POP3 Email retrieval not working

[#1]

Hi,

FYI - I'm a legacy free-online customer and email has been working perfectly fine for many years. I am also able to access emails using the Plusnet webmail client. I've made no changes at all at Plusnet or to my email client for years.

As of around 22:10 GMT on the 17th March, my email client was unable to retrieve emails from Plusnet via POP3 stating a failure to connect. I did a search through posts on here and found a number of recent references to Plusnet changing passwords if they believe that the account has been hacked. Which password this referred to exactly was a little confusing, however I understood this to mean the broadband account password so changed that, particularly as I couldn't see any specific email related password. I then proceeded to change to that password in my email client, but this made no difference; I still receive the same error. Can anyone please provide some guidance as to what the cause could be - and how to resolve the issue.

I've attached some logs from my email client in case they are of any use (I've edited out the repeated errors as my client attempts to retrieve emails every 10 minutes). I did notice the following entries (I've changed the email address to XXXX@XXXX.XXXX.co.uk):

22:18:40 XXXX@XXXX.XXXX.co.uk [POP3] MailClient.Accounts.SocketException: Error when receiving from account XXXX@XXXX.XXXX.co.uk : No such host is known.

and then this:

23:45:02 XXXX@XXXX.XXXX.co.uk [POP3] MailClient.Accounts.ConnectionException: Protocol error occurred. Is this really a POP3 server?

And then later on this:

15:38:43 XXXX@XXXX.XXXX.co.uk [POP3] MailClient.Accounts.ConnectionException: Can't open TLS/SSL session

Although that was after I had changed my password, so might be related to that?

[#2]

@starchild 

There have been some free-online email issues today, not sure when they started see

https://community.plus.net/t5/Email/Free-Online-email-servers-error/td-p/2002411

This issue is resolve for me, I use IMAP

[#3]

Thanks @Dan_the_Van - I saw that post but didn't immediately feel that it applied in my case, especially as the problems were with sending and not receiving. I can send emails with SMTP fine.

I'm a little unsure as to what I should change to get this working. I can't see an option to use IMAP instead of POP3, and don't want to make too many changes as POP3 has been fine for years.

So, should I change the POP3 host in my email client from mail.free-online.net to mail.freeonline.enmail.co ?

Do I also need to change the format of the username from just the username to username@XXXX ? If so, what should XXXX be?

As I've changed my broadband password, do I need to change that in the email client credentials? Or is there somewhere else in Plusnet configuraion for email credentials?

[#4]

@starchild 

From my reading everything should work without the need for reconfiguring anything.

Have you tested your email name and password pair using webmail https://webmail.plus.net/ 

accountname or accouname+mailbox name

If  the email address is your account name then yes the email client password would need correcting.

EDIT: you should still be using mail.free-online.net and relay.free-online.net

[#5]

@Dan_the_Van - OK, I've tried https://webmail.plus.net/ in an incognito browser and can get access using the new password which I set for my account/broandband.

I've gone back to my email client and ensured that mail.free-online.net is configured for the POP3 email retrieval. As I mentioned, sending email via SMTP was not impacted and is, and always has been, set to relay.free-online.net.

POP3 email retrieval still fails when using the username and password that works for https://webmail.plus.net/ with the following:

18:35:03 XXXX@XXXX.XXXX.co.uk [POP3] MailClient.Accounts.ConnectionException: Can't open TLS/SSL session

Do we know when Plusnet will have resolved their issues?

How do we raise a ticket to make sure they know it still isn't fixed?

[#6]

It is supposed to be resolved. You might need to restart your device (to clear down the comms stack).

[#7]

@starchild 

Are you a free-online/plusnet account holder? 

Which port are you using? Should be 995 for SSL

Not sure which OS you are using, you can test the connection using telnet, but it only does that, does not confirm credentials

telnet mail.free-online.net 995

A window should open, no text will appear

[#8]

Hi, I have a metronet email account with plusnet and am experiencing the same issues unable to access my mailbox via pop3

I did manage to send an email earlier today via smtp but tried again recently and got an error message

has any one raised a ticket with plusnet ?

[#9]

I've added @metronet.co.uk to my user name as suggested in another post and it's working

[#10]

OK, so I have it working now. Here's the lowdown...

My connection configuration for POP3 for my email client (eM client) has always been to connect on port 110 with a security policy of "Force usage of SSL/TLS". I know, that's strange because 110 is for an unencrypted connection, but it was working that way for years.

I changed to port 995, still with "Force usage of SSL/TLS" and got this:

"Unable to read data from the transport connection: A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.."

As suggested for a test, I then connected using telnet to port 995 and got nothing back - no rejection either, just a flashing cursor prompt.

I then connected with telnet to port 995 and got this:

+OK POP3 perditon ready on mail.free-online.net 00029e1f

Then issued:

USER xxxxxxx

PASS xxxxxxx

and got a successful login.

Issuing the LIST command returned the sizes for the emails present on the server, so happy days!

I then went back to my email client and configured port 110 with a security policy of "Use SSL/TLS if available". Lo and behold, the emails were retrieved!

For reference, I have not changed the server host field, it is still mail.free-online.net and the username field is also unchanged - it is just my account name.

I guess my traffic is now unencrypted (might always have been I suppose), but at least I get emails.

Conclusion - Plusnet have changed/broken something and we'll never no what. TBH - that's been my experience with this outfit on more than one occasion!

Anyway, hope this helps at least one person out there.

Thanks for all your input folks - much appreciated.