Unable to send email for over 10 days despite raising a ticket

[#1]

What does a customer have to do to get Plusnet support to resolve problems with their email system?

Since 26th August I have been unable to send Plusnet email from any of the email clients over several different computer systems. This was explained at the time of raising the fault. Fast forward to today and the outcome is that I am asked to check I'm sending from my correct email address to another correct email address!

It is nothing to do with the clients or their configuration, but for what it is worth, the clients are windows Outlook, Windows live, eM client, ios mail and windows 10 mail on 3 different systems. When trying to send from ANY of these clients on any system I get an error message which says, "server error 550, no MX" or A record or "invalid sender address" All these clients used to work quite happily.

Please can someone in PN escalate this to wherever in deep support it should go and get it resolved?

Many thanks.

[#2]

@grahamn 

The messages "server error 550, no MX" or A record or "invalid sender address" are saying that Plusnet can not find a record for the email address you are using, and thus not allowing it. Is this your own Domain email address or a plusnet address.

I would do two things double check the email address you are sending from, make sure you have not got a comma instead of a full stop in the address (a common issue).

Does webmail work?

[#3]

Moderators Note
This topic has been moved from Fibre Broadband to Email.

[#4]

Hi Wakeman,

Thanks for your post.

No, not using my own domain its the classic username@username.plus.com.

Webmail does work. addresses checked and are ok. Strangely the MX and A error changed after PN's mail server problem yesterday AM.

What lot's of testing demonstrated yesterday (all using IMAP servers - imap.plus.net and relay.plus.net) was that only "non-secure comms" would work on any MS client (25 out, 143 in) with Win 10 mail and Outlook 2019. All other variants with port 587 out and 993 SSL/TLS (or  STARTTLS in conjunction with 587) or even "Auto" doesn't work either. So setting manually. This was no better using PN's own recommended ports and servers - nothing can be sent. 587 on the SMTP side fails miserably with everything sitting in "outbox" - only 25 works (587 seems part of the issue from what I've seen)...that and the indication of lack of "conventional" support for secure sockets/Transport layer security on PN servers.

The only client that works encrypted with PN in my test arsenal was "emclient" and even that struggled for ages to find a working config. It now uses SSL/TLS on "legacy ports" as it calls them. There seems to be some incompatibility going on...

So for now, it works "in the clear", but that's not great really. Fortunately it's not my only email account. I've heard from others that PN suddenly stopped sending for them too, in the last couple of weeks - so I don't believe I'm alone.

PS. Mail via ioS also went off the air after PN mail servers problems were resolved yesterday morning and needed the config reset to work again. (SSLworking in the ioS mail instance).

[#5]

Hi Wakeman,

Thanks for your post.

No, not using my own domain its the classic username@username.plus.com.

Webmail does work. addresses checked and are ok. Strangely the MX and A error changed after PN's mail server problem yesterday AM.

What lot's of testing demonstrated yesterday (all using IMAP servers - imap.plus.net and relay.plus.net) was that only "non-secure comms" would work on any MS client (25 out, 143 in) with Win 10 mail and Outlook 2019. All other variants with port 587 out and 993 SSL/TLS (or STARTTLS in conjunction with 587) or even "Auto" doesn't work either. So setting manually. This was no better using PN's own recommended ports and servers - nothing can be sent. 587 on the SMTP side fails miserably with everything sitting in "outbox" - only 25 works (587 seems part of the issue from what I've seen).

The only client that works encrypted with PN in my test arsenal was "emclient" and even that struggled for ages to find a working config. It now uses SSL/TLS on "legacy ports" as it calls them. There seems to be some incompatibility going on...

So for now, it works "in the clear", but that's not great really. Fortunately it's not my only email account. I've heard from others that PN suddenly stopped sending for them too, in the last couple of weeks - so I don't believe I'm alone.

[#6]

Update: And now I find myself back to yesterday's status with no email able to be sent. Something is very wrong somewhere with PN's email "service".

[#7]

Can you send an email to yourself?

Can you send an email to no one at all?

If this error is occurring with specific email addresses, then it would be reasonable to suspect that there is an issue with the name server of the target domain name.  We have seen this before - a provider's name server goes down and it is then not possible to identify where the email should be sent to.