pop3 authorisation failure on free-online email

[#1]

Well, it turned out that Greenby had sent me the notification email then migrated me a matter of hours later before I had a chance to see it. Nice to give me a bit of notice, folks. Thanks to Keiran on the support desk for talking me through the login process, I can now get webmail (on firefox but not on Palemoon).

The bad news is I cannot get access through POP3. Plusnet have washed their hands of this, as far as they are concerned it's down to Greenby support who, unlike Plusnet, do not advertise a telephone number for support. The Greenby email knowledge base has signs that it needs updating. I have posted a ticket at Greenby asking for the correct curl pop3: string to test access and I will let you folks know of the outcome. 

Cheers, Jeff

[#2]

I'm getting POP3 on free-online OK. But despite what we have been told, we now have to log in with the primary mailbox address and not the old username. Originally the mailbox would have been username@username.free-online.co.uk but the mailbox name might have been changed - I'd changed mine to catchall@ and that took a while to work out.

As you found, I had no warning of the migration until it was done. Some people seem to have had a 30 day warning but not here.

But as it's all pretty useless (no TLS connections, having to set up aliases to send from and they still don't work etc. etc.) I'll be going elsewhere. I raised a couple of tickets on these issues, told the AI bot to send them to a real person, but they've been closed with no reply. 

[#3]

The correct cURL strings are as per the email server connection diagnostics … however there are some issues with the Greenby setup in secondary mailboxes with POP3 operation.

Try account+mailbox.

[#4 · Accepted solution]

Thanks SilverE for your hint, sorted but no help from the greenby ai bot whatsoever. Underwhelmed, I am. Here's my solution:

You need to register at greenby.com. Plusnet will talk you through that. You will have a username and generate a new password that eventually conforms to their (unpublished) complexity rules. This password is not used for email, ignore it for subsequent operations. Once you have jumped through these hoops you should be able to access webmail from the greenby page. You will find two mailboxes already set up. one will be postmaster@myaccount.free-online.co.uk. Ignore this too. Look at the other one, which might be plusnet@myaccount.free-online.co.uk. That is the one that you need. Now try

curl -v pop3://mail.free-online.net -u plusnet@myaccount.free-online.co.uk:mypassword

use the password that you have been using before the switch to greenby. If you are lucky you'll get a list of numbers from your mailbox. If not, sorry I did my best. Then for thunderbird etc you need exactly these credentials, i.e. change username from myaccount to plusnet@myaccount.free-online.co.uk and leave the password as it was.

SMTP, ports 567 (none) and 465 (SSL/TLS)  worked for me. User was set to myaccount.free-online.co.uk

Good luck.