Using plusnet email abroad

Hi all,

I'm currently away on holiday and wanted to try and access my plusnet email while i was away, as I usually receive personal emails to it. I've been using a portable version of thunderbird with imap settings so that I can access my emails but so that they are still downloadable when I get home.

What I've found is that since I am not on a Plusnet connection, I can't actually send any emails as I can't use relay.plus.net.

I was wondering, was anything ever put in place as a workaround to this? i.e. the use of secure smtp?

regards and happy holidays

Not yet AFAIK, although you could use webmail if you have full internet access as this will allow sending and receiving from any connection.

I faced this problem during the summer while I was working away from home for three months and I came up with three solutions:

1) Use the webmail service. (Simple but not as functional as a real client)

2) I signed up for a googlemail account. They allow you to register a second e-mail address against the account (I used my normal PlusNet one) and you can also activate secured SMTP access which you can then use to send mail. I didn't use the mail reading capability - just the SMTP access, (Not too complex to set up, allows use of normal client and works pretty well)

3) I used Secure Shell (SSH) via my linux machine at home to set up a port forwarding so that when I connected to port XYZ on my local machine I was really connecting to the SMTP port at relay.plus.net, which as it was being accessed from my PC at home via a PlusNet connection was OK. (More complex to setup [especially as you want to make things very secure] but works just as if you are at home!)

Edited by smithg (Sat 29-Dec-07 08:31:41)

I use www.mail2web.com. You can check your email and send from your Plusnet account or whatever.

can recommend mai2web... never really liked the squirrel mail interface

The only problem I've found with the (squirrel) webmail access is that it does not work outside of the UK since the whole summer hacking thing...

I'll try out mail2web though, sounds like an interesting solution.

was anything ever done by plusnet in regards to secure smtp?

thanks & regards

It is something that we have been asking for in PUG. Can you vote here please in order to show Plusnet how much this is wanted.

Thanks
Ian

Did you try changing your SMTP settings to use your username and password? It's quite a recent change, but it should work now iirc.

Ian

In reply to:

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webmail access is that it does not work outside of the UK

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webmail should work fine, there should be a captcha image to enter if you try to send mail though.

Yeah I had a whole load of spam I was trying to send to the spam e-mail address but it kept saying the image had not been generated gave up in the end.

In reply to:

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Did you try changing your SMTP settings to use your username and password? It's quite a recent change, but it should work now iirc.

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I have an Authsmtp account I use to send all my email.
Can I use the PN SMTP server off-net and are any other ports (e.g. 2525) supported so I can still send when the local network blocks 25?

Thanks

Edited by deleted (Thu 03-Jan-08 17:44:39)

I'm afraid not.

We do have Port 995 for that - http://www.port995.com/ !

Ian

Unfortunately I'm now back in the UK and didn't see your response while I was still there.

I tried sending a test email using auth smtp on my home plusnet connection, and it's arrived.

So would using my username and password allow me to send emails using relay.plus.net while abroad/on another connection? I won't be able to confirm this until i test it from work on Monday.