pop3 authentication failures

[#1]

I called Plusnet customer services. Steve was very helpful. There's no indication that this account has been migrated, or migration is in progress, so the problem appears to be with PlusNet, not Greenby.

He suggested:

• try a different device - no different, login denied on https://webmail.plus.net/
• try mobile data, external to plusnet broadband - login denied on https://webmail.plus.net/
• try basic webmail (squirrelmail) - "ERROR: ERROR: Connection dropped by IMAP server. Query: LOGOUT" - which is a different error, but the gist is the same 🙂
• "toggling" password - setting it to a temporary password, try login (still login denied on webmail and auth failure on pop3s), then set password back to original again (same auth failures)
• I tried the "I don’t know my login details" on Greenby, but no code was received on my mobile, which also suggests the account hasn't been migrated yet.

I know the password I'm using is correct as I'm logging in to the member centre with it

I've raised a ticket at Greenby, on a different migrated account that I can login to - "someone will reply via email during normal working hours" - not confident they'll be able to do anything from a different account though?

I don't know what else I can do / try?

(I've changed the contact email on my plusnet account so that it's not this account that I can't access!)

[#2]

Migrated or not, the issue is (was) problem a Greenby service issue.  ALL email server connections route via the Greenby proxy servers.

[#3]

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@Townman wrote:

Migrated or not, the issue is (was) problem a Greenby service issue.  ALL email server connections route via the Greenby proxy servers.

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Unfortunately, my issue is still very much an "is" issue! I hope it's not going to be much longer before it turns into a "was" issue though... (not least because I'm expecting car insurance renewal any day now, and I don't really want that going missing, or not be able to access it online. Functioning email is "business critical" to some people. I hope Plusnet can quickly re-confirm my faith in them 🙂)

I'm hoping that once access to my mailbox resumes there's going to be a ton of mail (mostly spam!) waiting for me... After speaking with Customer services on Saturday, I'm now worried that my lack of access is due to my mailbox "disappearing", rather than just an access issue. If it has "disappeared" then I suspect any email received since Thursday has ended up in /dev/null rather than my mailbox. That would be "far from ideal" 😢

[#4]

Just to confirm, is this the default mailbox? All looks OK with that. I've clicked in and can see how many messages are waiting.

Do the test mailboxes work? 

This account (the one I'm looking at) hasn't migrated yet, 

[#5]

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@plusnettony wrote:

Just to confirm, is this the default mailbox? All looks OK with that. I've clicked in and can see how many messages are waiting.

Do the test mailboxes work? 

This account (the one I'm looking at) hasn't migrated yet, 

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@plusnettony Thanks for looking into this. I've sent you a private message. Thanks 🙂

[#6 · Accepted solution]

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@Townman wrote:

Migrated or not, the issue is (was) problem a Greenby service issue.  ALL email server connections route via the Greenby proxy servers.

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Just to update this thread and bring it to a 'Fixed' conclusion. As is often the case, @Townman was absolutely right, it was an issue with the Greenby proxy - it wasn't routing my auth requests back to Plusnet for my (non-migrated) account - for some "mystical" reason (that wasn't easily fixable though).

Fortunately, I did still have access to two other "test" (i.e. never used) mailboxes on my account, so I was able to temporarily reconfigure my domain catch-all to one of those mailboxes, so that all incoming email was delivered somewhere that I *could* access! It's a pity it took me 6 days to realise this was a viable option though...

Meanwhile, @plusnettony was able to get my account migrated today and as he hoped, that's brought everything back to life. Once again, I was able to access my default mailbox where 448 mails were waiting for me, spanning the 6 day period I wasn't able to access it previously (emails timestamped 2026-10-08 19:21 to 2026-10-14 16:07). I re-enabled that pop3 account in Thunderbird and (thankfully! 🙏) they all downloaded and deleted entirely normally again. It was a huge relief that those emails were still there and hadn't disappeared somewhere!

A quick skim through the Greenby config (for my email, domain and website) all looks to be correctly migrated too.

I've since reconfigured the catch-all back to the default mailbox and new mail is arriving there normally again. Plus, with some aliases, SMTP is now working again too - I'd previously got that working again (after the SMTP-server migration) but it started failing with auth errors (presumably related to all this) sometime in the last couple of weeks.

Big thanks to @plusnettony for getting this all working for me again. 👍