Update on Plusnet email migration to Greenby

[#1]

What’s happening?

We’re in the process of moving Plusnet email, webspace, and domain services to our new supplier, Greenby. Here’s the latest update and what you need to know.

We’ve recently completed migrating Metronet, and most Force 9 and free-online email only accounts (plus a small number of Force 9/Free-online email and Broadband accounts) over to Greenby, and we’ll now be moving onto Plusnet accounts. If you use one of these services, you should receive an email update soon.

Will I notice any changes to my email service during the migration period?

While we’re actively migrating accounts (usually between 8am and 8pm), you may notice a slight slowdown when using email due to the larger than usual server traffic – this is temporary and normal service will be restored once the work is finished. You may find using a device based email client will perform better than webmail during these periods.

On the day your individual account is migrated , you may notice a brief outage when we migrate your mail service. This could mean a delay of up to 24 hours in receiving your mail and changes not being saved, such as deleted emails re-appearing, so we recommend not making any changes whilst migration is taking place.

How to stay updated

If you’d like to keep up to date with the migration process, please keep an eye on your email inbox for updates about your account and bookmark this thread for more general updates – we’ll be updating it on a regular basis.

FAQ

For answers to common questions, please visit Changes to Plusnet email accounts | Help | Plusnet.

Thanks in advance for your patience while our Technology Team are working hard on getting everyone moved across.

If you have any questions about the migration process, please add a reply below and we’ll do our best to get you an answer.

[#2]

Nice to see you're continuing with the migration despite the masses of complaints from people who've been migrated over and missing emails / login details incorrect and Greenby's own advise on user settings being completely wrong.

But to be honest that shouldn't be a surprise as the link to PlusNet's mail has had the wrong settings for months if not years.

When will we have an answer from PlusNet (or Greenby) about the appalling spate of spam, Phishing emails and now viruses that have started since this move became live? 
All the communications blithely state you won't have to do anything on migration  - except it obvious that for some users there's had to be password resets, some people have had to change their login details as the format accepted by Greenby doesn't match that used by PlusNet - the list goes on. What makes it worse is that PlusNet are relying on the support of "superusers" rather than addressing a problem they and Greenby have created by not supplying adequate documentation or support during this migration. 

[#3]

I was migrated on the 2nd December no emails worked and little to no communication from Greenby other than to say I can log in with my plusnet details.

That was entirely true but I did eventually log in and and find my email accounts on there webmail portal which is a slow and cumbersome as plusnet webmail.

According to Greenby your existing email settings work on your third party programs in my case Thunderbird, this not true either.  I spent about 2hours messing with settings on Thunderbird and my iPhone to try and receive emails. So for Force9 users username is blogs so your mailbox would be blogs+{mailbox name} again doesn’t work but blogs@{mailbox name}.f9.co.uk does along with imap.forc9.net so i can now receive emails but I can not send any from Thunder bird or my phone using and settings either old or those suggested by Greenby

There customer support seems to purely online and as of now I have been waiting since the 3rd December for there so called support to get back to me with answers

The only way I can send emails is using there [-Censored-] webmail

Plusnet have dropped the ball with this one and clearly never ran test scenarios with Greenby before off loading there email to them. Plus the amount of SPAM MAIL is getting annoying.

[#4]

Mine migrated today fairly smoothly, but all the subfolders disappeared until I restarted my Thunderbird client. At this point, they reloaded (so I had to reorder their messages by date descending, rather than ascending) but they have moved up a level to sit alongside Inbox, rather than as subfolders of Inbox. This broke my filters, so I had to reset their destination folder locations.

[#5]

The problem with folder location has been reported before see link 

I am still unclear whether custom folders should be under Inbox or not. My son's account has several duplicated folders, both containing emails - one under Inbox and one not, and we are trying to decide which should be moved into the other!

[#6]

@Voodoorising 

Hello, maybe the settings in this thread will work for you:

Has anyone discovered how to modify Thunderbird to access Greenby???

https://community.plus.net/t5/Email/Has-anyone-discovered-how-to-modify-Thunderbird-to-access/td-p/2...

[#7]

Hi and thanks to those that have made suggestions and sent links to possible solutions to not being able to send emails after migration to Greenby. I can now send and receive emails for now.

I have now had a bit of a break through after further messing about with settings etc.

so I have gotten these to work so far 

Server Settings

server Name: mail.force9.net

user Name: full email address blogs@blogs.f9.co.uk but user+mailbox also seems to work ?

port :143

Outgoing Server

mail.force9.net

Port: 25

User Name: full email address or user+mailbox both seem to work

Authentication Method: No authentication

Connection security: None

Also if your running a VPN make sure its not blocking port 25, I usually use Surfshark and apparently it blocks port 25 and there doesn't seem to be a way to get it to bypass that port so I have to disable Surfshark to be able to send emails but I can receive them if its running.

Hope it may help others having issues

[#8]

What version of client are you using?  Is it current?

The persistence of pointing to obsolete configurations is questionable advice.

Being precise mail. Is the convention for POP3 and port 143 is IMAP without encryption.

With Greenby imap. mail. and relay. are all the same IP address so in practice it matters not, but breaking established conventions creates confusion.

What might work and what’s the correct configuration are not the same.  Port 25 it reserved for MTA to MTA  message relay, not email client message submission.

Unless the email client is obsolete the correct settings are…

IMAP Port 993 with TLS/SSL

POP3 Port 995 with TLS/SSL

SMTP Port 587 with STARTTLS

If they do not work then look towards a credentials issue.  There have been a few gremlins with Greenby’s implementation of the userID which has been different between default and secondary mailboxes.

[#9]

Thunderbird Version 128.12.0esr Released July 1, 2025, which is the latest version in my distro's package list.

I'll try those.

Thank you.

[#10]

My inherited email from Freenetname.co.uk which migrated to Madasafish, which migrated to Plusnet and is a personalised email domain  @personalised email domain.co.uk  - suddenly stopped being recognised as a domain name on the morning of Thursday 11th Dec. I can't send emails to my Plusnet webmail or my Thunderbird client to that email address and i can't send any emails out from either facility either. I don't use my @plusnet.com email domain email at all, just the hand-me-down, inherited personalised email. 

I raised a ticket but the cs didn't seem sure if the issue was service-migration related or not. I can't see what else it could suddenly be, impacting both webmail and Thunderbird. If it is , i can't see how the Greenby service provider can email me to let me know the service is complete. 

Any advice on what might be happening or what to do ?

Cheers

dsdt

[#11]

@James_B 

Thank you for the status update - how about making this a weekly event (in a locked thread).

Through this forum I've learned that the *.plus.com users have been broken into cohorts. It would be nice to know what these are, which cohort is currently migrating and low long until completed. Us users can then guess which cohort we may be in to get some idea of timescales.

It all boils down to knowing when we will migrate so we can be ready for any hiccups that happen. Needing reliable access to Email only to find out 'todays-the-day' we migrate and we're offline for 24 hours will concern some people.

Your forum posting states:

"On the day your individual account is migrated , you may notice a brief outage when we migrate your mail service. This could mean a delay of up to 24 hours in receiving your mail and changes not being saved, such as deleted emails re-appearing, so we recommend not making any changes whilst migration is taking place."

Nothing I've read so far suggests I will get any advance warning other than the "migrate from 17th Nov" email I've already had. If we don't know when, how can we do as you suggest?

Thanks, fingers crossed all goes well.🤞

[#12]

@Townman 

Thunderbird client version is 146.0 the latest update on Win11 25H2

So just to clarify I am an electrical Engineer of 41yrs experience in industrial PLc control and Network system's ie Siemens, Texas, Rosemount, ASI, ASI-Safe, Profi-Bus, Profi-Net and Microsoft Server to name a few so yes I know all about Standardising conventions and configurations to stop confusion etc, but sometimes for reasons beyond our control sometimes convention and standardisation get thrown to the wind and you look for a work round that sometimes isn.t right but works and then you ask yourself why?

Simple answer I don't know but I know its working for now until some one nails it on the head and we all use the same settings.

Also this is a reply I have from a Greenby support ticket I put in about it, it goes against you your suggested settings, so either they don't know there own system and Plusnet and Greenby need to have a talk with each other about how things work.

I can see you're having trouble with your Force9 email since the migration. Let me help clarify the correct settings.

For your Force9 email, the settings should be:

Incoming Server (IMAP): mail.force9.net or imap.force9.net
Outgoing Server (SMTP): relay.force9.net
IMAP Port: 143
SMTP Port: 25
SSL/TLS: Disabled
Username: User Name+Mailbox (your original format should work)
Password: Your Greenby/Plusnet password

The key thing is that SSL/TLS must be disabled - if this is enabled, it will cause connection issues.

For your iPhone specifically:
Try rebooting your device - this resolves most email issues on iOS devices.

Important note:
You shouldn't have needed to change your settings from what you had with Plusnet. The migration was designed to work with your existing configuration. The fact that you're experiencing intermittent issues suggests there may be something specific going on with your account that needs investigation.

Can you confirm:

1. Is SSL/TLS currently disabled in both Thunderbird and on your iPhone?
2. After rebooting your iPhone, are you still unable to receive emails on any of your devices?

If the issue persists after checking these settings and rebooting your iPhone, I'll need to transfer you to an agent who can investigate your account directly.

[#13]

@Voodoorising Well I have been using the exact server settings given by @Townman above with Thunderbird  (now v146.0 on Win11) for a long time with Force9, and they still work for me after migration except that secondary mailboxes may need a username of <mailbox>@<account>.f9.co.uk. My outgoing server user name is just my account name. Authentication is set to Normal Password.

With these settings, were you having problems with incoming, outgoing or both?

What happens when you click "Test connection to server" for each of the servers?

Unfortunately, Greenby still seems to be suggesting old and dubious server settings that do not encrypt your emails to the server, when encryption has been strongly recommended for years.

[#14]

As of yesterday, I cannot send emails on totalise webmail/ Shows" SMTP Error (500):Failed to set sender "xxxxxxxx@totalise.co.uk"(<xxxxxxxx@totalise.co.uk> sender rejected (Blacklisted by local policy)). Its got to be the migration process!

[#15]

Dont think this update should  be so upbeat judging by the replies here and many many people searching to find out why there email is broken!

I had no notification that this was happening either when first anounced or when the actual migration was carried out

First I knew the migration was underway was when my email stopped working 

It is not true that you need to do nothing, settings do need to be changed the  user name ..."fred+domain" needs to be changed to full email addres and if and outgoing setting needs to be relay.plus.net..... if you were using smtp.relay.net

really poor from plusnet have sung thier praises for years on the lack of problems and good support

About to go to full fibre and would have automatically chosen Plusnet now Im not so sure