Unable to send emails - relay.plus.net not reachable

[#1]

For the last few hours I have been unable to Send email through from Outlook on PC using relay.plus.net.

I have tried to Ping relay.plus.net and it is unreachable.

I can ping my email server successfully.

I can receive mail from all services.

My mail settings are as per the guides, and were working fine yesterday morning.

Does anyone else have the same problem?

[#2]

My outgoing mail was glitching for a bit but I just managed to get a mail sent via relay.plus.net.

[#3]

Nope. Seems to be working fine for me (on Thunderbird). A quick test would be to go to Webmail and try sending an email from there (eg to yourself). If it works from there then you know it's a problem with Outlook.

[#4]

No.

If relay not accessible, then I cannot send emails through my personal accounts outside of plusnet. I have no Webmail account. .....

[#5]

@billmu If you are a Plusnet customer, you have webmail https://webmail.plus.net/. Are you on your home connection?

[#6]

---

@billmu wrote:

For the last few hours I have been unable to Send email through from Outlook on PC using relay.plus.net.

I have tried to Ping relay.plus.net and it is unreachable.

I can ping my email server successfully.

I can receive mail from all services.

My mail settings are as per the guides, and were working fine yesterday morning.

Does anyone else have the same problem?

---

Not all servers will respond to pings, and relay.plus.net looks to be one of them.

Try setting up a telnet session to it (if you haven't done this before, run telnet relay.plus.net 25 from a command line. If you're using Windows you might need to enable it) and see if that makes a connection. This could help narrow down where the issue lies.

[#7]

Hi @billmu

I'm sorry to see you're having issues sending emails.

I'd also recommend using webmail.plus.net as this will help identify where about the issue lies. 

You'd log in using your account username and account password, if your email address is the default mailbox.

Alternatively if you're using an additional mailbox, the username will be in the format of username+mailbox and it'll have its own password you'd have set up and you can reset by going to Manage My Mail at plus.net/email

[#8]

One step at a time:

Using Telnet gave the following:

220 avasout-ptp-003 smtp relay.plus.net
Connection to host lost.

Pinging relay.plus.net [212.159.9.107] gives

Ping statistics for 212.159.9.107:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss),

Note that I do not use the Plusnet webmail account - my first login in 7 years found a message about archiving the contents and a copy of my latest billing email which I had received at my usual non-Plusnet email address.

[#9]

---

@billmu wrote:

One step at a time:

Using Telnet gave the following:

220 avasout-ptp-003 smtp relay.plus.net
Connection to host lost.

Okay, that's a good sign as it shows you can connect to the server (assuming it took a while for the connection to be lost - after 10 seconds or so of no commands being given it'll terminate the session - try typing ehlo test and you'll begin to see more dialogue).

Pinging relay.plus.net [212.159.9.107] gives

Ping statistics for 212.159.9.107:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss),

That's to be expected - the server is configured not to respond to pings.

From what you've written it is sounding like a client issue to me.

[#10]

Thanks for getting back to me @billmu

While I appreciate you don't use webmail, it's a good tool to determine where the issue lies though as per @MJN, from the Telnet you've done, it does appear that this may be a mail client issue. 

Do you have any other devices you access your emails from to check if the clients setup over there are OK? 

[#11 · Accepted solution]

Strange:

Sending from iPad on Wifi connected to Plusnet broadband worked OK with my email addr as From and relay.plus.net as outbound server.  (Not sure whether the Plusnet BB should allow third party smtp sending).

Sending from PC using smtp.[myemaildomain] instead of relay.plus.net worked

Sending from PC using relay.plus.net now works.

Nothing else was changed at my end.

I'll mark this as solved, though no idea why 🙂

[#12]

Thanks for getting back to us @billmu

Ah that's really odd but I'm glad to see you're able to send emails now.

Let us know if you have further issues or there's anything else you'd need help with.