No email this morning 10 November

[#1]

@Surfer Not sure why it is taking so long to repair?

Here's a false flag hypothesis: If the rumours  - about Plusnet no longer wanting to support email - are true, then there's no better way to soften the blow than to take as long as possible to fix this problem, or even not to fix it at all. After 48 hours of chaos, how many of you are already looking for alternative arrangements?

One could even imagine the problem itself being "home grown". Apparently most PN customers don't rely on PN's email service. So the reputational damage, of an extended email problem, would be limited to that minority who do (did) use their email service, and they are customers who PN are prepared to lose.

[#2]

I find it truly astonishing how so many people who have never supported IT think fixing complex issues is something done in a couple of clicks of their fingers.  Yes it is annoying, it might be inconvenient, but sometimes things go wrong.

When they do which would you prefer - staff putting effort in fixing the issues or updating the status report every 15 minutes?  Remember that someone updating the status report needs to interrupt the people doing the fixing get that update.

The system clearly now has backlogs to deal with ... and there is probably no realistic means of knowing exactly when that backlog will clear ... but it will certainly clear quicker is users are not pressing send and received every two minutes.

My last external test in to Plusnet took 1:40 to deliver, which is markedly better than the 6 hours earlier today.

[#3]

Whilst I agree almost entirely with much of what TOWNMAN says ... I think the annoyance is perhaps more down to being over-optimistic and disingenuous in service status reports etc

For instance, there would appear to be a 50% chance of getting pointed to a non-functional HTTP or SMTP server at the mo because half of those allegedly available are either not accessible or not accepting connections.  If, as it would appear is possibly the case, there has also been issues with PN accepting incoming mail, then it is almost inevitable that some mail will have been lost. Not all senders will retry at all let alone retry for long enough. Commercial mail that was refused by PN servers or not responded to at all is more likely than not to have been lost. Some mail will be received again later and/or eventually get dequeued over a reasonable period of time depending on just how much got stashed away rather than being delivered to the recipients mailbox almost immediately.

How exactly does all that stack up with reports just saying "email login problems" "some delays" "most customers no longer being affected" and such like ?

FWIW, the test emails that I've sent out via the one working SMTP relay server were delivered immediately to non-PN recipients although there was some quite considerable delay between connecting to the server and completing the upload of the message. A delay that I've only noticed happening over recent days/weeks and one that has slowly been getting longer every time I send mail ! I've yet to grab incoming mail received since Tuesday and establish what has or has not been lost but I'd put money on finding  some expected stuff not being present.

[#4]

These issues are only impacting users with user names in the latter half of the alphabet. 

Sorry, that is not true here - my (Force9) username starts with a, which is certainly in the first half!

No emails yesterday (Wednesday), sporadic deliveries today (POP and IMAP), and I have very rarely been able to send.

And I first noticed problems at about 11pm on Tuesday 9th - certainly well before 7am Wednesday.

[#5]

@03:57 (that’s insomnia for you). Sending takes a couple of attempts from my iPad email app but ultimately works. New inbound emails being processed immediately but still no emails from the period when service was down, which I am becoming increasingly concerned about.

[#6]

I am getting a little fed up of answering posts on this subject, so this will probably be my last comment here , but when I got my delayed mail, I am 99.9999% certain I was missing nothing, although a couple of my mailboxes only got populated on the second attempt, and the initial download felt like it was on sub-dial-up speed. Since then, no problem.

[#7]

Have just tried first thing this morning - I think I have caught up with receiving emails but am still unable to send anything. The Service Status page says it will be fixed overnight but it hasn't been.

What is unclear to me is why it stopped working. As someone who worked in IT for a very long time I know that things don't stop working unless something has changed, this could be a software change or some circumstance in the data that stops the application working. It could be something in the network configuration.

I am interested in why this has happened but don't really need to know. I would just like it fixed.

[#8]

I’m in same position as jezport and Dr1ftwood, and with massive business/personal repercussions that will be long-lasting.  Phoned Customer “Services” who seem to think it’s all now fixed and it’s just a matter of delayed transmission.  It’s emphatically not – it’s a matter of still (since Tuesday night) not being able to connect to the servers (whether by Webmail, Outlook client, Android app or automatic pickup/relay to a Gmail account).  Also astonished to be told that they don’t know there’s a problem until customers complain - doesn’t anybody at Plusnet monitor system delivery status at their end?

Would like to know - does anyone in Plusnet read this forum’s posts, so they can know what’s going on?  The whole thing baffles me.

[#9]

@Harold1066 Yup, sending still seems to be broken. With respect, I think your ideas of the reason for the failure is missing a big chunk. For something as big as the Plusnet network, there are other factors external to it which can have a detrimental effect.

[#10]

Same for me. I seem to be able to send an email to my plusnet account from my gmail account and it arrives pretty instantly. However I still cannot send or reply to emails. I just get this dialog box that says "Statue: Sending Message..." and there seems to be no timeout. I am using Thunderbird.

[#11]

Using MS Outlook we are not able to send via the SMTP server.

Port 465 / SSL is rejected as unsupported encryption method. ( this is what we have used for years )

Port 587 / TLS is rapidly dropping the connection.

Sending was the aspect that worked for longest period but it failed yesterday afternoon.

[#12]

@PhilipHeyes As I and others have said, the SMTP side of email still appears to be broken - hopefully they are still working on it.

[#13]

Can we have a definitive statement from Plusnet to say either the emails not delivered (as reported by many users here and on Twitter/FB) are in the system and yet to be delivered, or they have been lost.

I appreciate that sending services may continue to try to re-send when the recipient service replies to the sender to say the acceptance of the email was not successful, but I have a number of important emails which I know have not been received and with (from what I can tell) the service now passing on emails without delay I would have expected to see some of these emails which originally failed now starting to appear. 

[#14]

I have finally managed to send my backlog of emails at 0719 this morning. I use the SMTP server and things seems to be back to normal. I hope we will get adequate compensation for this, e.g. a month's sub for free, but I'm not holding my breath!

[#15]

I can confirm my username starts with 'b' and I've been having all the problems described.

It is useful to have some idea of the complexities of an email service; it makes me more comfortable about the erratic nature of performance yesterday; some emails taking many hours to propagate others much less.

A friend has a waitrose email and that seems even worse than my plusnet one.

I wouldn't debate the start time of the problem.  I think the time is when plusnet started to become (seriously) aware as people started to come online first thing in the morning.  It usually takes a bit of a push to get a major problem acknowledged (with any provider) to overcome the threshold of assumed 'user problem' with the first reports.

I have a lot of catchup email overnight; lets hope that is things starting to improve.