Free-online migration: unable to send emails

[#1]

@Townman I had a more in depth investigation of my sister in laws setup last night.

As I suspected with your prompting the mailbox had been setup with the incorrect email address of "fredxy@fredxy.free-online.co.uk" instead of "fred@fredxy.free-online.co.uk" so emails send out from her phone as fred@fredxy.." were being rejected with "the senders address is invalid" i.e not matching "fredxy@fredxy.."

Catchall was on for this mailbox and therefore emails addressed to her correct email address of "fred@fredxy.." were being received. (Turning it off obviously stopped her receiving emails!)

I ended up creating a new mailbox of "fred@fredxy.." and setup a new account on her phone with incoming port 143 security none and SMTP port 587 SSL ON (it actually created this port on entering the outgoing server). Her incoming password changed as the new mailbox needed a new password which had to be longer than her original one!

The SMTP username was fredxy+fred and used the orignal mailbox fredxy password

I then used Thunderbird to copy all her stuff across to the new account from the incorrect one!

I turned Cactchall OFF on this new mailbox and disabled the incorrect mailbox

What was interesting was on Thunderbird when I created the original mailbox to copy from it defaulted to incoming port 993 with security on SSL/TLS which works too, so not sure if this is the port settign which should be used for incoming and not Greenby's 143 no security?

The tech support from Greenby was saying the configuration on the phone was incorrect but failed to address noticing she had told them what her correct email address was and they did not put 2+2 together with the error message so not good on that part. Their solution to add fredxy+fred would never have worked.

It would have been easier for Greenby to just rename the mailbox from fredxy to fred but I was not convinced it would happen (or not quickly) therefore I chose to do the work myself creating the new mailbox which wasn't too long a job.

I'm guessing there may be others with the same situation. The alias isn't something my SIL had created. It was a standard setup from the start when she setup her free-online account many moons ago with a username of fredxy but email address of fred.

Hope this helps anybody who may have similar issues.

[#2]

@Townman 

My SIL had this response below back from Greenby after telling them how it had been resolved by crearting a new mailbox. It would have been helpful if they had actually given this information out on their welcome email when it was all migrated. Poor communication on their part and would have saved a lot of pratting around thinking it was the port from their tech support replies.

"Thank you for the detailed information. This aligns with how things work after the migration. After the migration, you will have fredxy@fredxy.free-online.co.uk as the main catch-all account.

If you need a new mailbox for a different email address, you will need to create it via the Greenby dashboard. Alternatively, if you don’t need a separate mailbox, you can add the new email as an alias for fredxy@fredxy.free-online.co.uk.

You can follow the steps in the documentation here: https://greenby.com/support/knowledgebase/article/5

This should allow you to manage additional email addresses as needed while keeping everything linked to your main account."

[#3]

@lyndonp 

That advice does not seem correct (necessary) if all was working the same as it did with Plusnet.

If in the past, there was a default mailbox of fredxy@fredxy.free-online.co.uk with catchall enabled, then with the correct client configuration, it will have been possible to use that mailbox as fred@fredxy.free-online.co.uk so long as the server userID credentials were...

• fredxy@fredxy.free-online.co.uk
• fredxy

It should have been the same on migration.  The issue on initial migration is that the alias mechanism was not working properly, the only remedy being to create an explicit MAILBOX address of fred@fredxy.free-online.co.uk

The issue with aliases is reported to have been fixed and thus you (your SIL) should be able to work the same as when with the Plusnet platform.

@plusnettony - is this an accurate and fair perspective?

[#4]

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@plusnettony - is this an accurate and fair perspective?

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Yes.