topic Re: Problem sending Plus Net emails from Gmail Alias account in Tech Help - Software/Hardware etc

Problem sending Plus Net emails from Gmail Alias account

JonH1 — Mon, 12 Aug 2019 16:56:43 GMT

Hi, I’m new to this forum so please bear with me, but thought it worth raising a recent issue here to see if anyone has any good ideas to resolve.

I’ve just finished a call with a Plus net technical guy on the help desk who was unable to solve the problem, which is:

For a number of years I have been using Gmail to send and receive Plus net emails. It’s quite easy to set this up in Gmail (‘send email as …an alias’) with plusnet username, password, relay.plus.net as SMTP server, port 25, and ‘Unsecured Connection’. It’s all worked well until the past few days, and I’m getting error messages when I try to send emails:

Message not delivered

You're sending this from a different address or alias using the 'Send mail as' feature. The settings for your 'Send mail as' account are misconfigured or out of date. Check those settings and try resending.

The response from the remote server was:

554 avasout04 smtp ESMTP server not available (blacklisted by local policy)

In fact none of the gmail settings have been changed so not clear what’s going on. The helpdesk guy said there were high level issues between Google/Gmail and PN, and this issue was affecting some users. The problems are all at the Google end. He suggested one solution might be to delete my gmail account and start again. Having investigated a bit I can’t see how I can do this without losing all my emails and my gmail address, that I am obviously loath to do.

Anyone else with this issue, and any possible fixes?

Thanks

Re: Problem sending Plus Net emails from Gmail Alias account

VileReynard — Tue, 13 Aug 2019 08:45:40 GMT

I'm surprised Plusnet ever allowed the use of a 3rd party to send email that pretended to have been sent by you.

Gmail doesn't provide your link user/password to Plusnet - so it must be quite properly considered to be spam.

Re: Problem sending Plus Net emails from Gmail Alias account

Strat — Tue, 13 Aug 2019 10:16:09 GMT

Moderators Note
This topic has been moved from General Chat to Tech Help.

Re: Problem sending Plus Net emails from Gmail Alias account

James_F_H — Tue, 13 Aug 2019 11:52:26 GMT

I also have this problem and would be interested in workarounds / solutions.

Re: Problem sending Plus Net emails from Gmail Alias account

jm2 — Tue, 13 Aug 2019 14:31:08 GMT

As of yesteday I have the same issue. Not sure if this is Gmail blacklisting Plusnet or the other way round.

It is a pain as I can't use Gmail to send from a non gmail address.

Seems to apply to avasout03 and avasout02 at least.

Re: Problem sending Plus Net emails from Gmail Alias account

tjn104 — Tue, 13 Aug 2019 17:11:10 GMT

I have exacly the same issue - thought it might be my static ip blacklisted so I asked PN to change it but still no joy....

I have raised it with gmail tech help - may get a result in 2 weeks!

After may hours at this I am relieved that I am not the only one....

So all we need now it a fix/workaround?

Re: Problem sending Plus Net emails from Gmail Alias account

jm2 — Tue, 13 Aug 2019 17:43:02 GMT

For what its worth avasout07.plus.net (and other avasoutxx) is showing up on ips.backscatterer.org blacklist.

Maybe more of us need to log the issue with gmail tech help...

Re: Problem sending Plus Net emails from Gmail Alias account

idonno — Tue, 13 Aug 2019 17:51:03 GMT

@jm2 wrote: Seems to apply to avasout03 and avasout02 at least.

https://www.abuseipdb.com/check/84.93.230.244

Re: Problem sending Plus Net emails from Gmail Alias account

glkeswick — Tue, 13 Aug 2019 20:51:09 GMT

I have this too since a coupel of days ago. avasout07 is identified in the latest error message I received but I think there have been others.

When I first had the error I found my Gmail configuration to send via my Plusnet address was configured to send via SMPT server relay.plus.net on port 587 over a secured connection using TLS. That configuration was in place for months (probably years) and worked just fine but in researching the error I read somewhere in the Plusnet help that TLS is not supported and I would need to use an unsecured connection to port 25. So I changed the configuration which fixed the problem for about a day but now it is back again.

I've tried deleting the configuration and re-creating it but that doesn't work. In my understanding in this scenario Gmail is just acting as an email client and so I would have thought that other email clients (e.g. Thunderbird) would suffer the same error, but I haven't seen any postings to that effect. So maybe that suggests something has changed at the Gmail end such that it isn't interacting with Plusnet the way it used to?

Either way I have no idea how to diagnose further. Will try logging the issue with Plusnet and Gmail support but suspect that it will just lead to finger-pointing between them both. Sigh

****UPDATE***** right after submitting the above post I took another look at my configuration in Gmail and simply re-enterd my Plusnet password in the configuation dialog (still using unsecured connection to port 25), saved the change and it's now working again. But for how long. And it still doesn't help identify which end of the connection is the cause of the problem.

Re: Problem sending Plus Net emails from Gmail Alias account

RobPN — Tue, 13 Aug 2019 21:01:13 GMT

Probably just a coincidence, but six 'newbies' (of ~~nine~~ eight posts) joined the forum to post about this.

Just saying.

Re: Problem sending Plus Net emails from Gmail Alias account

glkeswick — Tue, 13 Aug 2019 21:02:20 GMT

Not really sure what you are saying. Can you be clearer?

Re: Problem sending Plus Net emails from Gmail Alias account

glkeswick — Tue, 13 Aug 2019 21:47:33 GMT

I just found this thread about "Send mail as" feature not working on Gmail support pages:

https://support.google.com/mail/thread/4386637?hl=en

As it's probably the case that most of the participants in that threale d are trying to route emails out through non-Plusnet email servers this suggests the problem is due to something changed/broken at the Gmail end.

The favoured solution in that thread is to enable "Less secure app access" in your Google account settings but I'm not sure I buy that because that setting seems to relate to non-Google applications trying to access your Google account, whereas routing email from Gmail via a non-Google email server would seem to be to be the opoosite of that i.e. Google accessing a third party account/service.

Still no solution though.

Re: Problem sending Plus Net emails from Gmail Alias account

JonH1 — Wed, 14 Aug 2019 12:07:45 GMT

Yes I've tried a number of things to resolve, none of which work.

Like glkeswick, I tried to delete the 'send mail as' configuration and recreate with the same settings. It took about 20 tries for it to accept the PN password again and having done that it sent one email and then failed again.

The helpdesk guy said at one point 'google (gmail) doesnt like us (ie PN) whereas Microsoft (Outlook) do.

One thing I tried was to set up a 'send mail as' configuration with my wife's gmail and PN email addresses. She uses Outlook almost exclusively. She has the same PN user name as me but obviously different email. This worked well, implying the problem is perhaps at the Google end of things.

Naive question: Does the avasoutxx server belong to Gmail or PN??

More ideas welcome......

Jon

Re: Problem sending Plus Net emails from Gmail Alias account

VileReynard — Wed, 14 Aug 2019 12:57:36 GMT

If software on your PC (connected to Plusnet via router etc) sends an email to Plusnet then it will work.

If some remote server sends an email to Plusnet pretending to be you, then it shouldn't work.

Hopefully, Plusnet confirm that the email sender's IP address at least matches your user IP address - at least as a bare minimum!

This should reduce the incidence of spam sent/received by Plusnet.

Re: Problem sending Plus Net emails from Gmail Alias account

DMGStevens — Wed, 14 Aug 2019 14:08:54 GMT

Hi Jon,

I have the same thing this week and it is driving me mad. I have just spent a while creating a new Gmail account, disconnecting the old one and connecting the new one. it worked for 1 day then the same message "Blacklisted"

If anyone can find a contact who can help please send me a message on my personal account

dmgstevens@gmail.com

Thanks,

Dave

Re: Problem sending Plus Net emails from Gmail Alias account

JonH1 — Wed, 14 Aug 2019 22:19:32 GMT

Just had a response from a 'platinum product expert' on the gmail community site. He/she says :

The message is clear:

The response from the remote server was:

554 avasout06 smtp ESMTP server not available (blacklisted by local policy)

The SMTP server you are connecting to, not Google, is blocking your messages. The Plus net administrators are the only ones who can explain it.

As someone said earlier, PN and Google are going to bounce this issue backwards and forwards and avoid getting to the root cause.

Re: Problem sending Plus Net emails from Gmail Alias account

idonno — Thu, 15 Aug 2019 06:54:10 GMT

@JonH1 wrote: Naive question: Does the avasoutxx server belong to Gmail or PN??

As in my link above. The server is Plusnets. Presumably you've read this?

I must admit, I'm a bit confused really but what is the benefit of sending and receiving Plusnet emails via Gmail? I have a fair number of email addresses (aliases too) hosted by various companies and yet I don't have any problems having those set up to send and receive directly from the associated server. They all come into Gmail on my phone. Even on the desktop, I don't use Plusnets servers, again I receive and sent direct. So why use Google mail server as a 3rd party agent?

As @VileReynard mentions maybe you are falling foul of the tightening up of level of authorisation required to send email via Plusnet servers. All to do with controlling spam, of course.

Re: Problem sending Plus Net emails from Gmail Alias account

glkeswick — Thu, 22 Aug 2019 03:50:34 GMT

@idonno to answer your question, the reason I like to route email from Gmail out through the PN servers is because I prefer to receive all my emails from various non-Gmail accounts into my Gmail inbox and work on them there. At the same time I prefer not to give out my Gmail account name so if I receive an email into my Gmail inbox which was addressed to, say, myaccount@non_gmail.com I want to be able to reply to that email as if my reply originates from myaccount@non_gmail.com rather than from myaccount@gmail.com. And that's what 'Send mail as' is there for in Gmail. But if there's another way of acheiving the same thing I'm more than happy to try it out.

@VileReynard - you may well be right that PN should never have allowed Gmail to route outgoing messages through their servers, but the point is that for years they *DID* so while I'm fine if PN wants to start tightening up on what is allowed it would be good if they could publicise their intention to do so. Maybe they did and maybe I missed it. I'm not sore about it - I was just hoping this was a solvable issue, but as it appears not then it's time for me to look into alternatives to carry on working the way I like to.

***Update - I *DID* see the email from PN which @Idonno referred to and my settings were already correct so there was nothing for me to do to retain the ability to use PN mail servers for outbound email from Gmail. By definition I think the PN email also confirms that routing messages from other mail services through PN servers is not frowned upon.

Moderator's note by Mike (Mav): Post released from Spam Filter.

Re: Problem sending Plus Net emails from Gmail Alias account

RodentNoir — Thu, 15 Aug 2019 19:24:56 GMT

I have this same issue as well. Been happening for two days - 14th and 15th Aug 2019 - so far. Using Gmail 'Send As' to send from a PN email address. I am getting the exact same messages pasted here by others.

I have been using this feature for years with no problem. I have read the email put out earlier this year from PN about outgoing server settings. My settings checked at that time and been working fine.

I am using relay.plus.net port 25 unsecured. Plusnet username and password are required so I assume they are used for authentication - It doesn't work at all if you remove the login credentials.

I find that I can successfully send emails from the Gmail web interface (via Chrome on two different desktop Windows PCs). But using the Gmail App on an iPhone and an iPad sent messages are rejected with the error returns we're all experiencing.

Still looking for a solution. I'm puzzled why it should be OK from the Gmail web client but not from the Gmail App. The Gmail settings are global across all platforms.

**EDIT** It seems the problem is intermittent. I was able to send a few emails but then the issue returned. Obviously no change to settings or anything like that that could account for the change. Also no change of network, device, or WiFi connection etc.

Re: Problem sending Plus Net emails from Gmail Alias account

jm2 — Thu, 15 Aug 2019 19:54:28 GMT

I also found it worked for a while last night. I wondered if it depended which email server (avasoutxx) you get - i.e. some are blocked and others are not.