PN email reliability these days

[#1]

I'm a long time PN customer but haven't really relied upon the mail service for a while. I'm thinking of redirecting my personal domain's email to my PN account's mailbox. Also, to use PN's relay (unathenticated from my home BB connection and occassionally authenticated from outside).

I remember lots of complaints about email delivery and lack of TLS. The latter looks to be sorted. It would be good to know, from someone whose using it now for their main email, how the service is these days.

Any feedback would be appreciated. Thanks.

[#2]

Plusnet email, like so many other ISPs, is a  basic, clunky service that should not be relied upon for serious work. If you want a reliable service go to an independent provider such as Fastmail. I'm not knocking Pnet, great service otherwise but I gave up even when trying to set up PN email years ago.

[#3]

Thanks for the recommendation. I am considering other options. It's not for business but obviously would like reasonable reliability. One thing I am not keen on is, hosting outside UK or at a push europe. One of the reasons why using my ISPs mail service came to mind again. I know things have changed blah blah, but I wish ISPs would still treat reliable email delivery as part and parcel of basic service level.

And it would be good to hear from someone who is actually happily using PNs email at the moment.

[#4]

Have a browse through the forum and you'll find general advice to use an independent email supplier rather than ANY provider's built-in service. You'll work hard to find someone with a good word for PN's ! We quit BT when they tried to charge us £1.60 a month for their BT Yahoo email which was becoming a hacker's playground ...

The other big advantage is that you keep your email no matter how many times you change ISP. Fastmail is in Australia so probably unattractive to you but my wife and I have had a basic account each for six years now, always works perfectly. Good luck!

[#5]

Oh well, I was hoping for better news. It would have been nice to forward domain email to my PN account. Especially since my dns host has free mail forwarding and plusnet supports multiple mailboxes. That would keep to a miniumum the number of parties involved in managing a simple family domainname and home broadband.

I've been hosting one domain mail with google apps, since 2007 IIRC. But that is coming to an end soon. I only really used it (later rebranded GSuite) for that purpose. 'Free forever' they referred to it as, at the time 😉 Sadly Google are bringing 'Legacy' GSuite to an end in May and it's being done in that strange offhand manner that they've cultivated to perfection over the past few years.

[#6]

A different angle here - forwarding is rarely good Karma.  Further where email services in receipt of your outbound email seek to profile potential spam based on the presence (or indeed absence) of SPF settings, attempting to send via Plusnet's relay service for a domain not hosted by Plusnet has significant potential for issues (none of which are specifically to do with Plusnet's email service).

If the domain name MX server for the inbound mail does not support SRS then there are other landmines which might be encountered as well.

Fewer issues are encountered if you use the same provider's SMTP service as that which is the MX host service for your domain name.  Forwarding is rarely without tears.  Given that Plusnet no longer offers own domain hosting, you would fair better using a third party domain AND email hosting service and not use forwarding at all.  In that respect the potential for issues arises more from the practice of forwarding than any perceived issues with the party to which emails are forwarded.

[#7]

The domain isn't hosted with PN. However I have tested sending mail for it via PN's relay. That seems to work as far as satisfying SPF is concerned. I also tested DKIM signing, and a stricter DMARC policy. Result was, mail sent thru the PN relay passed all three criteria when checking those headers in some online tools as well as a third party recipient's gmail account.

I wasn't aware of any downsides concerning SMTP server having no relationship to MX records, just that it's address fell within the scope of the spf DNS record.

Re the SRS handling of the inbound MX (& forwarding) server, that's as yet untested.

Also, what I have not tested is PNs handling of the domain mail received from the above MX/forwarder.

What I intend to continue to do, and have been doing for years, is host a groupware server for family use without directly exposing it to the WAN. i.e. fetchmail mail retrieval (currently from GMail mailboxes) and smart relay (currently GMail). Relaying via PN seems deliverable (other than downtime or blacklisting of the PN relay!).

It would be good to find some concrete info on PNs recent reliability with respect to relaying and POP/IMAP access.

[#8]

Comment about SMTP server being in the same space as the MX server was intended to suggest the best approach for simplicity. You seem to have a good grip of the technology more so than most users do might be able to address the challenges.

I have my domain hosted with Plusnet (legacy account), I run a multitude of mailboxes and I do not experience too many issues, certainly not as many as I’ve seen with other hosting providers.

[#9]

@Townman thanks for the feedback. I think the PN side of things may work well enough for me too. The domain dns hosts mail forwarding I fear may be the weak link. There's no logging or easy means of discovering the mail they reject. My main motivation, for having this arrangement work, is least third parties rather than just cost. Though I begrudge paying 100's a year for a few mailboxes!

[#10]

Need not cost £100s https://www.ecohosting.co.uk/email.html £15pa gives you 10 mailboxes. There are others.