TalkTalk, Tiscali and legacy email issues

Please note the following has also been posted in the Tiscali/Freedom2Surf forums but neither seem very active these days. I'm not spamming (honest!), just maximising my chances of being read by someone who can actually help.

I have a legacy tinyworld.co.uk address redirecting to a Freedom2Surf address (both of which were handled by Tiscali) that no longer receives any mail at all due to the (new?) mail server

mxgb1.opaltelecom.net

rejecting the tinyworld address as invalid.

Now given that the tinyworld email addresses were handled by Tiscali, Freedom2Surf was part of Tiscali, the new mail server is run by Opal Telecom and that all these organisations are part of Talk Talk Group, you'd think somebody in one or the other of these business units might know something about fixing the problem.

You'd be wrong!

Despite calling every support number I can find for Tiscali and Talk Talk, nobody wants to accept responsibility for this problem. As no mail has been received for a month you can appreciate how annoying this is.

Anybody got any ideas how to get somebody to do something about this?

I feel like calling up Dido Harding (CEO) or Charlie Dunstone (Chairman) and ripping them a new one, such is my disgust at the level of incompetence and indifference shown by Talk Talk, its subsidiaries and its staff at all levels.

Phil

I'm not from TalkTalk and you really need someone from TalkTalk to sort this out properly.

Not familiar with tinyworld.co.uk so it's just my pov which may well be incorrect!

have you tried logging in at TalkTalk?
Lineone accounts are able to login here Ok:

http://www.talktalk.co.uk/mail/

It isn't entirely clear from your posts if the problem is no mail sending or receiving.
Presumably both,
and what pop and smtp servers you are using (DNS names)

Although it is inconvenient (to say the least) that you can't send mail using their smtp, it isn't absolutely necessary.
It is still possible to send mail using different smtp (possibly authenticated).

What is catastrophic is if you aren't able to receive mail because there really isn't anything you can do about that apart from making sure you use the correct pop server.

With us, on Lineone, the pop server (for receiving mail) didn't change.
It was pop.lineone.net before any changes and remains the same now.

Am i right in saying that you used to use: pop.tiscali.co.uk

If so, are you still using that?
because i think maybe you should be ..
So are you saying that you are using that server to receive incoming mail and it is failing?
In that case really only TalkTalk can sort that out

pop.tiscali.co.uk
the name is still the same but they have changed the server:

>nslookup pop.tiscali.co.uk

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:    svc2gb1.opaltelecom.net
Address:  62.24.139.64
Aliases:  pop.tiscali.co.uk

Thank you for your reply. Unfortunately your advices are not strictly relevent to my problem.

Background:

Tinyworld were an ISP run by Tiny Computers back in the late 1990s

When Tiny Computers went bankrupt the ISP was taken over by Tiscali

At some point about 4 years ago the ISP was switched to Freedom2Surf, however the Tinyworld.co.uk email address was retained, and the configuration changed so that incoming emails to @tinyworld were redirected to the Freedom2Surf POP3 address.

Emails addressed to the @tinyworld address have been successfully forwarded to the POP3 address at Freedom2Surf for all that time.

The MX Records for the tinyworld.co.uk domain show that mail for that domain is now handled by the server at

mxgb1.opaltelecom.net (62.24.139.61)

Since the beginning of October, emails addressed to that @tinyworld address have been bounced by the above mail server as

550: Address Rejected

So, although mail for tinyworld.co.uk addresses is supposed to be handled by mxgb1.opaltelecom.net, it is in this instance (and perhaps for others) rejecting mail because it thinks the tinyworld.co.uk address is invalid.

The problem, therefore, would appear to be either an address validation problem with the server at mxgb1.opaltelecom.net, or a misconfigured MX Record for the tinyworld.co.uk domain. Whether it is just (myaddress)@tinyworld.co.uk that is "missing" or more, or all tinyworld.co.uk addresses, is unclear.

It should work something like like this:-

1) Mail for [email protected] validated against live address database and accepted by incoming server at tinyworld domain (mxgb1.opaltelecom.net, according to the MX Records)

2) Mail redirected according to account settings, forwarded to secondary address and passed to incoming server at Freedom2Surf

3) Mail collected from server at Freedom2Surf using POP3 protocol

The POP3 settings for mail collection at Stage 3 have not been altered, and are moot since the process is failing at Stage 1 before mail can be even accepted for redirection.

The fault rests with TalkTalk/Opal Telecom, but nobody on their technical support lines appears to either understand the mail transport process or accept responsibility for the misconfiguration of the mail server and/or MX Records.

Nobody has informed me that [email protected] email addresses were going to die, otherwise I would have provided my contacts with an alternative address well before such time. To have to do so now, after the event, because TalkTalk/Tiscali/Opal are neglectful and inefficient in managing migrations, is galling to say the least.

Hence my frustration.

Thanks for the long background, interesting

If nothing else, this passes the time until someone from TalkTalk shows up


But if you forget about sending mail for the moment and those smtp errors, and just try to sort out receiving mail.

I think you may be using the wrong server settings.

The reason i say that is this,
take Lineone as an example which i can use fine, no problems.

if you do MX record check for lineone.net you will get:

mxgb1.opaltelecom.net 62.24.139.61

however that is not the server to be used for receiving mail on Lineone

the correct server to use has the DNS name pop.lineone.net
which when checked shows it to be another opaltelecom server, as below

>nslookup pop.lineone.net

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: svc2gb1.opaltelecom.net
Address: 62.24.139.64
Aliases: pop.lineone.net, pop3.lineone.net


Have you tried pop.tiscali.co.uk
in an email client with an account setup for that email address?


have you seen this page?
http://www.talktalk.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=12...

Unfortunately the issue is not whether I can connect to a customer-facing POP server to collect mail, it is that mail is being rejected at the gateway by the inbound mail transport agent because it is an @tinyworld address.

Mail from anywhere@anywhere addressed to <myname>@tinyworld.co.uk is routed to

mxgb1.opaltelecom.net

that is what the MX Record for tinyworld says, and that is where mailservers around the globe are thus instructed to send email for tinyworld.co.uk - mxgb1.opaltelecom.net is the 'Post Office' handling email for that domain..

And yet, mxgb1.opaltelecom.net says "Actually, NO, I'm not going to process that bit of mail, I don't recognise the address"

MX Record says "This Server deals with a Tinyworld address"

But the Server says "I don't deal with that address"

You can see there are two contradictory statements at work.

Ok understood thanks, yes you are right of course,
it does look like you have problems with that account, but others seem to be working ok.

I have now been able to reproduce that same error, I tried a few tests of my own.

Sending to a fictitious address at that domain immediately bounces and produces this error:
(the same as yours)

Returning a 'Delivery Status Notification (Failure)'

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

[email protected]

Technical details of permanent failure:
tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the recipient domain. We recommend contacting the other email provider for further information about the cause of this error.

The error that the other server returned was: 550 550 #5.1.0 Address rejected [email protected] (state 14).

However, sending to several other 'genuine' @tinyworld.co.uk accounts doesn't produce any error, they appear to be accepted for delivery.

So unfortunately, it does look like it may be just yours and possibly one or two others with problems.
TalkTalk appear to have lost your account during their migration process.

Hopefully, anyone from TalkTalk reading this will have a bit more to work with and be able to help ..

Edited by deleted (Tue 26-Oct-10 10:18:37)

TalkTalk have really screwed up their migration of email legacy customers

I've got a legacy Tiscali email account as a sub-account of a LineOne account. I haven't been able to access it via POP or webmail for other 2 weeks. I do seem to be able to send email to it, although cannot confirm as I cannot access the account

In reply to a post by nredwood:

TalkTalk have really screwed up their migration of email legacy customers

I've got a legacy Tiscali email account as a sub-account of a LineOne account. I haven't been able to access it via POP or webmail for other 2 weeks. I do seem to be able to send email to it, although cannot confirm as I cannot access the account

I get my old id emails access using

(receive) pop.lineone.net or pop.tiscali.co.uk or pop3.uku.co.uk

and

(send) smtp.talktalk.net

no problems (normally) .. It does sometimes not hook up, but then works the next time

Have no problem POP3'ing my old Tiscali (ex LineOne) mailbox using pop.tiscali.co.uk. Of course I can't and don't use its SMTP.