Problem sending Plus Net emails from Gmail Alias account

[#1]

Hi, I’m new to this forum so please bear with me, but thought it worth raising a recent issue here to see if anyone has any good ideas to resolve.

I’ve just finished a call with a Plus net technical guy on the help desk who was unable to solve the problem, which is:

For a number of years I have been using Gmail to send and receive Plus net emails. It’s quite easy to set this up in Gmail (‘send email as …an alias’) with plusnet username, password, relay.plus.net as SMTP server, port 25, and ‘Unsecured Connection’. It’s all worked well until the past few days, and I’m getting error messages when I try to send emails:

Message not delivered

You're sending this from a different address or alias using the 'Send mail as' feature. The settings for your 'Send mail as' account are misconfigured or out of date. Check those settings and try resending.

The response from the remote server was:

554 avasout04 smtp ESMTP server not available (blacklisted by local policy)

In fact none of the gmail settings have been changed so not clear what’s going on. The helpdesk guy said there were high level issues between Google/Gmail and PN, and this issue was affecting some users. The problems are all at the Google end. He suggested one solution might be to delete my gmail account and start again. Having investigated a bit I can’t see how I can do this without losing all my emails and my gmail address, that I am obviously loath to do.

Anyone else with this issue, and any possible fixes?

Thanks      

[#2]

I'm surprised Plusnet ever allowed the use of a 3rd party to send email that pretended to have been sent by you.

Gmail doesn't provide your link user/password to Plusnet - so it must be quite properly considered to be spam.

[#3]

Moderators Note
This topic has been moved from General Chat to Tech Help.

[#4]

I also have this problem and would be interested in workarounds / solutions.

[#5]

As of yesteday I have the same issue. Not sure if this is Gmail blacklisting  Plusnet or the other way round.

It is a pain as I can't use Gmail to send from a non gmail address.

Seems to apply to avasout03 and avasout02 at least.

[#6]

I have exacly the same issue - thought it might be my static ip blacklisted so I asked PN to change it but still no joy....

I have raised it with gmail tech help - may get a result in 2 weeks!

After may hours at this I am relieved that I am not the only one....

So all we need now it a fix/workaround?

[#7]

For what its worth avasout07.plus.net (and other avasoutxx)  is showing up on ips.backscatterer.org blacklist.

Maybe more of us need to log the issue with gmail tech help...

[#8]

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@jm2 wrote: Seems to apply to avasout03 and avasout02 at least.

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https://www.abuseipdb.com/check/84.93.230.244

[#9]

I have this too since a coupel of days ago. avasout07 is identified in the latest error message I received but I think there have been others.

When I first had the error I found my Gmail configuration to send via my Plusnet address was configured to send via SMPT server relay.plus.net on port 587 over a secured connection using TLS. That configuration was in place for months (probably years) and worked just fine but in researching the error I read somewhere in the Plusnet help that TLS is not supported and I would need to use an unsecured connection to port 25. So I changed the configuration which fixed the problem for about a day but now it is back again. 

I've tried deleting the configuration and re-creating it but that doesn't work. In my understanding in this scenario Gmail is just acting as an email client and so I would have thought that other email clients (e.g. Thunderbird) would suffer the same error, but I haven't seen any postings to that effect. So maybe that suggests something has changed at the Gmail end such that it isn't interacting with Plusnet the way it used to?

Either way I have no idea how to diagnose further. Will try logging the issue with Plusnet and Gmail support but suspect that it will just lead to finger-pointing between them both. Sigh

****UPDATE***** right after submitting the above post I took another look at my configuration in Gmail and simply re-enterd my Plusnet password in the configuation dialog (still using unsecured connection to port 25), saved the change and it's now working again. But for how long. And it still doesn't help identify which end of the connection is the cause of the problem.

[#10]

Probably just a coincidence, but six 'newbies' (of nine eight posts) joined the forum to post about this.  

Just saying.

[#11]

Not really sure what you are saying. Can you be clearer?

[#12]

I just found this thread about "Send mail as" feature not working on Gmail support pages:

https://support.google.com/mail/thread/4386637?hl=en

As it's probably the case that most of the participants in that threale d are trying to route emails out through non-Plusnet email servers this suggests the problem is due to something changed/broken at the Gmail end.

The favoured solution in that thread is to enable "Less secure app access" in your Google account settings but I'm not sure I buy that because that setting seems to relate to non-Google applications trying to access your Google account, whereas routing email from Gmail via a non-Google email server would seem to  be to be the opoosite of that i.e. Google accessing a third party account/service. 

Still no solution though. 

[#13]

Yes I've tried a number of things to resolve, none of which work. 

Like glkeswick, I tried to delete the 'send mail as' configuration and recreate with the same settings. It took about 20 tries for it to accept the PN  password again and having done that it sent one email and then failed again. 

The helpdesk guy said at one point 'google (gmail) doesnt like us (ie PN) whereas Microsoft (Outlook) do.  

One thing I tried was to set up a 'send mail as' configuration with my wife's gmail and PN email addresses. She uses Outlook almost exclusively. She has the same PN user name as me but obviously different email. This worked well, implying the problem is perhaps at the Google end of things. 

Naive question: Does the  avasoutxx server  belong to Gmail or PN?? 

More ideas welcome...... 

Jon 

[#14]

If software on your PC (connected to Plusnet via router etc) sends an email to Plusnet then it will work.

If some remote server sends an email to Plusnet pretending to be you, then it shouldn't work.

Hopefully, Plusnet confirm that the email sender's IP address at least matches your user IP address - at least as a bare minimum!

This should reduce the incidence of spam sent/received by Plusnet.

[#15]

Hi Jon,

I have the same thing this week and it is driving me mad. I have just spent a while creating a new Gmail account, disconnecting the old one and connecting the new one. it worked for 1 day then the same message "Blacklisted"

If anyone can find a contact who can help please send me a message on my personal account

dmgstevens@gmail.com

Thanks,

Dave