Plusnet to Gmail addresses - what's the problem?

[#1]

@Eddie,

Face with the evidence, how can you make that claim?  The CAUSE is not well known.  I think the symptoms are well defined from empirical testing, but that is a far cry from knowing the CAUSE.

What do you believe the cause to be?

How do YOU objectively explain emails coming from the same SMTP service being delayed by GMAIL depending on if the target is a paid for account or a free account GMAIL account is ALL PlusNet's fault?  If it were any of the claimed "Plusnet must fix" issues, then explain why sending via the same Plusnet services from @mydomain.co.uk which does not have any of those "fixes" NEVER EVER encounters the issue?

Yes it is easy to rant and throw toys out of the pram, but there is no clear evidence of what needs to be fixed from Plusnet or any of the other email service providers also encountering the same issue.  It is evident that Google does not want to discuss the issue THEY have and no one COMPANY (e.g. Plusnet) is going to point the finger at another (Google).

However as users, we can report and discuss the findings of our objective testing.

If you want to ditch anything here, then ditch Gmail, for if anyone using one of the other mysteriously impacted email services wants to communicate to your Gmail account, you'll be stuffed there as well.  Such** is why I do not use Gmail for email … I just happen to have such an account for use of Google's mapping API for websites I manage.

**I also have to ask myself what does a search engine business do with all of my data they hold … I think the answer is obvious, they search it!

If you want a rich fully functioning email and productivity tool, take a look at outlook.com - I use that as a "Hub" service across two computers, two tables and a smart phone to keep calendars and contacts all synched and consistent.  I could if I chose use it for email, but I do not, for I use my own domain name which happens to be hosted here without too much issue.

[#2]

For what it's worth, on Tuesday (08/10/18) evening I sent 6 emails, titled "Test 1 of 6" through "Test 6 of 6" but otherwise identical, to a free (@gmail.com) Gmail account.  The delivery of all 6 has only just completed. The results were as follows:

Test 1: sent 18:51, delivered 20:28 (delay 1h 37m).

Test 2: sent 18:53, delivered 21:21 (delay 2h 28m)

Test 3: sent 18:53, delivered 10/10/18 11:26 (delay 40h 36m)

Test 4: sent 18:54, delivered 09/10/18 11:27 (delay 16h 33m)

Test 5: sent 18:55, delivered 19:18 (delay 24m)

Test 6: sent 18:55, delivered 18:56 (delay 1m, i.e. almost instant delivery)

So the delivery order was 6, 5, 1, 2, 4, 3.

I have no contacts with paid Gmail accounts so I'm unable to test those, but evidence strongly suggests they'd deliver immediately.

[#3]

@Eddie wrote:

149 posts over several months; the cause of the problem is well known to Plusnet and they have not addressed it with Google or by modifying their format; obviously this is going nowhere.

I'm off.

Goodbye plusnet.

In Tibault's words, 'A plague on both your houses.'

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I agree with you completely. You have summarised the situation perfectly. After several months still no mention in the Service Status.

On my way out!!

[#4]

I get copies of my 'official' Plusnet emails (notices from Plusnet of bills, announcements etc) sent both to my plusnet address and to my free Gmail address (which I hardly ever use).  I just logged in to my Gmail account and (as expected) found 8 Plusnet messages there, sent between 31 May and 06 October.  I checked the headers for the sent and delivery times, and those sent between 31 May and 06 Sept were delivered within a minute or two (in fact four of them showed the same delivery time as sent time, give or take a few seconds.  An email sent on 08 Sept was the only one to suffer any delay, and that was 51 minutes.  The most recent email, sent on 06 Oct, was again delivered with little or no delay.

I don't know when this issue of delayed emails actually started, but I think it was quite recently, and the figures above appear to confirm that, unless I was very lucky.

[#5]

After waiting for a reply to my question for 4 weeks, I have been told that there should be an answer to the GMail problem by November 30 - I assume 2018.

[#6]

A few days ago I reported the varying results of six test emails sent to a friend on Gmail.  One had delivered almost immediately, but the others had suffered significant delays (the worst being over 40 hours).  See earlier post from me in this thread.   I also sent six identical tests yesterday from Plusnet to my own free Gmail account.  The first delivered after 15mins, the second and fourth after 3mins, the third after 40mins, the fifth almost immediately and the sixth after 7 minutes.

Yesterday I asked a former colleague (one of the email system techs) at the University of Sussex if they had noticed any delays with email from their system to Gmail, and he replied:  "I have to say no, not really. I suppose there may be the odd occasion when I think a message took a while to arrive but certainly not something that has been conspicuous.   We do get messages sent from Sussex deferred (rate limited) by google for various reasons, usually because of spamming or for something that they don't like about our SPF record, but we do not see messages to gmail accounts building up in the queues.

With regard to the theory that Gmail are only delaying email to free accounts, he said: "I can imagine that that google email infrastructure may get "busy" at times and I can imagine that they may do some traffic shaping for email but... I would argue that there is more overhead involved in identifying and delaying mail to "free" accounts than there is in simply delivering it."

Finally, I sent another six test emails in quick succession to Gmail (free account) this morning from my outlook.com account.  All six were delivered almost immediately.

It's probably still too early to draw conclusions, but the evidence is starting to look fairly compelling...

[#7]

Fairly compelling in what direction?

I have just ran another six tests using my Plusnet email account, configured with my @mydomain.me.uk

All six tests were received fairly immediately.

@mydomain.me.uk (like @myaccount.plus.com) does NOT have SPF records.

Looking at the email headers in my previous tests sent via Webmail which were delayed by 30+ minutes...

Authentication-Results: mx.google.com;
       spf=neutral (google.com: 212.159.14.19 is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of native@myaccount.plus.com) smtp.mailfrom=native@myaccount.plus.com

At one leve Gmail is getting the SPF assessment correct … but at some other level is appears to be deferring receipt for mail from *.plus.com (amongst others).  Whatever the cause the variable behaviour is all in Gmail's domain.

[#8]

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@JHA1E wrote:

After waiting for a reply to my question for 4 weeks, I have been told that there should be an answer to the GMail problem by November 30 - I assume 2018.

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I just want to clarify here that this is an internal estimate, it shouldn't have been shared publicly for a number of reasons, not least of which

• priorities change, whilst it's frustrating that emails aren't delivered instantly they still get there. As such this incident is prioritised lower than other issues that have a wider service impact.
• We're still not 100% sure how to fix it, we have ideas on what we can do but these are educated guesses as this is impacting multiple email providers. So whilst we have a plan, we can't say yet that it will fix the issue.

That being said there's lots of things happening to try to improve the service over the next few weeks, I appreciate that it's frustrating and that you'd like it resolved as soon as possible but I don't want to set false expectations.

[#9]

JonoH

Thanks for that.  I have just walked across my hall (Wednesday) from my study (Plusnet) to my wife's study (Gmail) (time taken 3 seconds, average speed 3 mph) to say: using voice (time taken 5 seconds, average speed 0 mph), that it may be Sunday before she receives my acceptance (on Google Calendar) of her invitation to a night out with our friends on Friday night.

I know he is on his way out but should I copy this thread to the CEO (copied to the Chairperson of BT) and ask if he is a mouse frightened of Google's lion?

[#10]

@Eavestile, while I appreciate your frustration and it's your decision to email whoever you'd like, I'm afraid it's unlikely to speed up the resolution of this problem which we're working to resolve.

[#11]

Gandalf

I couldn't risk email snails might be offended.

[#12]

It would certainly help things if Google engaged with support both in response to PlusNET’s enquiries and posts on Google’s user forums.

Google are remaining steadfastly silent on the subject. This looks like typical corporate strategy when they have a problem they cannot (or will not) resolve.

[#13]

Many thanks to JonoH for his straightforward post on behalf of PlusNet this week on the PlusNet-to-Gmail email problem. It is genuinely useful to know where PlusNet are with this, even if the end of November for a solution is a guesstimate at best, but it would have been better if PlusNet had been upfront earlier about why a fix is taking so long. What's a wee bit disappointing is JonoH's reference to priorities where he says: "Whilst it's frustrating that emails aren't delivered instantly they still get there. As such this incident is prioritised lower than other issues that have a wider service impact."

The trouble is that the extent of the delays is random and unpredictable - and can be over 48 hours, which I don't think really qualifies as "getting there".  On Wednesday, I sent six emails from my @myaccount.plus.com address to my own (free) Gmail address. The order in which they arrived was (with delays in brackets):

3   (instant) - 1 (40 minutes) - 2 (41 mins) - 5 (41 mins) - 4 (8 hours 33 mins) - and finally message # 6 which has still not arrived some 53 hours after it was sent.

In the real world, this means that Plusnet email is not a reliable way to send messages to the enormous number of customer's contacts who choose to use Gmail.  While I have no doubt that JonoH intended to be both honest and helpful, I wonder if PlusNet, even now, have clocked the true impact of the problem on users?

[#14]

I agree that it is the lack of transparency and the delay in answering questions which worries me both. Email is supposed to be a quick method of communication and the statement that they still get there, which is not always the case, and 48 hours is certainly not acceptable. Why this issue is not a top priority is beyond my comprehension with increasing numbers of Gmail email accounts.

I am experimenting by using another mail server for my outgoing messages and so far so good.

[#15]

Have you not grasped the detail that this is not a PlusNET sending issue but a Gmail permitting (inhibiting) delivery issue?

As for sending to multiple gmail accounts, if there are multiple addressees on the same email, it is sent just once to the @gmail server and it distributes the email to all @gmail addressees. Plusnet does not send the same email individually to each address in the same domain.

It would help matters if Google were clear about what is happening here at a detailed technical level. As I have noted, they are not replying to questions asked.