Email not arriving in Inbox

[#1]

My sister has an email only account with Plusnet, and recently purchased a Windows 11 laptop which I have been helping her set up. Her email account has been added to Windows Mail and can send OK, but no new emails are arriving in her Inbox.

We tried setting up the account in Thunderbird, same issue. I've used imap.plus.net and relay.plus.net for the servers, with the appropriate ports, 993 and 587 respectively.

The issue does not appear to be client based; we checked on webmail and the test messages we sent do not appear. She has not been notified that the mailbox has been archived, but we deleted a lot of old emails in case size was becoming an issue.

None of the test messages has bounced, so no headers to check. We have sent from GMail, Yahoo, Hotmail, and my domain and PN email. Nothing has arrived.

Does anyone at Plusnet have an explanation and possible fix, please?

Please contact me privately if you need her username.

[#2]

Try setting the IMAP root folder to inbox

[#3]

Hi. Thanks for your thoughts.

Not sure how you do that, but in any case it is not a client-side issue. No new emails are showing via webmail either.

[#4]

Should have read more carefully!

Have you tried sending to the self mailbox using webmail?

Is the mailbox the account’s primary mailbox or a secondary mailbox?

[#5]

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@Townman wrote:
Should have read more carefully!
Have you tried sending to the self mailbox using webmail?
Is the mailbox the account’s primary mailbox or a secondary mailbox?

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Tried that just now. The test message is in Sent Items but the Inbox remains firmly unpopulated with new emails.
It's the primary and only mailbox on the account as far as I know.

[#6]

For the avoidance of doubt - is the email sent from webmail being sent to address@account.plus.com ?

I want to eliminate the possibility that this is a hosted domain issue.

Is this a legacy free email account?

When everything probable has been eliminated, then the improbable needs to be examined.  If there are no emails in the inbox when viewed via webmail, there is a possibility that some other email client has been configured as POP3 and is harvesting emails as soon as they arrive.  If this is not something you believe has been done, then you ought to change the password.

HOWEVER there have been a number of cases recently where those with legacy free email accounts have changed their password .... and have then been unable to access the SMTP servers.

@willcutforth @MatthewWheeler - can you advise if the above gottcha will impact this user's email service if they change their password?

[#7]

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@Townman wrote:

For the avoidance of doubt - is the email sent from webmail being sent to address@account.plus.com ?

I want to eliminate the possibility that this is a hosted domain issue.

Is this a legacy free email account?

<snip>

HOWEVER there have been a number of cases recently where those with legacy free email accounts have changed their password .... and have then been unable to access the SMTP servers.

@willcutforth @MatthewWheeler - can you advise if the above gottcha will impact this user's email service if they change their password?

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It is not a domain account; all the test emails have been sent to name@username.plus.com

One of the things we tried was resetting the password; the last two emails in the inbox were the acknowledgements that the password had been changed. These were timed at 2023-05-17 21:43 and a few minutes later, however, they were cc'd to postmaster@username.plus.com so I've just sent a test email to the postmaster address, and it arrived almost before I had finished pressing the "Send" button.

Curious...

[#8]

That confirms that you are accessing the default mailbox and emails are delivered there successfully.

Is the mailbox in question the default mailbox or a secondary mailbox?

The username for the default mailbox used for the IMAP sever is accountname whereas that for a secondary mailbox is accountname+mailboxname as in accountname+daughter

[#9]

I was pondering the accountname+mailboxname thing. I'll try that and see where that leads.

[#10]

Failed to login with the accountname+username to webmail. I'm not sure if the password is different for that, I'll have to check.
Meanwhile, there appears to be some problem with her account - I'm getting "An error has occurred
You can't change your products for the moment, our system may be updating. Please try again later." when logged in to her account, and also "Your contract
There was an error
We couldn't find your contract".
Her last bill was in January, so looks like something has gone wrong with the account?

[#11]

Nope - they are typical issues which do not impact most account functionality. Mine is like that too.

Email settings are managed via Manage My Account - Manage Email which is in the lower half of the screen.

PS: it is accountname+mailboxname as in mailboxname@accountname.plus.com

Username is synonymous with accountname.

[#12 · Accepted solution]

Cracked it!

I was able to get on to username@username.plus.com with the password that we set when trying this originally when she got the new laptop, but not the user@username.plus.com, or variations thereof.

We had changed the account password, but not the email address password for user@username.plus.com so I logged on and reset that. I also made the same address the catch-all address.

 I can now report successfully being able to access the user@username.plus.com email address.

Hooray!