O2 POP3/SMTP servers

Those of us who migrated from O2 were assured that our O2 email would continue, despite being withdrawn for other users. I don't actually use it myself, but know others still do as their prime email. I occasionally check my old account there though.
For the past week or two the O2 servers, mail.o2.co.uk and smtp.o2.co.uk seem to be dead and not even responding to ping or tracert requests, at least for me. A posting on the Sky forums highlighting this brought a rather abrupt response from Sky who closed the thread:
http://helpforum.sky.com/t5/Unlimited-Lite-Connect-b...

I rather sense that O2 have now turned off email for everybody and Sky have washed their hands of it...

ps. I see I still have webmail access, including a test posting I sent there this morning, but no POP3 access.

Edited by dsergeant (Tue 03-Mar-15 11:17:13)

In reply to a post by dsergeant:

For the past week or two the O2 servers, mail.o2.co.uk and smtp.o2.co.uk seem to be dead and not even responding to ping or tracert requests, at least for me.

telnet mail.o2.co.uk 110
telnet smtp.o2.co.uk 25

Both seem to work for me.

OK, it seems to be working now.... Maybe finger trouble at this end.

Maybe!

I wouldn't bank on Telefonica running the servers forever though, so hopefully this is just a "spare" account you have. Personally I wouldn't even consider using a mail server which only allows passwords to be sent unencrypted.

As I commented, I don't actually use it nowadays myself - my main email is via my 1&1 hosting with a backup Sky one. I keep checking it for one of my friends who insists in using his O2 email and refuses to move it to Sky or elsewhere. I am expecting it will die one of these days.

If I remember, they were ACL'd for only BE and O2 IP ranges

In reply to a post by nredwood:

If I remember, they were ACL'd for only BE and O2 IP ranges

No, smtp.o2.co.uk and mail.o2.co.uk were open to all IP addresses, subject to user/pass authentication.

Thanks Oliver

It's been a long time, I'm rusty and my memory isn't as good as it used to be

I also never used these personally

They are certainly still working for me!

Last email received via O2 was from Sky offering a a 50% discount on Sky TV.

Since I started this thread I found that I had wrongly set up the password in one of my applications, and once corrected found that they were indeed working. Still working today...