Plusnet/Greenby SMTP server - is it down?

[#1]

My various email clients (eg Thunderbird and Windows Live Mail) are configured to send email via relay.plus.net with SMTP authentication using the same ID (my plus.com email address and password) as POP.

As of this morning I'm getting authentication errors on outgoing mail, prompting me to re-enter my username/password, sending from either Thunderbird or WLM. My Android phone (using the built-in Samsung mail client) also fails, though with no error message).

Is this a transient problem or has something gone wrong.

It may be significant that I've just migrated from a Plusnet internet connection to a third party (Quickline), so Plusnet may have pulled a plug - I'm not sure exactly how far through the switch-off of my PN account has got. I started using Quickline on 3 Sep, so it's a fault that dates from them: it's more likely to be a PN problem (something being turned off) than a Quickline problem (something has not been enabled from the start).

[#2]

Assuming your email accounts migrated to Greenby before the change of ISP,
try replacing Plusnet hosted SMTP relay.plus.net with Greenby hosted :  relay.force9.net or mail.enmail.co

[#3]

Can I check: is "mail.enmail.co" correct, or has ".uk" been truncated from the end? Is ".co" as opposed to ".com" actually valid syntax for a top-level domain?

I would have thought that both relay.plus.net and relay.force9.net would have been transferred to Greenby. Also, I think that relay.force.net doesn't authenticate with a <mailbox>@<account>.plus.com username and vice-versa for relay.plus.net.

I've not tried with the other SMTP servers yet, but I have tried accessing Greenby webmail. Sending from there displays an "SMTP authentication error" message. I think Greenby are having problems (even though their status page https://status.greenby.com/ says "Operational". Quel surprise!

[#4]

@martinund 

"Can I check: is "mail.enmail.co" correct, or has ".uk" been truncated from the end? Is ".co" as opposed to ".com" actually valid syntax for a top-level domain?"

It is correct.

[#5]

To see who is hosting a mail server check its IP,  Greenby servers begin 91.xxx.xxx.xxx

To confirm if an SMTP server is active and responding : 

> telnet mail.enmail.co 587 

it responds : 

220 mail.enmail.co ESMTP ready

[#6]

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@martinund wrote:

Can I check: is "mail.enmail.co" correct...

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Wot @pvmb said!

My PN email has just been migrated to Greenby.

I get my secondary email addresses to work I had to change the username from [myPNaccountName]+[mailboxName] to [mailboxName@[myPNaccountName].plus.com

I also replaced the (different) outgoing and incoming PN server names with the same Greenby server name, the odd looking 'mail.enmail.co'.

I made no changes to my passwords, port numbers, SSL/TLS encryptions settings, etc.

All my mailboxes work, albeit slowly at times, with these new settings.

[#7]

The server address mail.enmail.co and the username <mailbox>@<accountID>.plus.com (ie the email address) works fine for me. Thanks for that suggestion. Thunderbird prompted me to enter my password, as if the saved one was incorrect.

It look as if Greenby have made a change: originally relay.plus.net and username <account>+<mailbox> worked fine, long after I was migrated. But in the last day or so those details are insufficient. That's a shame because it goes against what PN (and maybe Greenby) told us, that the settings in email clients such as Thunderbird which worked with PN would continue to work with Greenby.

Ah well. Just need to make the same changes for other Greenby accounts, on my laptop (Thunderbird), desktop (Windows Live Mail) and mobile/tablet (Samsung mail client).

I've not change the POP configuration for Thunderbird yet - they seems to work fine - but if I start getting errors on incoming mail, I'll know what to try.

PN and Greenby really have made a pig's ear of the transfer process which was suppose to be seamless.

[#8]

I'm a wally! I was wondering why the "fault" has only just manifested itself. It's dawned up me what has changed recently.

At the beginning of September I migrated from PN to Quickline as my ISP. That change didn't provoke the problem: since my email accounts were migrated to Greenby ages ago, a change of ISP should be irrelevant.

But... Quickline have notified PN of my account closure and the ISP account has probably been closed down recently. That again *shouldn't* matter, if the mail.plus.net and relay.plus.net domains have been migrated to Greenby (with username and password preserved).

However, I wonder if relay.plus.net is still in PN's control and they, not Greenby, do the initial username/password validation before passing the email onto Greenby's outgoing servers. If so, PN will have removed my account very recently (a week or so after I changed my ISP connection), so my details will fail validation.

[#9]

However, I wonder if relay.plus.net is still in PN's control and they, not Greenby, do the initial username/password validation 

you got it in one!

relay.plus.net was supposed to point to the Greenby proxy like everything else. However that has been delayed temporarily. So when a Plusnet account is closed, authentication with relay.plus.net fails. The fix (if the account is migrated to greenby) is to point directly at the Greenby server

[#10]

Haha. Hence the comments early in the thread about mail.plus.net being in Greenby's control and having one of their IPs, but relay.plus.net being in Plusnet's control. Now that makes sense...

Slight bob boo there. Let's hope they move the server over soon, or there will be other people in the same situation as me. It's scary how many different devices it needs to be done on: my phone and tablet, my wife's phone and tablet, my laptop, my desktop.

It's a shame that PN's procedure for cleaning up when an account is terminated doesn't leave the account in relay.plus.net as a special case, for as long as it takes for the server to be moved to Greenby's control.