Emails from BTinternet.com and hotmail.com not received

[#1]

Has anyone experienced problems receiving from either btinternet.com or hormail.com addresses recently?
A few days ago someone tried to send me an email from his btinternet a/c to my plusnet address but he said it failed - tried twice, same problem. I thought he must have used the wrong address for me as it was the first time he'd sent one to me and I was still receiving emails from other people. However, today my son tried to send me one using his hotmail a/c but it bounced back to him.
So tested sending one to me from my wife's hotmail a/c/ and it bounced back to her stating: "This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification. Delivery to the following recipients failed....."
I'm still receiving emails from other addresses and a test from from my gmail a/c worked as well. I'm set up to receive plusnet emails in Thunderbird and use AVG virus protection - haven't changed anything recently. Looked on plusnet webmail and they're not there either.
Any thoughts please? Thanks
Gary

[#2]

By the way I also tested sending an email from my wife's hotmail a/c to an old tiscali email address that I also have set up in Thunderbird - and that came through okay, so it doesn't appear to be a Thunderbird problem. Just emails to plusnet.

[#3]

Was there a reason given other than a failure notice, like a code or something?

[#4]

No. Simply the above delivery failure message followed by my plusnet email address.

[#5]

Hi Gary,
That does sound most odd.
Almost all email servers give an error message indicating the reason why, though not all give all the needed information. In this case, it sounds like absolutely no information is supplied.
Hotmail certainly populate this information and our systems certainly generate it. This adds a little more confusion.
Are you able to get a copy of the bounce reply sent to you via alternate means, so this can be raised on a support ticket?
We can have a better look at it this way.

[#6]

Hi Phil,
Thanks for the reply. However, as of today I've been receiving emails from hotmail addresses okay so whatever it is may be sorted. I'll monitor it over the next few days and if it happens again will send a copy of the bounce back message to raise a ticket. Thanks again.
Gary