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Mail delivery to recipients taking 5hrs plus

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jab1
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Re: Plusnet to Gmail addresses - what's the problem?

To be blunt @axelant it is Google who have unilaterly moved the goalposts and are declining to communicate with ISPs - it is only GOOGLE who can return things to how they were pre-foul-up. Blaming PN, or other affected ISPs is wrong.

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

Hmm, but it doesn't change what I said, you can be as right as you like, but if the end result is your customers are unhappy, being in the right doesn't change a thing. This problem doesn't seem to affect everyone, so they have picked out a few ISPs, for a reason. We can only guess why Google are doing what they are doing, but they are making themselves look bad as well as others - their users are the ones getting delayed emails.  Would they do that just for kicks, or would they do it because they are having trouble with frequent spam?

 

From the amount of email I appear to send myself, threatening me, trying to phish me or trying to sell things to myself tells me it's not hard to do.  The system is unencrypted, insecure and frequently pwned, so it's not surprising other ISPs don't trust it.  If they were more robust and secure, would this still be an issue?  Maybe Google did just throw darts at a list of ISPs to bully.  It doesn't matter, if it makes PN customers unhappy with the PN service, that should be important to PN and the feeling in this thread seems to be that it isn't.  It's not up to the customers to deal with that.

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

This is what PN said last Thursday:-

I'd love to update you each week, but I'm afraid the updates wouldn't be very much use. Especially as we're now in our Christmas change freeze period and so apart from high priority fixes very little changes will be released before mid-January.

Email is a vital part of life and I wonder how PN business customers are coping. The PN reply shows very clearly that this issue is not a high priority fix. Why on earth is there a need for a Christmas change period? Life goes on.

If I employ a builder to do work on my house, and the builder subcontracts part of the work, then if there are problems with the subs work, my redress is withe the builder as the contract is with the builder.

 

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

There is nothing around here having a higher priority than complying with regulatory body rules - which are forever changing.

Christmas change freezes are common place in IT - there tends to be fewer staff available and therefore it would be foolish to implement system changes when staff might not be available. It is though very frustrating - I’ve been there for years - unfortunately (in my experience) such decisions were too often made by risk averse management not by informed engineers. All changes tend to be prohibited no mater how low risk / beneficial they are perceived to be.

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.

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


@JHA1E wrote:
If I employ a builder to do work on my house, and the builder subcontracts part of the work, then if there are problems with the subs work, my redress is withe the builder as the contract is with the builder.

 But your builder has the option of using a different supplier.

Plusnet does not have that luxury. That is the problem when dealing with a monopoly supplier.


 

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

You misunderstand my point. My contract is with the builder so if there are problems with the subcontractor, I seek redress from the builder as the person with whom I have the contract and who invoices me for the work. It is then for the builder to deal with the sub. My contract is with PN.

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

I agree with your point.

It's just that I have been on both sides of the fence in the past and have sympathies with both.

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

I was told by PN Customer Service last Monday that the problem also existed for emails to Yahoo and BT Internet addresses,

jab1
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Re: Plusnet to Gmail addresses - what's the problem?

That may be true, @ntokane. I don't send to either of those domains, but the two or three places I use my Yahoo address as a contact for are usually delayed by 15-20 minutes.

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


@ntokane wrote:

I was told by PN Customer Service last Monday that the problem also existed for emails to Yahoo and BT Internet addresses,


Are you certain that email sent *from* PN *to* Yahoo and BT addresses also suffers delays (like that sent to Gmail), or that email *from* Yahoo and BT addresses *to* Gmail also suffers delay?   The former would seem to land the ball very much in PN's court, the latter lets PN off the hook somewhat, so it's a crucial difference.

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

Yesterday evening  at 2219 I sent an email to 2 Gmail accounts including my own personal GMail account. My email arrived in the 'other' Gmail account at 2259. I have yet to receive the email sent to my personal GMail account.

This morning I sent an email to my Yahoo address and delivery was instantaneous.

 

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

That is what I was told. Whether it is correct only PN would know.

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

I don't think anyone should be surprised that Plusnet are not prioritising trying to fix this latest issue - their clunky and apparently overloaded webmail system has had problems for months if not years, so I bet they don't mind how many customers flee to other email providers as long as they don't actually close their Plusnet broadband and other accounts. Wink

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


@JayG wrote:

I don't think anyone should be surprised that Plusnet are not prioritising trying to fix this latest issue - their clunky and apparently overloaded webmail system has had problems for months if not years...


Plusnet's webmail system appears to be the 'RoundCube' webmail system - a free, open-source system - the same one we used to provide at my former university and which was abandoned two years ago in favour of MS Exchange and Outlook Web App.  RoundCube isn't bad, but it is now pretty clunky in its present form (I understand a completely rewritten system is on the cards).  I use Mozilla Thunderbird, a  standalone client configured for the Plusnet servers (and indeed for outlook.com).

However, no matter what people are using, it will make not one iota of difference as far as the Gmail delivery delays are concerned.

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


@cotswoldpuffin wrote:

Did I understand correctly that Plusnet are putting a freeze on changes over the Christmas period? And a Merry Christmas to you too!

It's a service protection measure put in place to ensure something that fixes this doesn't break something else for other people over a period where we have less staff available than normal to diagnose and fix it.  It's extremely common in the IT world.

 

@axelant wrote:

This problem doesn't seem to affect everyone, so they have picked out a few ISPs, for a reason...

The measures they've introduced don't target anyone specifically, they're not aimed at Plusnet customers but they are impacting Plusnet customers.

The problem is the measure that resolves this issue for customers will have a hugely detrimental effect on potentially tens of thousands of other Plusnet customers mail accounts. We need to identify these customers, mitigate the impact in any way we can and communicate the changes to the impacted base and our advisors.

What we can't do is fix this issue, roll it out and expect all of these customers to contact the call centre at the same time making an already difficult time worse. 

 

@JHA1E wrote:

Email is a vital part of life and I wonder how PN business customers are coping. The PN reply shows very clearly that this issue is not a high priority fix. Why on earth is there a need for a Christmas change period? Life goes on.

Businesses tend not to use emails like username@plus.net they're likely to have their own solutions, they're also unlikely to have business correspondence with free Gmail accounts. as businesses don't tend to have employeename.buinessname@gmail.com style accounts.

 

If I employ a builder to do work on my house, and the builder subcontracts part of the work, then if there are problems with the subs work, my redress is withe the builder as the contract is with the builder.


Not quite, we're not asking them to do any work other than accept the mail.  Imagine you sent a letter Royal Mail Tracked, you know where it is every step of the way, you know when it leaves the Post Office, when it gets to and leaves the sorting office and when it's in the posties van. You still can't make the user sign for it and take the letter out of the postman's hands though.

 

@ntokane wrote:

I was told by PN Customer Service last Monday that the problem also existed for emails to Yahoo and BT Internet addresses,


We had early reports of this impacting Yahoo accounts, as soon as we started to get them we asked for examples from the contact centre to see if this was an issue or not, I'm pleased to say it's not an issue

 Jono H
 Plusnet Community Manager