before and after are fine with no configuration changes. And of course the initial emails are accepted perfectly at my first receiving email provider, aren't spam etc. Both are I believe fatal, I certainly never received the one from the second error (which was actually reasonably important).

Re: Two more different error codes at Greenby

PhilipHeyes — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 11:28:05 GMT

In recent days I have also seen a sporadic : 4.3.0 Error: queue file write error when sending via Greenby hosted SMTP relay.force9.net So far it has cleared on the next Send / Receive.

I opened a Greenby Ticket reporting the issue was seen via : relay.force9.net, the AI Bot was mostly concerned with berating me for using SMTPS Encryption and for not using the Plusnet SMTP and flatly rejected the idea there any SMTP issues just ignoring the full error message shown below.

Send test e-mail message: Your outgoing (SMTP) e-mail server has reported an internal error. If you continue to receive this message, contact your server administrator or Internet service provider (ISP). The server responded: 451 4.3.0 Error: queue file write error

Re: Two more different error codes at Greenby

mavison — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 11:42:36 GMT

@PhilipHeyes

Please persevere with the bot until you get to an agent - they ARE aware there is a problem.

You could try including "please pass to an agent"

One hopes the more complaints will speed up fix!

Re: Two more different error codes at Greenby

PhilipHeyes — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 12:10:59 GMT

@mavison

My ticket was passed to a Agent on 30/06/2026
I shall keep it open and add any further occurrences or oddities.

Re: Two more different error codes at Greenby

Kwak — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 13:03:37 GMT

Just had another

Technical details of the failure: 
4.3.0 Error: queue file write error

.. Assuming this is not just me, there will no doubt be a pile of people not getting the odd mail and not knowing they are missing the mail, I'm aware as I'm strangely forwarding to myself

Re: Two more different error codes at Greenby

mavison — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 14:05:06 GMT

@Kwak

Have you raised a ticket and got a response from an agent?

Re: Two more different error codes at Greenby

PhilipHeyes — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 08:59:07 GMT

I wonder if "4.3.0 Error: queue file write error" was the heart attack warning for last night email blackout.

Re: Two more different error codes at Greenby

Kwak — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 11:19:27 GMT

I've not raised a ticket yet sorry.

The service is so bad I'm thinking to just give up on it. This is ridiculous. Is it a one man band who thought he could just knock something up?

I had yet another error last night in forwarding last night, in addition to not being able to log on. Oh and another queue write failure so at least 2 more emails would've bounced.

At least not being able to log on you probably aren't missing emails, THESE errors are bouncing them so people won't get them which is pretty serious for an email service.

Temporary lookup failure

Re: Two more different error codes at Greenby

Kwak — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 11:29:16 GMT

I'd expect, if the guy doing Greenby is doing things properly, when it does something like "queue file write error" it should be writing to an error log as that's *exactly* the sort of thing you'd expect to be written to an error log, that's why error logs exist.

He should surely know about it, and if not, why aren't things like that being written to an error log that he should be checking ..

If it's happening to me once a day, and there are 1000s (?) of people using him, it'll surely be happening to many people.

Re: Two more different error codes at Greenby

mavison — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 12:08:29 GMT

I have been monitoring my "Queue file write errors" since I migrated in December - having NEVER had them before migration. I raised a ticket with Greenby, and have been reporting them regularly ever since. Most months I have seen 30-40, except for February which was over 100 ... but that was a bad month for Greenby.

However, last month (June) I saw over 180 of them, and I raised this increase on my ticket. Their response was:

At the moment, this is largely due to the ongoing migrations from BT. While these migrations are in progress, some level of reduced performance is unfortunately expected. Most of the issues being experienced right now are unavoidable during this phase.

Please be assured that work is actively underway to complete these migrations as quickly and smoothly as possible, and we are doing everything we can to minimise the impact in the meantime. Once the migrations are fully completed, the performance should improve significantly.

My response was:

No email system should take several attempts to send an email until it is accepted by the server!
I appreciate that migrations will add extra load, but that should have been anticipated and catered for.
You are losing users because of the many problems.

But just got empty assurances back.

I have no idea if this is related to the current outage from 8:30pm yesterday.

It cannot be right that this error results in sometimes taking 3 or 4 attempts to send an email, and it has caused me to lose totally over 70 emails that my NAS has tried to send me.

Add on top of that the months when hotmail etc would not accept emails, and the increased likelyhood of my emails arriving ... but hidden in the recipients spam box!

I have totally lost patience with Greenby.

Re: Two more different error codes at Greenby

pvmb — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 12:48:25 GMT

@mavison

"I have been monitoring my "Queue file write errors" since I migrated in December - having NEVER had them before migration. I raised a ticket with Greenby, and have been reporting them regularly ever since. Most months I have seen 30-40, except for February which was over 100 ... but that was a bad month for Greenby.

However, last month (June) I saw over 180 of them, and I raised this increase on my ticket. Their response was:"

At the moment, this is largely due to the ongoing migrations from BT. While these migrations are in progress, some level of reduced performance is unfortunately expected. Most of the issues being experienced right now are unavoidable during this phase.

That was my intuitive appraisal of the situation.

Please be assured that work is actively underway to complete these migrations as quickly and smoothly as possible, and we are doing everything we can to minimise the impact in the meantime. Once the migrations are fully completed, the performance should improve significantly.

"My response was:

No email system should take several attempts to send an email until it is accepted by the server!"

Agree. In normal circumstances...

"I have totally lost patience with Greenby."

As I find it basically works for me* I have not so far run out of patience.

* The one exception being the mail delivery issues. e.g. To Gmail. However, unlike others, I am not as yet completely sold on the idea this is all Greenby's fault.

Re: Two more different error codes at Greenby

Kwak — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 13:54:50 GMT

"At the moment, this is largely due to the ongoing migrations from BT. While these migrations are in progress, some level of reduced performance is unfortunately expected."

Without knowing the actual details, my instinct and common sense indicates this is a resource issue, i.e. an overload of a queue that writes to some database (?) and it can't handle the amount of emails it's being asked to handle. That seems reasonable. So why would more people being added to the system as more migrate possibly help that, if that's the cause.

Google indicates this appears to be an error an email system called postfix, or related..

So you'd guess he needs to update the queue size / timeout / database size / get a faster server ..

I can't imagine how adding more things to be queued would make a queue throwing an error better.!