Problems with Webmail
Clearly, [-Censored-] are incompetent in all things related to emails.
Interesting.
[removed] gets censored.....
Moderator's note by Dick (Strat) Avoidance of forum rule edited.
My Suggestion for whats its worth , PN has increased its customers BUT not increased their webmail servers !
they are hoping webmail from 10 or more years ago will suffice in present day 
@maranello wrote:
@bobpullen wrote:
if you're so heavily reliant on your email account then I'd strongly suggest you consider setting up direct access using a dedicated email application like Outlook or Thunderbird.
This advice appears regularly in response to this issue, but are not the problems with Webmail also affecting performance of email clients set up using IMAP?
Yes, but to a lesser degree. In my personal experience, I have an IMAP account that's nigh on inaccessible via Webmail, but works moderately well using an email client (Thunderbird in this case).
@rongtw, your suggestion isn't accurate. Additional server capacity has been introduced this calendar year.
@MKSlinky, I've asked one of our engineers to get rid of that redundant trash folder for you. Regarding the congested email folders, it's not directly related but it certainly won't be helping.
@bobpullen wrote:
@rongtw, the software update has been rescheduled to next Tuesday. Early this morning, a different change was scheduled - I'm trying to establish if it went ahead or not because things still seem pretty dire to me
This morning's change didn't happen because we ran into problems. I'll let people know once it's been reattempted.
@vanessen wrote:
bobpullen: It is not helpful to advise using an email client. We access webmail from a variety of portable devices when away from home, which is often.
The vast majority of portable devices have IMAP clients available to them. I'm not suggesting it as a solution, I'm just trying to be helpful. If I was currently reliant on a Plusnet mailbox for anything critical, then I would not be using Webmail, I'd be using a direct IMAP connection which is far more reliable and resilient to errors.
And another unhelpful thing is the repeated request to 'spend a minute or two' deleting emails, with the threat of PN deleting my emails (which they have done in the past with virtually no warning), when- there is no convenient way of monitoring the size of usage - you have to go to Personal Setings, Folders, select one folder, the 'Click to get Folder Size' and this is currently taking about 4 minutes per folder, and this is before trying to select the largest messages and decide what to do with them.
Whereas with an IMAP client like Thunderbird you just right-click the folder and select Properties 
- trying to select and delete (or forward) mails currently takes some minutes each, with constant danger of 'service unavailable'.
Again, this is likely to be much less cumbersome using a mail client.
What would be helpful, would be for PN to turn off the threats (that your emails will be deleted unpredictably by PN), at least until there is a reliable and fast webmail service again.
Worth considering, Plusnet?
Switching off the mail policing will further exacerbate the problem due to the incremental load caused by customers logging into over-saturated mailboxes. I can see where you're coming from, and share your frustration, but this really wouldn't be a wise move.
For some time I have been dealing with all routine matters Webmail on Saturdays and Sundays and ,so far, with complete success! All day the basic system runs quickly and smoothly. I do not use any of the other gambits to get round the difficulties because I am unclear of their own difficulties and can live with the weekday nausea if things are really urgent. But I fully understand the feelings of most of the loyal members. The sooner the problems are satisfactorily overcome the better but the lack of clarity about what actually has gone wrong is quite alarming.
