Out of the country & unable to send to emails

[#1]

Getting the usual ‘server rejected recipient email address’ message. Have switched authentication on and changed outgoing port to 465 as suggested elsewhere, all other setting looking correct. Having the same problem on all devices- iPhone, iPad, MacBook.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

[#2]

You need to change your SMTP Settings when you're not sending via [home] normal a/c; do some googling.

This is from a very old forum post; comments re SSL/TLS may now be wrong-

"Testing SMTP Authentication using Telnet
March 10th, 2010 at 14:11 by Bob Pullen
SMTP authentication allows you to send email through our SMTP servers when you're not connected to
our network e.g. when you're on holiday or when sending email from your smartphone. Without SMTP
authentication you would *always* need to be connected via a Plusnet connection in order to send
messages using our servers.
Plusnet allows customers to use SMTP authentication as long as they have a paid-for subscription
account.
Your SMTP authentication credentials are either
the username and password you use to log into the Member Centre, or
a mailbox identifier of the form username+mailboxname with password for that mailboxname.
NB: You should *avoid* using secure authentication (SSL) or TLS as these features are not currently
supported by our servers (although they will be in the future).
Using a mailbox identifier rather than account username is preferred from security considerations since
the information is transmitted over an insecure connection."

[#3]

I have indeed googled it and changed my settings as suggested in similar past posts. But still no joy. 

[#4]

@Gel

That advice is way out of date - encryption has been supported for years now.


So long as the “home” settings for the SMTP server are configured to authenticate on port 587 with STARTTLS encryption they should work anywhere. If it’s working at home with authentication never change the settings, as the reason for it not working elsewhere will not be the settings, but rather the location / IP address which are outside the scope of the user to fix.

Security measures for overseas / proxy / VPN connections are far more stringent than those for native Plusnet network connections.

Can you send using webmail from your location?

[#5]

Thanks - I tried deleting the account and then setting it up again with those settings. I can now send and receive emails. Except for one email to 21 recipients where I get a 'too many recipients in the last hour' error message. I've looked at past threads where people have had this problem but no wiser.

[#6]

I should have added that I've tried this with and without a VPN connection (to a UK server).

[#7]

As I hinted - sending from overseas has significantly higher security thresholds to prevent abuse of the relay servers and their associated reputation. Sending to lots of users in a short time window will ring alarm bells.

Try splitting up the receipt list / try later.

[#8]

I tried to send yesterday and again today. instead used an outlook.com account which worked fine, though not ideal as I prefer to use one email account. Disappointed with this limitation on my Plusnet account.

[#9]

The limitations are there to inhibit abuse from off shore agents. Should Plusnet’s email servers be deemed a source of high risk email, then everyone suffers, regardless of location.

[#10]

Thank you for taking the trouble to explain this, which is appreciated. This is surely not a satisfactory situation though. Since leaving the country a week ago, I've sent barely a handful of emails (successfully) but just one email (unsuccessfully) to multiple recipients (all to UK official government/local government servers). I do appreciate the need for some regulation around this, but the inability to send just one email to multiple recipients seems excessive? If that is indeed the case, it would be more honest for Plusnet to inform their subscribers that when abroad they will only be able to send emails to single recipients? In which case I'm sure I'm not the only one that will need to reconsider their choice of ISP.

[#11]

In practice few organisations fully disclose their service security measures. Doing so simply helps abusers to defeat them. Though I have no direct experience of other mail providers, I would expect that they take similar precautions.