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Mail delivery to recipients taking 5hrs plus

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sirjestalot
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Re: Plusnet to Gmail addresses - what's the problem?

fxbronte wrote, "My point is that I suspect that it is the mailer supplied by PN, not the mailer used. As I stated previously, my tests show that using the same PN address but another mailer the fault does not occur."

What were your tests?   I use the Thunderbird email app to send email from Plusnet, but the delays still occur.  The method used to send an email should have no bearing whatsoever on its deliverability.

Moderator's note by Dick (Strat): Quote clarified.

fxbronte
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Re: Plusnet to Gmail addresses - what's the problem?

sirjesttalot

Unfortunately I have uninstalled eM and Thunderbird now, but I have just tried again sending using outlook to gmail without any problems. The tests were a series of emails with only the subject line, and were sent during the middle of June 2018.

 

Townman
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Re: Plusnet to Gmail addresses - what's the problem?


@fxbronte wrote:

My point is that I suspect that it is the mailer supplied by PN, not the mailer used. As I stated previously, my tests show that using the same PN address but another mailer the fault does not occur.


Can you please explain what you mean by "mailer"?

 

For the avoidance of doubt, this is NOT a PN Email (SMTP) server issue@, it is though an issue with how GOOGLE CHOOSES TO PROCESS mail having a FROM address of @myaccount.plus.com

 

@I have just undertaken a new series of tests.  I configured an email client to use a third party SMTP server configured with SSL and sent 6 test emails "from" @myaccount.plus.com to a free Gmail address.  The last one to arrive did so about 3 hours after it had been sent.

All six were sent straight one after another; they arrived in a different order each having an increasing delay in being received.

The more this issue is tested, the more it looks as though Google is making inappropriate decisions specific the  *.plus.com domain.

 

 

 

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sirjestalot
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Re: Plusnet to Gmail addresses - what's the problem?

It sounds like the tests Townman conducted yesterday were pretty much the same as those I did a few days ago (i.e. to same gmail address, from an X@username.plus.com address, and sent one after the other in quick succession).  The results sound the same too in as far as they arrived in a different order and with varying delays up to 3h.   In my case though, although one delivered within a minute, the last one to arrive was delayed by 40h 36m.

 

Townman
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Re: Plusnet to Gmail addresses - what's the problem?

Note clearly that my recent test used an email submission service which was not Plusnet’a.

Was yours really the same?

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sirjestalot
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Re: Plusnet to Gmail addresses - what's the problem?

Hi townman, my apologies, I overlooked your mentioning that you used a third party's SMTP rather than Plusnet's.  That's where your tests and mine differed 🙂

JonoH
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Re: Plusnet to Gmail addresses - what's the problem?


@PeterB1 wrote:

it would have been better if PlusNet had been upfront earlier about why a fix is taking so long.

We launched a new billing engine in September, because of this there was a change freeze for a little while before rollout until the end of September.

 

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."

I absolutely appreciate your point of view here, but like any organisation we have finite resources and I think it's fair to expect that those those that have the biggest impact to the most people are fixed soonest. 

 

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.

Fair criticism, I'd like to point out though that not a single other large email provider seems to having problem receiving mail from us. We are working on resolving these delays though.

 

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?


We do, e-mail you send might take longer than than the standard post. It's frustrating but for most customers the impact isn't huge and as such its raised at P2 with our our incident management team.

 

@cotswoldpuffin wrote:

I was thinking more on the lines of Plusnet as I pay them for a service which they cannot maintain.

I think that's unfair, if an any email provider chooses to delay messages from us, we are powerless to stop them. We can look into what reasons they've chosen to make the decision to delay and look at what we can do to resolve it, but we can't make them accept the mail. 

 

I'd point out though that nobody is reporting any delays from other large mail providers like Hotmail, Live, Yahoo, Apples, .me. 

 Jono H
 Plusnet Community Manager
PeterB1
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Re: Plusnet to Gmail addresses - what's the problem?

Thanks to JonoH for addressing a number of points from my post last Friday.

I accept that the problem seems to lie with Google discriminating against emails from @myaccount.plus.com addresses for reasons that are not fully understood. I accept that this poses an unusual puzzle for PlusNet's experts, especially as (though JonoH is too circumspect to say so directly) Google seem reluctant to engage with the issue. I also understand that PlusNet, like all commercial organisations, has finite resources and cannot treat everything equally. Prioritising is inevitable.

Having said all that, I'm still not convinced that PlusNet fully understand the scale of the difficulty for users. It's true that most message to Gmail accounts eventually "get there". But this is not always the case - and it's the uncertainty that undermines everything.

I sent six test messages to my own Gmail account last Wednesday. Yes, four of them arrived within 40 minutes - and if 40 minutes was the worst case I could live with this while PlusNet works on a solution. But the fifth message was more than 8 hours late and the remaining message has still not arrived FIVE DAYS after it was sent.

The uncertainty means that a Plusnet customer with an @myaccount.plus.com never knows whether any email to a Gmail user will arrive within a reasonable time - or indeed arrive at all. It's this that undermines confidence in the system and makes it impossible to rely on PlusNet's email service for the simplest of tasks.

jjlothin
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Re: Plusnet to Gmail addresses - what's the problem?

Well said! As so many of my friends use Gmail addresses these days, for emails to "eventually get there" is just not workable, as I'm sure other people will have already stated.

Regardless of whether Google is responsible or whether Plusnet needs to be trying harder to address the problem, if it isn't going to get resolved relatively soon, I really have to think about whether I need to shift to another ISP which can deliver emails to Gmail addresses.

Undoubtedly all part of Google's nefarious plan for world domination! Smiley

JHA1E
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Re: Plusnet to Gmail addresses - what's the problem?

I find the casual and almost cavalier attitude of PN very puzzling. I suspect that there is a lot that we are not being told. As PN email accounts, we are not able to send effectively to a major email ISP. I use a GMail address if I want to send to another Gmail address, with the reply address set as my PN email address.

Eddie
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Re: Plusnet to Gmail addresses - what's the problem?

I see this discussion is still dragging on and plusnet are still doing nothing about it. Perhaps they have other things to do than keep up to date and provide a service like proper providers.

Well, goodbye, tomorrow I am moving to a better service, solely because plusnet do not provide the same usable service that others do.

Good luck

Eddie

Townman
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Re: Plusnet to Gmail addresses - what's the problem?

We can send effectively to a major email provider (they are not an ISP), however it is they who are "casual and cavalier" in that there is no predictability in their ACCEPTANCE of what has been sent, where the recipient is a free Gmail account and the send (in the case of this ISP) is @myaccount.plus.net  How many emails are you sending to FREE Gmail accounts and at what interval?  It would appear that SMALL numbers are delivered promptly.  Several submitted in quick succession seems to engage their slow-down behaviours.  Taking a break and trying again, further emails appear to come through immediately.

I have ran another batch of tests - 6 emails (one immediately after another) to the same Gmail account - 1 & 3 arrived promptly, the rest I am waiting for.  Took a break to 20 minutes and sent 7 more promptly arriving in the sequence 1, 5, 6, 7.  The rest I await.

 

Tests have shown that even when sending via a third party SMTP relay (thereby avoiding the Plusnet email estate completely as the tests above) Gmail behaves exactly the same...

If the same one email is addressed to both a free Gmail account and a paid for Gmail account and the latter arrives immediately, but the former is deferred by the receiving service, can you please explain how that is being " casual and almost cavalier" by the sending ISP (whoever they are)?

The decision to defer acceptance of inbound mail to a free Gmail account is a decision being made by Google, which they have yet to engage in open dialogue about, in the many questions posted on their forums about the issue.  Yes there are vague references to a number of nice to have technical bells and whistles … without which we see everything working fine to Gmail … except if the accounts are free.  The nice to have bells and whistles are not simple to implement.

It does rather look as though Google is being somewhat aggressive (cavalier?) in respect of from whom free users may receive email in a timely fashion.

 

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jric
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Re: Plusnet to Gmail addresses - what's the problem?

Just to clarify on a couple of points of confusion made by various members in the above thread...

1) I thought this forum had agreed that emails sent directly from the Plusnet webmail service on the Plusnet Member Centre website were NOT subject to the same delays. I have certainly satisfied myself that is the case.

However, although they arrive at the other end instantly they arrive with a completely different sender address i.e. user+mailbox@imap.plus.net. So I cannot take advantage of this speed because if the Gmail account holder replies it will not come back in to Plusnet with this address (as previously predicted by spraxyt). It will just generate lots of 'timed out' responses for the Gmail user. It will also confuse them when you pop up as a new contact.

There may be a way to configure things and use the webmail only to Gmail but I do not want to change my POP settings to IMAP and I do not want to use my primary Plusnet email address, even if changing either could make any difference.

2) There also seems some confusion between email clients and ISP's. The email client you use is unlikely to be relevant as everything still goes through the Plusnet servers (Plusnet being the ISP).

3) For the purposes of this discussion members are distinguishing between free and paid-for gmail accounts. However, if anyone is put off complaining to Gmail because they don't think they have the right to complain about something that is free N.B. there is no such thing as FREE Gmail. You are paying for the account by giving Google FREE access to your personal data!

Incidentally my Gmail correspondent (a.k.a. wife) has just received a test I sent 52.5 hours ago!

 

JHA1E
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Re: Plusnet to Gmail addresses - what's the problem?

 Just for the record, I do not sent bulk emails to several Gmail addresses. I send single emails to one of two Gmail addresses. Last night I sent an email at 1825 and it arrived in the GMail account at 0659 this morning. 

pjmarsh
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Re: Plusnet to Gmail addresses - what's the problem?

My understanding of it is that it doesn't matter how you send the email, whether from webmail or an email client, regardless of if that uses Plusnets SMTP servers or anyone elses, the deciding factor is that the address used is from username.plus.com (or a number of other similar kind of domains which are nothing to do with Plusnet) according to similar complaints that can be found online) and it is going to a free gmail account.  

@jric, The most likely reason that your webmail tests worked are because it isn't coming from a username.plus.com address.  I'm pretty sure that is configurable in webmail.  If I remember correctly you need to go to Settings and then Identities to change that.

Superusers are not staff, but they do have a direct line of communication into the business in order to raise issues, concerns and feedback from the community.