Email redirects stopped working this week

[#1]

Hi all,

Having trawled the forum, I think this is a (slightly) different problem.

I have been using a handful of redirect for several years of the form name@domain.plus.com which all stopped working on Monday.  I can still use Plusnet Webmail to get into my catchall account and have not received an email from Greenby about migration.  In fact I only learned about the mail migration today.

By deleting the redirects, mails immediately go to my catchall account so I can survive like that but it's not ideal.

I'm redirecting to both an Outlook address and an iCloud address.

Question: does Plusnet still allow redirects or is something else going on?  

Thanks!

[#2]

Hi @jpwatson 

A warm welcome to the forums.

This is indeed a problem different for the others around here at the moment.  You have not yet received an email from Greenby because your email service is not yet in the frame for moving to Greenby.

Redirection on a single email address can only go to one destination; therefore I infer that address1 redirects to Outlook and address2 redirects to iCloud.

Are you sending to @useraccount.plus.com or to @yourhosted-domain.co.uk ?

Plusnet has not changed its approach to redirects ... but some end receiving services might have done.

PlusNet does not (never has as best as I can recall) support SRS which is essential for maintaining the integrity of SPF validation at the end receiver.  Without SRS, SPF validation checks to see if - the last hop SMTP is deemed valid - for the ORIGIONAL sending domain.  That will assure a SPF validation failure.

However if the originator used BOTH DKIM and SPF anti spam measures, the under a one or the other requirement at the receiving end, emails will be accepted.

I have just ran a number of tests where the redirects go to my Outlook account and another.  They all succeed, even thought they all fail SPF validation ... but given that the sender ALSO DKIM signs the email, they ae accepted at the remote end.

If those sending to you are only doing SPF, you will encounter issues redirecting to some of the recently hardened big bully boy email platforms, such as Outlook, Gmail and iCloud.

[#3]

Hi @Townman ,

Thanks for the rapid and comprehensive response - you're probably on to something there. 

Yes, you're quite right - I'm redirecting along the lines of:

• my-wife@domain.plus.com to wife@icloud.com
• my-name@domain.plus.com to me@outlook.com

I set up a test redirect and tried various methods that I have available.

• Sending to this test redirect alias from Gmail, corporate O365 and from Plusnet itself (both via Webmail and local mail client) all resulted in a delivered email. 
• Sending to the alias from several personal outlook.com or several icloud accounts failed. 

I can't think of a way to troubleshoot this further without additional information from either the Plusnet end (their support line denied all knowledge and responsibility for the redirect service) or Outlook (good luck with that!) 

Probably time to do what I should have done when I stopped using Plusnet broadband several years ago and migrate everything off this email service alas.

thanks again for your help

Jonathan

[#4]

I will keep digging on this.

Emails sent from other places to Plusnet, redirected to Outlook appear to be working for me ... however something sent from Outlook to the redirected address give rise to a blocked by policy issue...

[#5]

Allied Greenby issue, also related to SRS:  so I am a bit of a hijacker

 Plusnet has been allowing me to sendas assorted other domains for a couple of decades;  most commonly from my domain flashwalls.co.uk.   [ managed in the Plusnet webmail client by Settings / Identities ]

Greenby successfully migrated those 'Identities'  [ managed in the Greenby webmail client exactly the same]  but its mail server rejects any new message created in the webmail service with   550 5.7.1.unknown Sender

Greenby Support initially confused 'Identities' with 'aliases', but mainly say 

"the identities under the other domains are not hosted with us, so you won’t be able to send emails through those domains via Greenby."

...to me, that shrieks  "we decline to implement the same SRS service for outbound that Plusnet managed to deliver for years"

@Townman,  I would welcome your insights;  I only run corporate mail servers and have no idea what is going on behind the curtains here... I just see that I can no longer do what I did last month.

Oh yes - although I saw a banner saying  'email migration completed on Jan 28th'  when I first got into the Greenby portal, I still haven't had any emails from either provider to tell me that migration had started or completed.

Cheers, Nick

[#6]

@flashwalls 

"the identities under the other domains are not hosted with us, so you won’t be able to send emails through those domains via Greenby."

...to me, that shrieks  "we decline to implement the same SRS service for outbound that Plusnet managed to deliver for years"

Firstly , its nothing to do with SRS, that's concerned with forwarded email. 

You really should be sending your domain email using the smtp server of your domain hosting service. Whilst sending via the PLusnet servers has been allowed in the past (providing you could authenticate) there would have been no DKIM signing or SPF, thus a strong likelyhood that your mail would be rejected by the recipient. Greenby have (like most other email services) restricted sending mail to only those domains it hosts. 

[#7]

MisterW beat me to it - SRS has no bearing here - it is not SRS which “allows” a sender address to be that if a not hosted here domain.

Which email brand is this?

@plusnettony 

This looks like a harding of the outbound relay so I’m guessing this is not a Plusnet (plus.com) account unless the webmail service is using the naked SMTP Greenby server.

If this is a plus.com service, then there should be no change to the user experience given that the old relays are still being used.

Regardless, in a like for like migration is it intended that the ability to “send as” or “on behalf of” a third party domain be dropped?  If the claim here is accurate then there are a lot of mail users who forward email on their own domain names and then reply as that domain name via the Plusnet relay who are going to find they can no longer function in that manner.

I’ve long been an advocate that folks should use the mail services of the party who hosts the domain name but that can involve putting a hand in a deep pocket … giving rise to the practices described here.  If this understandable (arguably desirable) inhibition is intentional then it would be helpful if the FAQs declared it.

[#8]

@Townman 

 so I’m guessing this is not a Plusnet (plus.com) account unless the webmail service is using the naked SMTP Greenby server.

Pretty sure it is, looking at the headers from an email sent from one of the plus.com test accounts.

This looks like a harding of the outbound relay

IIRC Greenby is using Postfix as the MTA and by default it will likely implement the 'reject-unlisted-sender' smtp restriction. 

reject_unlisted_senderReject the request when the MAIL FROM address is not listed in the list of valid recipients for its domain class. See the smtpd_reject_unlisted_sender parameter description for details. This feature is available in Postfix 2.1 and later.

[#9]

@Townman , @MisterW  - thanks for your responses.  Apologies, I thought some wrestling I did with SRS, well over a decade ago was pertinent.   I built SPF records for my domains that included the Plusnet includes back then as well.

@MisterW  whilst your statement 'You really should be sending your domain email using the smtp server of your domain hosting service'  may be valid, Plusnet has been delivering a particular service for a long time and have not indicated that they and Greenby would be removing that service as part of the migration.

Cheers for looking at SMTP headers to identify the change that the Greenby implementation of PostFix is likely performing. 

Just to clarify, I AM using a plus.com account.  I forget which micro ISP was swallowed in the early noughties.

[#10]

As I understand matters at the moment all *.plus.com users pointing to relay.plus.net are using the Plusnet SMTP service irrespective of their mailbox migration status.

What is less clear is what is happening if one uses webmail on a migrated account.  Does it too use relay.plus.net (which is NOT proxy’d) or is that using Greenby’s SMTP service?

Indeed, which webmail service is being mentioned here - the Plusnet branded one of Greenby’s naked Round Cube?

I have a months worth of catching up to do around here: there could be changes I’ve not seen, but I’m not convinced that all user configurations / interfaces are using the same SMTP services.

[#11]

@flashwalls 

Plusnet has been delivering a particular service for a long time and have not indicated that they and Greenby would be removing that service as part of the migration.

I appreciate that and you can add (and have added) appropriate SPF records to your domain DNS. However, you will never be able to DKIM sign your email unless you use the hosting providers SMTP. At the moment you can get away with either SPF or DKIM but the likes of gmail and Microsoft have already required both DKIM & SPF for bulk senders. You can see that in the future they (and others?) may well make that more widely required.

I think we will need @plusnettony to confirm whether the restrictions imposed by the Greenby SMTP are by design or whether it is intended to reconfigure it to implement the same restrictions as the Plusnet servers.

[#12]

@Townman I have tested sending out from  xxx@flashwalls.co.uk  using both webmail.plus.net and webmail.greenby.com ... seeing the rejections  when webmail.plus.net  tried to submit my outbound emails last week is what caused me to make first contact with grimby.

[#13]

@flashwalls 

I have tested sending out from  xxx@flashwalls.co.uk  using both webmail.plus.net and webmail.greenby.com .. seeing the rejections  when webmail.plus.net  tried to submit my outbound emails 

That concurs with my testing using a migrated trial account. Both webmail URLs are hosted by Greenby and so appear to connect to SMTP via the Greenby proxy. This means that for a migrated account, they will send using the Greenby SMTP. In order to continue to send (temporarily) via the Plusnet server, you will need to use an email client such as Thunderbird and set the outgoing SMTP server to relay.plus.net

Note that if you've changed any passwords on the Greenby site since migration, you will need to use the old ones to authenticate with relay.plus.net as it will not be aware of the changes.