Email completely down

[#1]

... so in fact not entirely useless, the pilot was indeed able to work out where they were.

The disparaging "geek" is not an overly helpful term here or anywhere; being precise is essential. The right questions need to be asked, may be the pilot should have said "I am lost, where are you ?".

It is a bit like coming to a country road with a closed sign, which gives no indication of the exact point of the closure, with diversion signs to the other side of the closure pointing in some other direction.  It is not enough to 'simply' know that you cannot get to the place at the end of the road, you need to know how far along the road you can get, so that you know if you should follow the diversion to get to somewhere in between ... or just ignore the road close sign.

[#2]

---

@Townman wrote:

...or just ignore the road close sign.

---

Which is what many, many people did in our village, despite the signs giving full details of exactly where the road was closed.  It was 'interesting' watching HGVs turning round when they came up against the closure.

[#3]

So in summary, there was 'an issue', which resulted in loss of many services, including email for some. As we pay PlusNet for providing these services, I would have expected some update on the service status, if only along the lines of 'we are aware of a problems affecting....', and 'we've now identified and resolved the issue'.

There is a forum here helpfully labelled:

Service Information

Updates on our services and any issues.

Is there somewhere else we should be looking for basic information about whether there are active problems, or are PlusNet choosing to not report them. I won't accept 'they were too busy fixing the problem', it takes less than a minute to make a post.

[#4]

High IP traffic AKA DDOS attack on Plusnet servers?

[#5]

Cause has not been indicated.

On the basis that some services and some email users were not impacted, it would be reasonable to suspect an internal network issue.

[#6]

The service may not be entirely down it is still reasonable for affected users to highlight the diminshed service when PN have set the expectation and practice of reliability. Something has changed and for some users this has been going on since 8th Sept when using a 3rd party client like Thunderbird. After all, that is what we pay for?

[#7]

---

@Yeknodathon wrote:

After all, that is what we pay for?

---

To claim that this is a paid for service, one would need to show that those users who have email pay a different price for their service to those who do not have email - they do not!  Email is therefore a legacy free service ... which two years following migration will have a discernible price tag applied to it.  At that point you can indeed assert "After all, that is what we pay for".

"What we pay for" is an oft used weapon suggesting enforceable rights - where there are none.

It is unfortunate that recent specific email service issues you mention have been followed by generic networking issues: sometimes problems are like buses, you wait ages for one, then two or three arrive promptly immediately after each other.

You are though correct that communications could be better than they have been; today they were, staff were advising exactly what was not working - part of the network.

[#8]

Has PN bottomed out whether the password needed to login via 3rd party clients (there seems to be no issue with Webmail login that I have experienced) is intolerant of certain special characters like "$", "<", "%" et al.?

[#9]

@Townman Hi, I respectfully disagree. And I suspect PN does as well, else they would not feel obligated to investigate and correct whatever issue may be causing the degrade in service?

[#10]

@Yeknodathon 

To claim that this is a paid for service, one would need to show that those users who have email pay a different price for their service to those who do not have email - they do not!  Email is therefore a legacy free service 

This is from a 'Your plusnet Service' email when I renewed in 2021

Don't forget the other great perks of being a Plusnet customer

• Average download speeds of 66Mb
• Special offers as a Plusnet Mobile customer
• Multi award-winning UK based customer service
• Online parental controls
• Email address
• Calls to other Plusnet landline customers
• Caller Display and Call Protect

It was FOC for those who left; I can not recall when but plusnet stopped allowing you to keep your email account on leaving.

[#11]

---

@Dan_the_Van wrote:

• Email address

It was FOC for those who left; I can not recall when but plusnet stopped allowing you to keep your email account on leaving.

---

It was discontinued as an option to have an 'email only' account in September/October 2021 - not long after I moved.

[#12]

After all the stress of email problems in the last week, I'm so pleased I was out and away from my computer all day as I came home to all my Plus email accounts asking for passwords despite them being hard-coded into my Mac Mail client 😞

Luckily restarting mail seemed to fix it.

[#13]

Irrespective of the irrelevant joke. My Plusnet email service is still not NOT working this morning.

All I want is some information re the current status and expected status.

[#14]

@mantonis 

Some detail around "not working" would greatly aid you being offered appropriate advice.  What is not working in what way?

A precise description of what you experience, the email brad, how you are attempting to access the service all bring detail and colour to "its not working".