Plusnet POP3 email while at university

[#1]

Just a quick question.  My daughter has packed her PC and gone to uni.  She has got internet access at uni and has tried to use her Plusnet email account.  She can pick up her email fine but when she tries to send email, she gets a message saying that the email client (thunderbird) was not able to login to the mail server.  It was working fine at home!

[#2]

She needs to set-up authenticated SMTP using your plusnet account ID and password.

[#3]

Generally you can receive mail from any POP3 server whilst connected to any ISP.  However, you can usually only send mail using the SMTP server of the ISP you're currently connected to.  It's done as a measure to prevent abuse (i.e. sending of spam).
As madjbright has said, your daughter will need to set up authenticated SMTP in Thunderbird (so she can log on to PN's SMTP server) which will allow use of the SMTP server "off net".
To do this, she'll need to open Thunderbird and go to Tools>Account Settings then select "Outgoing SMTP Server" from the list.
In the box she should select relay.plus.net and enter your PN username (also make sure encryption is set to none).  TB will promt her for your PN password when she tries to send a mail.  She should tick the "remember password" box.
It's important that she uses your account username and password as it won't work otherwise.  These are the same as you use to login to the portal (i.e. without the @plusdsl.net).
Edit: typo

[#4]

Sorry Paul, not meaning to be pedantic at all.
The outgoing server name would need to be relay.plus.net

[#5]

Post corrected - 10/10 for spotting the deliberate typo 

[#6]

Quote from: Paul03

you can usually only send mail using the SMTP server of the ISP you're currently connected to.

This is commonly referred to as "blocking port 25", though the means and level of implementation vary a lot.
The simplest thing to do is to get her to ask the University IT/Internet services what facilities they provide for sending SMTP email for accounts held elsewhere. The answer may actually be "none at all" but that would be relatively rare.
If it is "none" then she'll only be able to send via a genuine uni account or webmail.

[#7]

Thanks for the info.  Not sure I am comfortable giving her the main plusnet account password for authenticated access!!  Will see what the uni offer or maybe she can use gmail (or similar) for outgoing mail.

[#8]

Quote from: Jameseh

Sorry Paul, not meaning to be pedantic at all. The outgoing server name would need to be relay.plus.net

thats assuming you are not a F9 or free-online member

[#9]

He did say "Plusnet mail account" though, Peter.

[#10]

OK, but  I am away from home at the moment, I think on Tiscalli, and to all intents and purposes I am on Plusnet, I use IMAP on Thunderbird, and unless I dig deep, it is difficult to remember that I an using Free-online mail, my outgoing mail is addressed .me.uk and have sent some today, even my web page is a .me.uk one (although I can address it as free-online), at my age you can tend to forget you are not really using plusnet - hence my sig to remind me

[#11]

re main user password required for smtp mail server.
I move my mail away from PN when they famously removed it from me 🙂 Glad those days are over.  That beside surely smtp authentication just needs the specific email addreses passowrd insterted for authentication i.e your daughters email password and NOT the main account password. That's how my host works but I guess each company set things up differently.
do you not trust your daughter with the password ? If she's feeling rich she could log on and pay your account 🙂
Podman

[#12]

@podman
With PN's implementation you need the main account username and password and not those associated with a particular mailbox. 

[#13]

cheers.
Podman

[#14]

Update:  Have found out that the Uni block port 25 wholesale but do provide an SMTP relay so my daughter can send email via that.