Email system failing today

[#1]

It’s not ‘free’, never was ‘free’, it was always a part of the paid-for service since I joined F9 in 1998. My domain is with PN and my main email has always been here. Downtime like this is pretty disastrous - I can’t even download the emails from my bank this morning and none of the imap folders are showing up. At the same time though my secondary email on btinternet is running smoothly as it always does - it seems that BT are just trying to slowly squeeze everyone out of PN and over to their more profitable business.

[#2]

@remmington1 OK. Who did you sign up with back then? Terms and conditions can be, and are, changed by companies, and especially when they are taken over/merged. PN is now merely the 'cheap and cheerful' brand of BT Consumer.

[#3]

Not that it helps those who use IMAP, but I can receive mail on my POP3 enabled laptop - it is horribly slow, but it works , for now.

[#4]

When I joined Plusnet in 2016 the package on offer included email and a 'free' domain name. I have recently moved the domain name due to the difficulty in administering it via Plusnet, and have been considering moving my email due to the abysmal service provided when I moved the domain name. Once I have done that I am no longer dependent on Plusnet for anything other than an internet connection, which I can get from many service providers if Plusnet don't perform

[#5]

@mikejohnsmith As a matter of interest who did you move your domain registration to?

[#6]

@snowdon  " I think there may be a way that you can configure POP to leave a copy on the server but I don't know if this is possible under webmail client."

Most better email clients allow you to leave mail on the server after downloading if you set it up in the client.  I have used Thunderbird since its early day and when I used pop3 I left it on the server for a month.  However the downside if you are using multiple devices is that sent messages will not show up on those other devices.  That's the main reason I use IMAP these days. (Webmail is basically the same as IMAP.)

However you can often have issues with IMAP where you don't with POP.  A few years back I could not delete mail via IMAP or Webmail.  In fact seeing any mail via webmail was very difficult.  PN tried to sort it and couldn't.  So I set my client to use POP3, but leaving the mail on the server.  Deleted permanently everything that needed to be deleted, which was a lot, and that solved the issue.  IMAP then worked properly.

[#7]

Just another person adding to the email system not working list. I use Windows mail and it has had problems syncing since 7pm yesterday...tried Webmail this morning...won't work at all with Firefox (though that's not new) and, whilst I did get to see my emails using Edge, as soon as I tried doing anything with them, it stopped working.

As to the product being "free", it shouldn't matter...any self-respecting company that offers a product, whether free or paid, puts some effort into making sure it works. the fact that plusnet put less than minimum effort into it speaks volumes for how they view their customers these days...PN have become so big that customers have now become a nuisance rather than being valued. Have been with Plusnet since 2007 and there has been a direct correlation between the mail service decline and the size of the company.

That the email service is effectively down and yet there is no official word says it all really

Edit: Just went to the "Plusnet Contact" page to submit a ticket to ask for any info and not a single option covers mail....that, more than anything else, tells customers that the company does not care.

[#8]

Another user adding to the no email issue, no mail visible on webmail or imap across all platforms for me

[#9]

I moved my domain over to Google Domains, which is now being sold to Squarespace!

[#10]

@jab1 "PN is now merely the 'cheap and cheerful' brand of BT Consumer."

This is rather ironical as, before and after BT acquired PN, according to statements made after the acquisition, PN had been and were undertaking a lot of development work for BT.  I think this C&C concept came along years later.  I can remember several years ago the head of BT describing PN as their cheap and cheerful offering, and it was from that period that the changes at PN appeared to happen. I do think PN is going in the wrong direction, and I had always considered PN better than BT, but that may be changing with the possibility of those like me that have been with them for a quarter of a century may decide to jump ship. 

Email has always appeared to have been a bit of a headache for PN, and at one time they appeared to host and administer the mail for customers of some other ISPs/mobile companies.  Email was part of the PN package going back years but things do change and we as customers have to make decisions based on those changes.  Many people, probably most, just want to use Gmail or Outlook hosted mail, so the relevance of an ISP provided mail solution becomes less relevant.  They can also move around ISPs without losing their mail so it's more beneficial long term for them. 

[#11]

@Total_Chaos The BT Group changes policies/strategies as often as you or I brush our teeth. 😀

[#12]

Nothing is free - it part of the price of the package.  PlusNet is not as cheap as several other suppliers, But I have been with them for over 20 years for the total package.  Our reward is to get a service that is failing and not supported properly - as a way of making us go away.  This is really sad.

[#13]

Problems here also for a couple of days (2023-08-15 - 2023-08-17) -- socket timeouts, "no network connection" etc.

But then again, it's been flaky & slow for years now,

Unfortunately I think the bundled email is very low priority for PN these days.  I've moved all my significant mail across to other providers now but stuff still trickles through, which alerts me to the need to move that as well,

It's a shame, because being able to use different usernames on the fly on the same domain made for useful disposable addresses for (e.g.) buying stuff online or forums etc, which could be rule-filtered or blackholed when they'd outlived their usefulness.

[#14]

@jab1 

Not that it helps those who use IMAP, but I can receive mail on my POP3 enabled laptop - it is horribly slow, but it works , for now.

I setup POP3 on my laptop but it didn't do anything - maybe it is just SO slow it won't pull my emails down so I deleted the POP3 setup!

......However as I type this some emails have just come into my IMAP box so maybe it is starting to come back to life! Fingers crossed as I have some emails I need to veify to do some other stuff (like setting up a test domain to test out iCloud+ domain setup to replace Plusnet email)

[#15]

Technically plusnets webmail is IMAP so it is great for access on any device anywhere but I was supposing that its overhead over POP is greater. What I was querying was that with POP you might get through to the server and get some emails but I wasn't sure if you could use POP with it. Clearly some on here using POP seem to be able get emails occasionally, but the risk as you say is that you lose them on the server and I like to archive my emails locally which is not what webmail is aimed at. Hence we need to have  a decent client package on our main computer.

I had a phone call this morning from support, following my query yesterday, telling me that it was a system wide problem affecting many users (I guess all users?) but he had no timescale for the solution.